Tim: 0:01

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. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Cables to Clouds podcast Fortnightly News. I'm your host this week, tim, and of course, with me always I've got my hetero life mate, chris Miles, at BGP Main on Blue Sky, or no, yeah, you changed it. Bgp Main yeah, I changed it. Yeah, that's right. And then, of course, myself at Carpe-DMVPN on Blue Sky as well.

Tim: 0:38

So, this being a news episode, we're just going to launch right into the interesting news that we rounded up from the last couple of weeks. And our first story actually comes to us from CIO Dive and it's an article from, or about, should I say, akamai Technologies, and specifically it has to do with Akamai realizing their cloud spend was crazy out of control and how they kind of regained control of their runaway spending. So the article specifically points out that their acquisition of Linode last year was a big trigger for them to kind of realize that they let their cloud spending just get completely out of control. So I mean, we see this a lot, where a lot of organizations go all in on cloud. They start developing for it. They just put pretty much everything they throw the kitchen sink at the cloud and then eventually the cost of running that comes back to haunt them. So we've talked about this on the podcast many, many times about cloud spend and where are the cloud savings spend and where are the cloud savings? So this is an interesting look at just a major vendor who kind of bought into the cloud thing and is finding that after they acquired Linode that they just spent a ton of money in the cloud. It kind of triggered them to go back and look at the books and in the article they're talking about moving some of the repatriating some of those workloads essentially to their their private cloud workload that that they bought.

Tim: 2:08

Right, linode basically is a private cloud uh provider for those that don't know, and uh, yeah, it's pretty interesting. Of course, not everybody has their own private cloud provider. Um, you know, I don't. There's not much more to say about about this one. It was just, it was just kind of interesting. So, uh, you took a look at this one too. Uh, chris, you have anything to add there?

Chris: 2:27

Yeah not much. I mean, yeah, it's just, it's like obviously funny to see that someone was trying to control their cloud spend and repatriation was a part of the piece of it. Um, so we've we've obviously had many talks on this podcast about repatriation and whether or not it's. I mean, yeah, people always talk about repatriation. They're like, oh, that means they're moving everything and it's like, no, it's, they're moving certain things that are, you know, a crucial piece of the business. That may not mean need to run in the cloud, right, so that's, it's good to see that coming to fruition. But obviously it's Akamai, right, they, they pretty much have. I mean, they do, they do CDN type stuff as well. Right, like there's a lot of um, yeah, so it's like obviously they, they need such a wide, they need to cast such a wide net across the globe for to do stuff like that. They need the cloud in order to do that. Um, so it's just good to, I guess, kind of get proven right in some aspects on this one. So that's good to see.

Tim: 3:20

I forgot to mention it, but there's a gold, just a huge nugget of gold, there in the article. It's near the bottom and it's a quote, basically from the person at Akamai. I forgot the name, but I just wanted to bring it up because this is such a true statement. Specifically, it says we were over-provisioned because we were leveraging cloud to compensate for deficiencies in the way our workloads were developed and engineered Right.

Tim: 3:49

And if that isn't a true statement, you know any networking person is well aware of the over provisioning and gold plating of networks to kind of compensate for poor application design and it's good to see somebody come out and just say like that and so and we've said that also many times on the podcast that like hey, if you take these workloads, these unoptimized workloads right, that have no tolerance and that are chewing up processes, and just put a middleman in there by throwing it in the cloud, like of course, you're not going to save money, it's going to ruin you. Yeah.

Chris: 4:25

Garbage in, garbage out, all right. Next up we have this one, I think, just squeezed into our news cycle, right? I think we actually debated on covering this on the last episode but with the way it fell we pushed it to this one. So there's been an announcement from OpenAI that they're basically doing another restructure to the organization and they're going to turn the public arm, uh, of the company Uh, so if you, if you recall they, you know kind of like a split these things across. Where there was a, it started holistically as a nonprofit and then there was a for-profit arm and now they're kind of operating as two entities and we've obviously been a bit cynical about how we think those things operate on this podcast before. But now they're changing the profit arm to be what is called a PBC or a public benefit corporation. And basically, I'll be honest with you, I had not heard of what a PPC was before I saw this article. So I did a little bit of research into it and basically just sounds like this differentiates from a typical public company or a C corporation, kind of like, just in terms of where the orientation of the mission for that company is like. It's like legally obligated to um file, follow um, you know kind of whatever their, their mission statement is, um and balance their financial profitability with that specific purpose. Um don't know how that's governed, but that's that's kind of what I've uh taken from it. And you know, there's obviously greater accountability and flexibility in decision making. It sounds like Like they will be able to prioritize like kind of societal or environmental goals over you know, direct profits for shareholders and things like that.

