Welcome to episode 287 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! 2025 is already shaping up to be another year of “unprecedented” times, but have no fear, Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, and Matthew are all in the house and (mostly) recovered from the holidays – and just in time to bring you all the latest new year news in the cloud world.

• Everyone is investing in AI… but you could invest in the cloud pod
• Oracle Exadata X11M: Burn a big pile of money
• The cloud pod has better security than Microsoft – mk
• The new and improved Cloud Pod 4.0
• Cloud Nine… Figures (or $80 billion)
• $60 Billion and Counting: The Ai Arms Race
• Oracle Exadata X11M: For When You Absolutely, Positively, Have to Burn Money
• The Cloud Pod rebrands to The Cloud AI so we can get 11B in funding

2:42 Oracle’s rampant cloud growth wasn’t enough for Wall Street, and its stock slides after-hours

• We missed talking about Oracle’s earnings call on December 9th, since we were in the middle of our re:Invent shows. Apparently, their rapid cloud growth was not sufficient to appease the Wall Street gods., but honestly – what is ever good enough for them?
• They reported earnings of 1.47 a share, just shy of the 1.48 expected by the analysts. Revenue was up 9% from a year before, at $14.06B below the street’s target of $14.1 Billion.
• Income was up 26% from prior year, to 3.15B.
• Revenue from cloud services and license support was up 12% to 10.8 billion.
• Oracle CEO Safra Catz said growth in the AI segment was nothing short of extraordinary, with 336% growth in GPU unit consumption from the prior year.
• Despite positive signs, Oracle guidance was soft and this also angered the Wall Street gods.

04:09 Justin – “…now in January, their stock is, up a dollar 11 today, but, looking at the month, they haven’t really recovered from earnings quite yet. So we’ll see how they do as they continue through the year. But, yeah, I mean, tech in general is down. I mean, everything’s down. Everyone’s waiting for the election to, election, the, the soaring in and the new administration to come in as we’re past that.”

04:34 HashiCorp 2024 year in review

• 2024 was a busy year for Hashicorp, and they wrote up a blog post to point out the highlights.
  • IBM + Hashicorp signed an agreement to be acquired by Big Blue. With IBM, they believe they can bring modern infrastructure and security practices to an even greater number of organizations around the world, and they are excited for the possibilities.
  • Terraform got numerous updates including:
    • Terraform Stacks

Welcome to episode 286 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Welcome to the final show of 2024! We thank you for joining us on our cloud journey over the past year. During this last show of the year, we look back on all the tech that changed our jobs and lives, and make predictions for an AI filled 2025. Join Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew as they look forward to even more discussions about undersea cables. Happy New Year!

• We thought 2024 would never end
• I can sum up 2024 – AI AI AI AI and uhh AI
• AI has taken over the Cloud Pod – we are not really here
• 2024 the year we hoped AI would replace us… close but not yet

Matt

• Simpler and Easier to access LLM with new services
• Kubernetes will become simpler for smaller companies to operate that doesn’t require Highly Paid Devops/Scientists
• Low Employee Churn Rates and increased Tenure (Quiet Quitting)

02:07 Matthew – “How is it simpler and easier? I think that there are more ways to run it. The general public has an easier way to access it. And they are simpler as Justin said that they are becoming easier and more efficient and better to use for the average user. So I know that I talked to many people that I work with now and just in general and people that are not in tech, which I feel like a year ago.”

Jonathan

• There will be mass layoffs in tech directly attributed to AI in Q1 2024 (10k or more)
• Someone will start a cult that follows an AI LLM God believing in sentience, a higher power.
• AI will find a new home in education. Lesson Plans, Personalized Learning plans by students, etc.

02:07 Jonathan – “Well, there is a religion called the First Church of Artificial Intelligence, but it’s been around for longer than this year. I think it’s like five, six years old at this point. So that’s kind of cheating.

Ryan

• Start seeing the financial impact of AI to better profitability by using AI.
• AI Solution tied towards new employee onboarding (replace wiki technology)
• Removal of stateful firewalls as traffic ruleset (next-gen next-gen firewall)

02:07 Ryan – “I mean, agentic AI is something that’s been rolled out in a lot of companies. I know in my day job, it’s been rolled out. I hope to see this get even stronger and more obvious just because I think that, you know, the days of searching through thousands of documents or the one, you know, unmaintained team page that someone built three years ago when they were new are over. And so I’d like to see this continue.

Justin

1. LLM will hit the trough of disillusionment either on Cost, Environmental impact or people realizing how limited these models are
2. Another AI model other than Transformer based
3. We will see another large defector from Public Cloud (not 37 Signals or X/Twitter)

13:26 Justin – “I feel partially vindicated that I was sort of right, just I thought we didn’t be in the trough a little faster, but maybe it’s coming still. I don’t know. they’re innovating pretty quickly. I don’t think they’ll get there, but definitely environmental is going to become a big, big conversation around AI.”

Did you remember that Gemini wasn’t a thing in 2023? It feels like it’s been around forever. 2024 saw some serious jumps forward in tech and innovation, as well as a lot o...

Welcome to episode 285 of the Explain it to me Like I’m 5 Podcast, formerly known as The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! We’ve got a lot of news this week, including the last of our coverage from re:Invent, ChatGTP Pro, FPGA, and even some major staffing turnovers.

• Throw $200 dollars in a fire with ChatGPT Pro
• Jeff Barr is wrapped up by Agentic AI
• The Tribble with Trilliums
• The Wind in the Quantum Willows
• Rise of the dead instances FPGA and PowerPC
• Jeff Barr is replaced by Nova
• The Cloud Pod: Return of the dead instances types
• After 6 year Jeff Barr hands over the reigns to the CloudPod
• For our 6th birthday Jeff barr Retires
• For our 6th birthday jeff barr delegates announcements to the cloud pod
• 6 years of meaningless PR drivel
• 6 years of cloud news and we still don’t know what Quantum computing is

HAPPY 6th BIRTHDAY!

2:00 HashiCorp at re:Invent 2024: Security Lifecycle Management with AWS

• Hashi is a big sponsor of re:Invent, so of course they had some news of their own to release.
• HCP Vault Secrets auto-rotation is now generally available.
• Dynamic secrets are generally available via HCP Vault Secrets.
• Secrets sync will help keep your secrets synced with AWS Secrets Manager. It still appears to be one direction, but you can now also view secrets in AWS Secrets Manager that are managed by vault.
• HCP Vault Radar, now in beta, automates the detection and identification of unmanaged secrets in your code, including AWS infrastructure configurations

03:10 Matthew – “This qualifies under the category of things that I feel like we talked about so long ago, I just already assumed was GA. I’m surprised that it wasn’t.”

03:34 HashiCorp at re:Invent 2024: Infrastructure Lifecycle Management with AWS

• Terraform AWS provider is now at 3 billion downloads.
• The AWS Cloud Control Provider is also now generally available with the 1.0 release.
• This is the provider built around AWS Cloud Control API to bring new services to Hashicorp Terraform faster.
• In June, AWS and Hashi partnered to