Tim McConnaughy: 0:15

Hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Cables to Clouds Fortnightly News. I am here, your host this week, tim, and with me, as always, is Chris, my co-host, who you may remember from previous episodes of this podcast. So yeah, with the fortnightly news, what we do is we go, we take a look around, we try to see what in the last two weeks has happened that's interesting. We roll it up and share it and then comment on it and see if we find it interesting what we'll say. So let's just jump right into it.

Tim McConnaughy: 0:50

This one just came out from cloudcompetingnewsnet and the title of the article is Amazon Cloud Revenue Misses Estimates Again as Rivals Pull Ahead. I feel like and I know this is obviously I feel like this is done quarterly anyway, but it seems like every other episode, we're talking about the race to the bottom, as it were, of cloud money, essentially. So what's interesting here, of course, is that in this article, they point out that Amazon had very slow first quarter results, even though they still increased right first quarter results, even though they still increased right. So they had a 16.9% increase year over year, which, of course, in any normal business would be really good numbers, but this being cloud and AWS, apparently. That's terrible and everyone should panic. So I mean, it's just it's not as fast. It's not as fast as was predicted, as they wanted it to be. What's interesting, though, in this article is that they mentioned that both Microsoft and Google or Alphabet, I guess had stronger than expected growth, while AWS had lower than expected growth. Now we've been doing this a while now, and I swear to God, it seems like every time we report on this stuff, we feel like this is the point where Microsoft is going to overtake Amazon or AWS as the leader, and it still has yet to happen, but we do continually report that, quarter over quarter, it seems like AWS is slowing down. Microsoft and Alphabet are heating up.

Tim McConnaughy: 2:26

So now put that in perspective. Of course, aws is the 800-pound gorilla. Aws is in the lead and has been in the lead pretty much since the beginning. So take all of that with a grain of salt, right. Microsoft and Google have a lot more upward trajectory than they have downward, and AWS is more or less the reverse, where it's a lot easier for them to lose ground than it is for them to gain it once you get to a certain point. So Andy Jassy said Amazon has not yet observed a significant rise in average selling prices. Oh, this is sorry.

Tim McConnaughy: 2:59

As part of this article also, they talk about Amazon a little bit because of the tariffs thing. So, even though AWS and Amazon are technically tracked differently, a lot of times when we get to earnings calls, for some reason the reporting on both of the numbers. I guess that's because, of course, I guess they report them both at the same time. So they talk about third-party sellers and all this other stuff and tariffs potentially impacting the Amazon side of the house potentially impacting the Amazon side of the house. So meanwhile, like I said, microsoft's getting a lot more growth.

Tim McConnaughy: 3:33

There was something in here specifically about the spending. There it is. Capital spending at Microsoft rose to $16.75 billion, a 53% year-over-year increase. So Microsoft is building hardware for AI. Basically that's what it is, so pretty interesting. Google is, of course, on the rise as well. So there's a lot of numbers in this article. I don't want to sit here and regurgitate them, but generally AWS has slower growth, microsoft and Google are taking off and there's a ridiculous amount of money being spent on AI. So you took the article. Anything to add, chris?

Chris Miles: 4:09

No, I kind of echo your sentiments here. Whereas it's funny, that even increases year over year of this percentage, which would be phenomenal for any other company on the earth, seems to cause concern for investors when it comes to Amazon or Microsoft or Alphabet, which is just hilarious. The thing is, if you're saying, just to do a call to what's trending on social media right now, if Amazon is the 100-pound gorilla or 800-pound gorilla, sorry to say and there's 100 individual small cloud providers, could they beat Amazon?

Tim McConnaughy: 4:48

That's the question. Oh my God, so topical, so topical, yeah, I guess that remains to be seen. Yeah, we should ask that question on social media, actually, and see what people say.