Chris: 6:16

I'll be honest with you, man, when I saw this, I was naturally cynical about it again, because we've've um. You know, we've seen what's happening with open ai and and there's been a lot of kerfuffles. Obviously sam altman's also in hot water right now for um some potential non-technical, non-technical related uh aspects of his life. But I'll be honest with you, man, I'm actually struggling to see what is bad about this. This actually seems like it could be a good thing, Assuming, like I said before, though, with the PBCs and things like that, I don't know how that's governed, I don't know how that's enforced, so I'm sure there's loopholes and things like that that I may not be aware of, but overall this does seem like a good thing.

Chris: 7:02

It seems like they're going to the way they they're framing it is that this aligns to their mission to reach the AGI right, the artificial general intelligence for for the public, um, which is seen as their, I guess their societal good contribute, uh, uh, contribution to the to the world Right, um, but yeah, I don't know. Um, how do you feel, tim, do you? I'm?

Tim: 7:28

sure you've got some uh, uh, hopefully a hot take where I don't, no, um. So this is interesting though. So, the public benefits corporation uh, we talked about this a little bit last year when we had Joe on a sick on, if you remember. We were talking about the tech layoffs and like what, basically what people can do, and like what the answer is. And he had had, he had been talking about the, the public benefits corporations. Uh, I forget it, it's b, I forget what, the, the, the specific uh 802.1c or 802.1b or something like that. I'm not thinking of like wireless, but uh, the, um, but, but whatever you call it, there's a corporation, a, a filing, that is Benefits Corp, and I have the same question, which is who determines whether it's like what is the public good and all of that in there, and maybe it's the board.

Tim: 8:13

But what's interesting about what I found interesting back then, and what I still find interesting here, is that we have this legal vehicle by which the corporation can essentially become unsuitable by investors. You know cause like the. You know part of the reason why capitalism is just, in my opinion, gone off the, you know the, driven straight off of the cliff, is this, this thing where corporations can be sued if they don't do everything possible to maximize their shareholder value. They can be sued by shareholders for not doing everything possible, whatever, whether that could be good, bad or ugly or whatever that looks like. Anything possible to maximize share value is becomes doable like you can. The shareholder can sue them and get money, basically. So I think that this the bit with the benefits corporation is is essentially structured legal protection for that, essentially. So you know, if you invest in our corporation, you understand that you can't sue us if we do something that's, you know, for the public good, which is what kind of world do we live in, where that's the thing we have to do, but whatever.

Chris: 9:18

That's a good point because, like, obviously money and shareholders, that's a tangible asset. Right, you can immediately, you can immediately say if, if that was met or not met. Um, whereas I guess with a PBC like, I don't know how you, I don't know how you measure, that yeah Right.

Chris: 9:34

Yeah. So it's probably going to be much easier, or much harder, I should say, to build a case against, like you saying like oh, they did not fulfill their duty as a corp towards goal A, b or C, right, yeah, see, that's why we have you here, man, give me a check.

Tim: 9:51

I'm glad to help. Okay, let's see, let's move on to the next one here. So our next article comes from oh hold on, I just got to, so sorry. Our next article comes from CIO Dive, actually, and this one is talking about Microsoft's plans this year to pour 80 billion dollars into their cloud data centers. Holy crap, yeah, basically to build out of all the framework and stuff for AI workloads.

Tim: 10:21

So I mean it doesn't specifically say, hey, this is like we're going to build Azure, all the Azure regions.

Tim: 10:27

It doesn't go that far and explain exactly what these $80 billion is earmarked for.

Tim: 10:32

But I mean, if we're assuming that their plans to upgrade and increase the amount of AI workloads you know that are available, you know, part of that probably is just, I don't know if they're going to be handing over tech to open AI I guess part of this or if they're just going to, like, build out more Azure infrastructure to make, you know, ai services available for customers, or little column, a little column B, it's not clear from the article, but I mean $80 billion is well, it's just a shitload of money. I mean it's just, it's an absolutely mind boggling amount of money. So this is interesting because up until now they've pretty much had, like he was saying before we record, chris, that OpenAI has been like their poster child, like their baby. So I don't know if this indicates a doubling down on that and I think we're going to have to wait and see or if it indicates that, hey, they're diversifying, or maybe just straight up, that they're adding the ability for customers to consume and hoping that that will bring the customers right.

Chris: 11:33

Yeah, my initial thought about this is that it's probably the latter, Because it specifically calls out them putting $80 billion into the purpose of training and developing AI within these data centers, and to me that seems like I mean, obviously you could say like oh, we're just giving infrastructure to open AI to perform that, but if they're calling out specifically to do training and things like that, it sounds like they're trying to come up either with something on their own or at least you know, kind of maybe taking a bit out of AWS's book and saying like hey, we're just going to have a kind of a market for this kind of stuff, or maybe they're developing their own thing.

