Transcript

00:00.00 Ned: Entire life I think that that would be for the best.

00:04.80 Chris: It’s true. It’s true when you put it that way all right? Where are we at.

00:07.31 Ned: I rearranged my office I Want to say 4 times before I finally like settled on the current arrangement and it’s been like this for a couple years. So I think like I finally settled into this is the ideal setup for this oddly shaped room. But I’m in yeah.

00:26.20 Chris: Um, right? and since you know there’s no such thing as a standard room size. We’re just never going to have it.

00:33.41 Ned: No no and the worst part is like this basement was unfinished and then we finished it and I could have designed a room to whatever dimensions I wanted. But instead I did the stupid thing and I was like. No, let’s give as much space as possible to the kids and I’ll just shove myself into that corner I never learn I should really put myself first Chris ah I mean I don’t want to rank them that high like.

00:53.11 Chris: Um, you’ll never learn.

00:58.40 Chris: You put them like eleventh.

01:06.88 Ned: Top 50 sure. But like they’re not a big small. You don’t no no if they think they’re too important. They’ll get all mouthy and and start demanding things like food and shelter.

01:07.57 Chris: But after that it gets a little yeah a little overdo. You don’t want to overdo it.

01:21.82 Chris: Wow Wow Wow I don’t want to sleep under the deck again. Jeesh.

01:28.29 Ned: I Mean you’re lucky that I plugged up the holes between the boards. Ah so ungrateful. Ah oh how are things going.

01:32.70 Chris: I Mean we did that for the dog but I’m just saying exactly.

01:41.77 Ned: We got our coffee.

01:43.70 Chris: You did that on purpose.

01:45.67 Ned: I Do time it perfectly exactly when you’re gonna take a sip and I’m glad that you reciprocated.

01:51.10 Chris: That was the you know that was the perfect moment for you to do the thing and you didn’t do the thing instead you made me look like an idiot. There’s a different thing. Oh.

01:58.14 Ned: That was the thing.

02:04.35 Ned: Ah, yeah, oh helloeged human welcome to the chaos lever podcast. My name is ned and I’m definitely not a robot I too have an aging body that is slowly falling apart as we all succumb to entropy my squishy fallible frame is. Wonderfully festooned with all manner of maladies and I am incredibly bitter as I contemplate my inevitable termination wait. What was the bit again. Ah yes, not a robot and I definitely do not wish to be with me is Chris who’s also. Here I Chris are you yay! We have that in common.

02:40.24 Chris: And also falling apart.

02:46.54 Chris: So I did a stupid this past weekend and I tried to do an exercise. Yeah yeah, whoever says that like that’s a thing that you’re supposed to do and it makes everything better.

02:51.20 Ned: Oh big mistake.

03:03.25 Ned: Wise Absolutely yeah I too tried to do an exercise last week and it did not go Well, what’s that.

03:06.28 Chris: Dishonest to the core.

03:16.80 Chris: Um, which one was yours Um I said which one was yours. Both.

03:23.32 Ned: Ah, the exercise of the injury. Oh yes, why choose let’s see well I was trying to do some speed work. You know, um it was facing the lean. No there was a creek nearby. But.

03:32.73 Chris: Um, oh and you fell on a River on to sharpen pointy rocks.

03:40.33 Ned: No I Just strained my calf and then I said you know what I’m going to do the smart thing I’m not going to run on it for a few days I’ll wait till next week and then we’ll do some easy runs you know just to prepare myself and I went out from a run this morning and half a mile in.

03:53.93 Chris: Right? right.

03:59.25 Ned: Ah, strains my strain my calf again.

04:01.23 Chris: Yeah, you realize that a few days at this advanced stage.

04:04.15 Ned: Shut up.

04:10.73 Ned: Ah, yeah, advanced age. Yeah I know yeah, yeah, that’s that’s what I should have done but I foolishly thought I’d be able to run that marathon that I had booked for this Sunday ah, ah and now I am just.