Chris Miles: 5:02

We'll get two answers and they'll both say no, Probably All right. Next up, we have an article here which is basically a report, a 2025 phishing report put together by Threat Labs that's Threat Labs with a Z Very, very cool having a Z in there which is a part of Zscaler, I believe, Basically doing a report on the effects of AI on scams like phishing over the past year, Right? So we've talked a bit on the podcast about how we think AI is probably going to maybe not increase the number of sophisticated cybersecurity attacks, but at least increase the kind of more targeted type of attacks and things like that. So I wanted to put this in here to see if we can actually glean what has happened over the last year and there's been some major call-outs in here. So basically, ThreatLabs did an analysis of over 2 billion blocked phishing transactions across their Zero Trust Exchange platform, which is a cloud security platform. So this is dated from January to December of last year Some interesting call-outs in here.

Chris Miles: 6:23

So phishing, while it's down, it's become overly more targeted as of recent. So there are more targeted attacks where they've been highly successful, things like that. The U S uh, it says the United States fishing has declined, but it still remains number one on the list of um targeted areas, which is, uh, is not really a huge surprise. Um, interestingly, there was a call out here that crypto scams are on the rise with fake wallets. Um, which is uh, which is kind of funny. I don't know if this had anything to do with the incoming administration being kind of more, you know, the pro-crypto party type thing, and not to even get into the politics of it. I'm just wondering if that is why there's been an increased kind of traction in this particular area. And then another thing here which is really sad to see but tech support and job scams are thriving and you know, as we all exist in this world today, we know that the job market is pretty shit right now, so I can see that being an area of opportunity for, you know, threat actors and things like that.

Chris Miles: 7:35

I'm trying to think what actually else was in here that was interesting. I'm trying to think what actually else was in here that was interesting. There were certain call-outs here about phishing. Sites are now starting to put captures on the front pages of them to kind of mimic their credibility and get past some existing security tools that are kind of scanning these things like that. So that was an interesting call-out as well like that, so that was an interesting call out as well.

Chris Miles: 8:03

All in all, I don't see a huge rise of kind of threats and things like that in this report that lead me directly to AI's involvement. To be honest with you, I'm expecting to see probably more of that come out in the next, probably next year's, report, so I look forward to reading that one. But I did see some points in here about vishing taking over, which vishing is kind of voice vishing, where you know they kind of are able to impersonate someone and mimic their voice in real time and basically steal vital information. So I could see that one relating to AI and like deep fakes and things like that. But, yeah, interesting article. You can read the full report. You can download it directly from them. So if you want to have a closer look, take a look in the show notes. Anything else to add? Tim, how did you feel about it?

Tim McConnaughy: 8:50

Yeah, it was good. So I did see something. So I like this one. Phishing targets, ai hype. I thought that was great, right.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:01

Fraudulent AI agent websites that mimic real platforms are exploiting the growing trust in AI to steal user credentials and payment details, and we've been talking about this for a while off the show and on the show. But these new federated systems, if you will, probably gives a little too much credit, like MCP and some of the agent-to-agent type of behavior that's growing really popular in AI workloads. A lot of that stuff's not secure. There's no real security to it. Nobody's authenticating agents, nobody's doing anything to validate or encrypt the data or decrypt the data, like I mean. It's just it's all very wild west.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:43

And because nobody has built security frameworks for these AI interactions, because the AI interactions are, like you know, days old or weeks old, at this point it's really ripe for threat actors to essentially, you know, mimic legitimate you know legitimate MCP servers Because, remember, the whole point of the MCP server is like an exchange, if you will Like an agent, I believe, an agent exchange or something where these services can find each other.

Tim McConnaughy: 10:13

So there's nothing stopping one of these, or even what used to happen all the time with software is it would be legitimate software and then somebody would abandon it. You know the maintainer would abandon it, and so I would come along and pick it up and build a malware into it and just keep the train rolling right so that stuff can happen Like there's no validation that I've seen on any of this. So that, I thought, was a very interesting insight from this report. I say insight. I say insight I mean it should be obvious to anybody who knows has been looking at cybersecurity for a period of time. But it's cool to see it documented that like hey, yeah, this is happening right. Like this is something people are going to have to deal with as AI becomes more and more part of our work life.