Chris: 12:07

I don't know. But I mean, like you said, they've always been obviously keeping OpenAI a little bit at arm's length. They haven't really completely embraced them, I think, just because probably Ndela doesn't want to pull in Sam Altman just yet, just by way of there's always been controversy and things like that.

Tim: 12:27

A little bit of a hot potato.

Chris: 12:29

Yeah, for sure. So I don't know, we'll see, but that's my prediction anyway.

Tim: 12:35

Yeah, I think that's pretty good, I mean truthfully, we're just gonna have to wait and see, but it does point out training. So yeah, is Microsoft going to create their own model, I mean, and if so is, does it take 80 billion dollars to create your own model these days?

Chris: 12:49

Like that's a good point.

Tim: 12:50

That's a good point.

Chris: 12:51

The person who puts the most money in wins, wins. Yeah, absolutely All right. Next up, we have an article here from Fierce Network. I feel like every time we have something on here from this publication, it's always like a drastically hot take Like a hot take, yeah, yeah.

Chris: 13:07

This one is of no exception, right? So they have an article here that in 2025, it looks like an analyst of some sort, I forget who exactly the name was is predicting that Google Cloud may overtake Azure Microsoft Azure within 2025 in terms of the market cap for public cloud, which I think is I would not have said that. We've been on here talking for a couple of years now. We're like, oh, microsoft might take over as number one soon, let alone getting you know, put in the third spot.

Chris: 13:47

I mean, they specifically call out the fact that Google does very well in the SMB space, which is totally, totally valid. I see that we just had Erica on here and you know she was talking about working at a startup and you know they went into Google cause, um, you know, people like Google and it was probably easy to get started and they do a lot of credits and things like that, so it makes makes perfect sense. Um, but like I think the they mentioned that the the market saturation was like AWS was like 31 percent, azure 20 percent, google 13 percent, which, I'll be honest, that sounds higher than I thought for Google, if I'm being completely transparent, but nonetheless, yeah, like you know, they call out specifically that Microsoft does very well with enterprises and is working in arenas with like things like ibm and sap and things like that. Um, but google is you know what we said last, uh, last news episode they're making this big push about.

Tim: 14:42

You know, gemini is the main focus for 2029 or 2029, 2025, I mean, maybe it'll be 2029 as well but I cannot foresee that happening within a 12 month span for them. That's a hell of a growth period, yeah. In 12 months. That's a very large month over month.

Chris: 15:04

Unless there's a tank sprout that, like it's, one's got to go up and that one's going to go way down Right.

Tim: 15:09

Yeah Right, I mean, there's not an infinite amount of market share, like I think they're definitely jockeying there. So, yeah, it's a. I mean, it's a radioactive take. I don't know what to say to it. I I do, having read the article. The article gets into the basically why we think this and they actually have at least a, a thesis. It's not just a let's, let's get clicks by saying weird shit like they do nothing right.

Tim: 15:33

I don't know if I'm still like I'm with you, like I don't know that I agree, still like I'm with you, like I don't know that I agree, but you know, I mean, the truth is we don't ever know. One thing this thing has proven is that we truly don't know. Like you said, we thought Azure, by this point, might be like really really dogging AWS's heels, and I think the AI thing has definitely really shaken the whole damn market up and yeah, so that's a big one. But yeah, I didn't think Google's share was, I would not have thought 13% either, and of course, you do the math on this right. So you have what? 31% for Google, 20% for Azure, less for, uh, azure and what was it 13?

Tim: 16:18

yeah, exactly. So we're saying are we seeing basically, the? The other side is other. So how much does oci have then? How much is? Is all the other private and public cloud, you know, startup or ibm or whatever we're calling public cloud now, alibaba and all those right. So that's, that seems like a pretty yeah. Anyway, yeah, not much to say, I guess. Well, we will see if Google really does catch up. I will point out that, of course, we've struggled with this too. All the analysts do is decoupling Microsoft's cloud Azure offering from 365 and all of their other stuff that's hosted on Azure. That's always been an extremely hard thing to decouple, which I think they actually use. They point out in the article as one of the reasons why Microsoft has always seemed so far ahead, but might not really be so yeah we're going to say, yeah, it's weird.

Chris: 17:12

It's funny how many customers I talk to on a daily basis, or you know, I should say probably prospects, and I just you know kind of line of questioning like hey, what clouds are you in? What are you typically using? They're like oh well, a bit of Azure, because you know we use a lot of O365. And I'm like even the response to that question is like in that camp, I'm like that's not, I not. I mean, technically, I guess you're probably using azure, but I wouldn't say that's, that's just pure sass right, like that's right.