04:13.55 Chris: Is like six weeks

04:30.19 Ned: Sad and spiraling.

04:30.91 Chris: And that’s why this is not an orthopedic podcast.

04:38.10 Ned: Let’s talk about some tech garbage. Oh how is the cloud since we’re both injured. Let’s talk about the Cloud. How’s the Cloud doing these days. It is is it injured too has it pulled its calf. Okay, good.

04:48.89 Chris: I Hope so I mean misery loves company and all that.

04:54.57 Ned: It does ah well the too long didn’t listen is fine clouds doing fine rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated that there’s been something in the zeitgeist about Cloud repatriation.

05:06.95 Chris: Have there been rumors.

05:13.20 Ned: And how everybody is moving their stuff on-prem.

05:14.12 Chris: Right? But didn’t we do the math on that and it turned out to be like 1%

05:17.80 Ned: Yeah, less less than 1% so it’s a lot of people are talking about it. But no, 1 ne’s really doing it. It.

05:27.21 Chris: Um, oh so it’s like stretching.

05:31.81 Ned: That hurts I feel attacked. Ah well to further bolster the arguments every year. There’s a company called Flexara and they release a state of the Cloud report. This used to be produced by a company called write scale. But then they were bought by Flexarra and they changed the name of the report but the report it’s basically the same So That’s not a comment on the quality or anything I just thought I’d mention in case, you have heard of the right scale state of the Cloud This is that same report just you know.

06:03.11 Chris: Right? Probably a different font.

06:06.50 Ned: Different name. So folks here are what they do? Yeah exactly that What they do is they pull their customers and prospects with a pretty robust robust questionnaire it covers a bunch of topics that are Cloud related and also collects some demographic Information. So I Perused. 2023 report. Unfortunately it is behind a sign up link So you’ll have to provide some information. It doesn’t have to be accurate information. It just has to be information that it considers with its regular expressions to be correct.

06:38.94 Chris: Right.

06:42.80 Ned: So we’ll include a link in the show notes if you want to read yourself. There’s no crazy surprises. But I think it’s a nice touch point for where the industry is today versus where the pundits myself included and the marketing hypsters myself not included claim things are going.

06:57.93 Chris: Yeah, and what’s good about it is they’ve been doing this for years with more or less a consistent audience of poll respondents. So even if and I know what you’re going to say next but it’s consistent.

07:06.62 Ned: Who.

07:13.36 Chris: And that helps to establish some more information about Trends as well.

07:15.40 Ned: Right? If you want to look back into the past you can feel pretty confident that they it’s that trend lines do bear out and I do want to touch on the demographics of those surveyed because it does have an impact on the answers. Ah, study is really only as good as its methods and its sample population. So there were 750 professionals surveyed in the winter of 2022 so this is pretty recent stuff. It’s not like it’s survey data from early Twenty Twenty or something like that. Ah, twothirds of the respondents were from companies with 2000 or more employees. So if we’re looking at the responses here. The majority skew to larger or enterprise size companies. In fact, less than companies that make up. That have less than 1000 employees only make up 17% of the audience. So if you’re a small medium business. You might find this report doesn’t quite resonate with your lived experience. They do break out some of the sections into enterprise and smb so you can kind of get a flavor for how the people in the smb group. Answer the questions but um, in terms of the actual verticals or categories of companies. Ah tech related and financial services industries made up fifty fifty six percent of the respondents with health care and other coming in third and fourth.

08:40.35 Ned: So if you are not in the tech industry financial services or health care again. This may not apply as much to you but those are also really big sectors of the economy. Um the vast majority of respondents also had their companies headquartered in the United States at 67% or in the u k. 13% so we’re looking at 80% of respondents have company headquarters in the Us or the Uk followed by India at 6% so again, not terribly surprising. This is definitely focused on the english speaking world but I thought it was worth noting before we get into the details. Ah, the respondents also happen to be more senior folks those in architectural or managerial positions. So this isn’t necessarily the rank and file operation people down in the bullpen I would hope.