Chris Miles: 10:55

Yeah, I mean, I think about the timing of it and obviously, with the cutoff being December of last year, that's when I feel like we were just starting to talk a lot more about AI agents and now we've moved on from agents to MCP. Now MCP is the new rage and it's funny because you hear the kind of counterpoint a lot of times that adding security can kind of stifle the innovation or the agility of new technology and things like that. But, like, when I look at mcp and like look, I, I'm not an expert, have a very rudimentary understanding of it, it seems very easy to build some basic security into that, like with common protocols and things like that that are in use on the internet, very much so today, um, and it's not there yet. But that that at the same time, because it's not in, you know, such a wide adoption just yet, then threat actors aren't going to be targeting that, so to say, just yet.

Chris Miles: 11:52

I'm hoping by the time the rubber meets the road and MCP is kind of that like standard framework that everyone uses, then maybe you know the uh, the security will have already been kind of baked in and but, uh, you know, I've I've I've heard the joke several times already and I think it's too funny to not repeat. But um, people are saying that the S in MCP stands for security, so I think that's uh, very relevant right now All right, Uh, so this next one is from I think that's very relevant right now.

Tim McConnaughy: 12:20

All right, so this next one is from, I think it's actually. Oh, this is from InfoQ. Yeah, so InfoQcom basically has an article that talks about essentially the release notes from the new version of Kubernetes that has been released, called Octarine, which apparently is an homage to Terry Pratchett's Discworld. I don't know how or why, because it's my wife who is the Discworld junkie. I am not. I've listened to maybe one or two audiobooks from Terry Pratchett on a road trip, yeah, and watched. Was it the one they had on Amazon? Was it Amazon the one with David Tennant and Michael Sheen? Oh, shoot, I forgot the one with the devil and the angel, zerphil and Crowley.

Chris Miles: 13:09

I was going to say, man, if it's between me and you, you're the resident expert here. I've not ventured into it.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:15

Yeah, I completely forgot the name of it all of a sudden. That's okay, I'm going to kick myself when I remember, but anyway. So yeah, new version of Kubernetes released. One of the most anticipated features in Kubernetes 1.33 is the promotion of sidecar containers to stable status. So this is interesting and I'm still not a Kubernetes expert. I've been working on it. I don't know if I'll ever be a Kubernetes expert, but I have been learning a lot more about Kubernetes. So the idea here basically is sidecar containers are an add-on basically to the whole Kubernetes environment and it usually has been used for service mesh. So service mesh providers like Istio or Linkerd, they deploy a sidecar, what's called a container. It's a container inside a pod whose sole purpose of being in the pod is to facilitate communication with other containers that have their sidecars. Now the whole thing about sidecar containers is that up until now it hasn't been part of the native Kubernetes workflow or Kubernetes lifecycle. It's been kind of managed as its own thing, kind of like CNI is my understanding. So this now is saying basically okay, so now we've got sidecars as part of the Kubernetes solution. Essentially it's not just an add-on, a bolt-on, a vendor hack. Now this is actually part of the Kubernetes lifecycle, so you can actually manage sidecars with Kubernetes, manifests and all of that. So that's, I think, a step in the right direction. You have expansion of your solution to include things that a vendor is adding functionality that wasn't originally built into the product. So they've seen widespread adoption. They see the value of bringing it in-house essentially or be part of the actual basic solution. So that's the big one.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:14

There's a few more here I like. This too actually Promotes in-place resource resizing for vertical scaling of pods. Now, this is a beta feature. This isn't a stable feature yet, but it's interesting that we can, because we didn't have this before. You have to blow away your pods and do manifest changes and spin up new pods. I'm curious the use case and I would love to hear if somebody knows, by the way, what the use case. And I would love to hear if somebody knows, by the way, what the use case is for vertically resizing your pods. I guess it's just so you don't blow away the container, right, so you don't have to kill the container to do it. There's obviously some value in that. But then again, kubernetes was kind of predicated on the idea of microservices and we could just continue.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:57