Chris: 17:40

I'm consuming services that are hosted in azure, but I'm not like an azure customer right so it's like, but that's I mean but that that could also speak to why microsoft has such success, that there's cohesion between that like, even the mindset, is that like if I, using O365, I consider myself an Azure customer, and therefore, it's easier for me to get started in Azure, because I'm quote-unquote already there, even though you're not really right.

Tim: 18:03

But yeah, I get that. That's interesting. Okay, and we'll close out this week with kind of a funny one. Honestly, I think it's absolutely ridiculous. So NVIDIA had a conference recently, uh, where uh jensen huang of uh nvidia basically said that he did, he did a bunch of stuff. That was hilarious. I don't know if you saw it. There's a video where he comes out with a giant uh uh nvidia gpu on like what looks like a shield. Basically, no, I did not did not see that.

Tim: 18:35

Oh, you got to find it Because I was joking with somebody. I was like it's way too flashy, You're not going to be able to deflect any and it looks weak. You can't deflect any. Sword strikes or maces with that thing or anything. It looks like a buckler, like a big old shield. Anyway, so in this article from AOLcom of all places, so I you know, if you right, I mean just go get one of the CDs.

Tim: 18:58

If you want to read this, go get one of those free CDs the thousand hours so you can read the article, so anyway. So Jensen Huang says basically, that AI agents are becoming a thing and, in this new era of AI agents, that IT service organizations will become the quote, unquote, hr of AI agents. So yeah, a lot of heavy lifting with a lot of words there. So the idea, of course, is that these agents are essentially not quite autonomous but, like, purpose built to perform whatever task the agent has been created for, and that, therefore, the IT would become the shepherd, I guess, of these agents. And I don't know, I feel like HR is a bit of a, I don't know. I don't want to say hot, take, it's a bit of a stretch or something, because I mean, can I put the AI agent on a pip if it's not doing well, you know, can we let it go?

Chris: 19:57

or, you know, I don't know, give it a pay cut. This just has me feeling sorry for all the people that are specifically individual contributors because they don't want to be a manager. It's like, well, well, according to jensen, eventually you will be a fucking manager. Yep over something that could. It won't talk back to you, I guess. So, um, you know, maybe, maybe you get. You get the, you know, that power complex that you've always wanted.

Tim: 20:22

You can yeah you really, uh, you know, push down hard on your, on your, uh, your workers or you can build an ai agent whose, uh, whose job is to agree with everything that you say. Perhaps that's you know. Give it a prompt, load up the agent with a prompt that says it'll uh, yeah, like you're my manager and I love you and I'll do anything you say who knows? Uh, I don't know what to say to this. It's an absolute. It's kind of a ridiculous article. I mean, I get the feeling like it was made for clicks, but not the article, sorry.

Chris: 20:54

The wording or whatever, if you will, the quotation.

Tim: 20:57

It was meant to turn heads and get headlines. But I mean, ai agents is a thing. It's the idea of we're kind of preloading prompts and then kind of packaging up, almost like a Docker container, an AI agent that will, you know, follow the prompt and and and carry out the task for which it has been prepared. But uh, yeah, I don't, I still don't know if it becomes the hr of ai agents or just kind of like the you know, life cycle manager of an ai agent.

Chris: 21:26

It's probably more accurate yeah, I mean like you said. I mean the. He can have the quote as ridiculous as he wants, but really what it means is just that you're changing how you interface with their technology, right? So it's like, sure, maybe I mean 2025, I have actually heard multiple times that 2025 will be the year of the AI agents.

Tim: 21:47

Yeah, so that does sound like a thing. 2025 will be the year of the AI agents.

Chris: 21:48

Yeah, so that does sound like a thing. But you know, we potentially have some talks coming up with some guests, maybe about some of these agents, and we'll get into that. But yeah, I feel like the number one phrase we say on this Fortnum Huntley news show is we'll see. This is no exception right, we shall see.

Tim: 22:11

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it's a. It's a new way to consume ai by, by kind of making it more autonomous, and I think that's the goal and that's where he's getting to. Is that that you know we're going to allow ai to be more autonomous and do more work on its own so it can secretly create skynet under our notices? But, uh, you know, yeah, 2025, 2025, you're the AI agent. You heard it here first. Alright, and with that I guess we can go ahead and wrap it up. I hope everybody had a good time.

Tim: 22:41

Of course, we always have some stories that we don't necessarily cover on the news. They're in the Fortnightly News document that we put in the show notes of every episode. We encourage you to take a look at those stories. There's just stuff that we didn't have time or or need to get into very, very deeply on the show, uh, but we think are interesting and that our listeners, viewers, whatever, will want to take a look at. So, uh, take a look at that. And, of course, always, uh, like, subscribe, buy the breakfast cereal, play the home game and we'll see you next time. Peace, 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.