Cattle, not pets, right, we don't care, essentially. So I am curious what the real value here is, and I think that maybe that's why it's a beta feature they're trying to see like are people using it? Do they need this? Is this something that this is a problem that needs to be solved? So that's a pretty interesting one. Also, enhanced support for service account tokens. So tokens are something I haven't really played with a lot at all, but the idea, of course, is it's a security feature. So talk about so we're just talking about security features here. Here's one too, right, so we have the ability for our pods and applications to pass tokens for communication purposes.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:30

And then there was one more that looked interesting. Um, they are changing the way that service ips are allocated. Um, so before you just pretty much had cluster ip, that would would, uh, is what you would use for kind of inter-cluster services, because the idea here is that you expose the service and the service is what you hit. Is that north star that you can hit, so that you can hit the back-end application containers? Because those containers are living, dying and being reborn all the time. Essentially, you don't want to use them as a target. So the idea of the cluster IP in the service is that here's a static spot, if you will, that we can hit, and then on the back end it's almost like a load balancer.

Chris Miles: 17:12

Well, it is really a load balancer, just like a virtual IP, is basically what it is.

Tim McConnaughy: 17:16

Yeah, virtual IP with a load balancer that points it back in containers. So they've changed it now to add this new thing called service CIDR and IP address Implementation enables cluster administrators to dynamically expand the IP address pool available for cluster IP by creating additional service CIDR objects. I'm assuming that before that, if you wanted to expand that out, you had to blow some stuff away and restart. Now, containers should not be something that would be impactful, but I could absolutely see where blowing away cluster IPs could be impactful to applications, right, because that's how those microservices are communicating with each other. So pretty interesting stuff. Yeah, it's pretty exciting. I have to read up on some of the newer things and still try to understand how they fit here. But yeah, dude, you got anything to add here. I don't know where you're at with your Kubernetes studies.

Chris Miles: 18:08

Yeah, not a ton to add. I mean, the sidecar thing has obviously, I think, been the major call out, from what I've seen people commenting on this. So, like you know, like when I've talked to you know customers and people at conferences and things like that, you know, the idea of running a sidecar operation can be a pain sometimes. I'm curious to know from people that are working with this on a daily basis, like is the when it comes to sidecar? Um, is the? Is the pain point made mainly the orchestration of it, which would, I'm assuming, be solved by this update or kind of you know, be a much less of a burden by this update? Or is it more kind of operational, uh type thing that that comes into play there where it's you know kind of order of operations around, when the sidecar does what, et cetera, versus the existing services, et cetera? So I'd be curious to know, you know, how much are people seeing this as like a, like a? Are they sighing a breath of relief at this point? Or or is there other major problems that come in with the sidecar that are still going to remain? So I'd be curious to hear yeah, definitely, all righty.

Chris Miles: 19:29

And lastly, we'll round out with another bit of a sad one here. So we have an article from USA Today about our good friend at Intel. So Intel their new CEO, which I believe is Lipbutan is how you pronounce that name has basically announced that, or alluded to layoffs coming, as the company has reported about 821 million in losses over Q1 of this year. So it looks like they could be anticipating laying off up to more than 20% of the workforce and, as we just talked about, this job market is not in a good state. So this is not gonna be good for a lot of those people, which is very sad to hear. You know, he's apparently had sent out an email initially saying that we are seen as too slow, too complex and too set in our ways and we need to change. So he's kind of been sowing the seeds that this is coming. It seems like he's coming in and kind of doing the whole thing. You know like we've been running inefficiently. We need to kind of, you know, cut waste, cut things and do more with less type thing.

Chris Miles: 20:43

Thankfully, intel has kind of been on the camp where they've been bailed out on the tariffs. You know, saying that they're being bailed out on something that shouldn't exist at all in the first place is kind of a funny sentence, but nonetheless, that's the world we're living in. So I'm assuming they're probably anticipating for when the tariffs are actually going to come back in full force and things like semiconductors will not be excluded from the existing tariffs. So this is just the latest in Intel's decline. It's kind of a sad state to see them continually on this kind of downward trend. I'm hearing a lot of people predicting that it's going to be sold off for parts in the upcoming future. So yeah, it's sad to see, but that's the state we're working in. Anything to add, tim?

Tim McConnaughy: 21:35

Yeah, so I mean, yeah, this is not as well. On this article he specifically says he's calling for a return to work policy in which some employees, who currently spend three days per week on site, would be spending four days on site. And specifically he says our competitors are lean, fast and agile and that's what we must become to improve our execution execution. So apparently being lean yeah, apparently being lean, fast and agile means adding one more day to your in office. I'm not sure what those two have to do with each other, but apparently that's why I'm not a CEO. Guys, I'm sorry. And then also he says these critical changes will reduce the size of our workforce, but observe that Intel must balance our reductions with the need to retain and recruit key talent, Because there's nothing that key talent loves more than going to companies that lay off 20% of their workforce.

Chris Miles: 22:25

Yeah, exactly.

Tim McConnaughy: 22:26

They're just waiting in line to do that. I mean, I don't know what else to say except to point out that this entire article is full of boilerplate. We have to make layoffs and challenging market and blah, blah, blah, and it's literally. You just change the names and it would be any tech company that you know is, quote unquote facing headwinds. There's nothing new here. Tech continues to implode. So yeah, and of course, for some reason, the answer to tech imploding all of these people think the answer to tech imploding is to get everybody back in the office.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:02

Because, as we, know, during COVID, tech burned to the ground and nobody was able to get any work done. So the only way to get work done now is to get people back in the office.

Chris Miles: 23:15

Yeah, I don't think there is an Amazon office in Chandler Arizona. But if they were upset about the four days back in the office, if you could stomach one more, maybe you could go to AWS and just do the full five days.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:33

I still struggle with the idea that the reason people aren't being successful is because they're not five days in the office. Trends should show this to be the case. You should be able to look at the last five years now or three, let me say, yeah, the last five years and draw a very easy line that says our productivity and value and ability to get shit done has steadily declined since people have not been in the office. Where's that graph? It doesn't exist, right, it doesn't exist. So this, all of this bullshit, is really about real estate. It's always been about real estate and tax incentives. Real estate and tax incentives is what it's always been about. So you're not fooling anybody, dude. That's all I have to add on that one. All right, let's go ahead and wrap this up today. So I hate to end on a sour note there, but this is the world we're living in and it's only getting more interesting. And when I say more interesting, I mean, like in the ancient Chinese curse, like, may you live in interesting times, like that, that style.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:39

So, yeah, we do have a question for you guys. We would love to know if you enjoy the news um more less, uh, than you know. Is there a particular format that you like? Is there more uh stuff that you would like to see do for the news? Uh, different? Would you like to expand out to include different topics? It would be really great to understand. Basically, is the news helpful to you and, if so, how does it help? How do you consume it and what are we missing?

Chris Miles: 25:13

so if you'd like to consume it. If there's a way you'd like to consume it in a certain way that we're not doing today, let us know. I'm just open to hearing some more ideas, because we know there's a way you'd like to consume it in a certain way that we're not doing today. Let us know. Just open to hearing some more ideas, because we know there's a lot of tech news out there. It's not a unique thing to offer that by any means. So we hope that you're coming here because you like Tim and I's personality, but we're not always the best people, so we're just curious to hear from you guys what you'd like us to change or if you think it's working, or open to any and all feedback.

Tim McConnaughy: 25:46

Yeah, appreciate it All right. Well, we'll go ahead and cut it there, everybody, we'll see you next week. Bye, thanks for watching.