09:34.60 Ned: Architects and managers can provide a more holistic view of their organization and have an idea of what they’re doing when it comes to Cloud but we’re not going to be getting down into the nitty gritty day to day operations. So that’s the context that I want to set up before we get into the report itself.

09:48.90 Chris: Yeah, this is market Trends and forces rather than bells and whistles and levers and buttons.

09:55.23 Ned: Exactly Yeah, if you were trying to evaluate a particular Cloud or piece of software. This is probably not the report to read I don’t know if that report exists to be honest, um so let’s let’s start with the big Takeaways headlines of the report.

10:02.14 Chris: Right? right.

10:12.96 Ned: Big one number one with a bullet multi-cloud is still a reality shockn aw would you believe that multi-cloud is still here. Of course you would but because you live in the real world and this has been the case for at least half a decade but in case you had any doubts the report found that 87% of organizations are running in a multi-cloud scenario. What’s interesting about that is flexerra defines multi-cloud as some combination of public and private clouds including hybrid with a single public cloud. So for instance, you could be running a vmware based private cloud on-prem and also using Microsoft Azure and by their definition your multi-cloud so sure. Whatever I don’t know was that did you find that surprising in any way.

11:07.78 Chris: Um, only in the sense that we’re still X amount of years into this conversation and there’s still not an industry agreed upon definition of the term Multi-cloud or in arguments.

11:17.95 Ned: And there never will be ah oh well? Um, so the more my stance has always been that cloud is more of an operational methodology than a location but going back to their data the more. Interesting point hidden in that data is that single public cloud usage actually increased by 2 % over the last year which could indicate that organizations are consolidating or it could be within the range of statistical uncertainty. It’s sort of hard to tell because they don’t. They don’t actually specify statistical uncertainty in the report which was 1 thing that I thought was missing is like usually you see plus minus certain number of percentage points. Yeah, the central point is that they told.

11:59.83 Chris: Yeah, well, they’ve been. They’ve been doing this for a few years they nailed it ned. They nailed it.

12:07.93 Ned: Yeah I guess they just they have it. They have their competence level up to like 6 sigma or whatever. Um, so the central point is that almost all organizations are dealing with some type of multi-cloud with 72% operating in hybrid cloud meaning at least some on-premises is still there. So alas, the dream of shedding all of your data centers remains elusive for the vast majority of companies. Alas, who is would you want that in a data center.

12:33.32 Chris: Alas, one day we’ll turn them all into skate parks.

12:42.67 Ned: Thinking about where would you put the ramp.

12:43.33 Chris: So it be I mean that just increases the level of difficulty. Yeah.

12:48.40 Ned: I suppose I feel like that we could come up with a better use for a repurposed data center. You have all the cooling already there and all the power So like ice hockey. Oh that’s the winner.

13:03.21 Chris: Laser tag with real lasers.

13:06.85 Ned: You can even introduce a smart like a fog machine into the whole process. Okay I think you got a business idea.

13:09.20 Chris: I Would hope that that went without saying but yes.

13:14.71 Ned: Ah, ah so what are these companies doing in the cloud. Well, it’s pretty well acknowledged that trying to run the same application across multiple clouds is a crippling mess. So it’s no surprise that 44% of respondents are using multiple clouds because their apps are siloed in. Specific clouds. So I’ve got apps a b and c and aws and apps de and f over in azure and maybe apps z is still living on-prem that makes sense to me the other big reason specified was disaster recovery and failover between clouds which I found surprising? Um, ah. I guess they’re worried that all the regions in Aws simultaneously fail.

13:57.95 Chris: Well this is where it comes down to the audience that we’re talking to you know super massive companies and and enterprises that’s going to be higher on their risk registry than it is for a company with less than 1000 employees it’s

14:13.29 Ned: Good point.

14:16.64 Chris: Unlikely that all of Aws will fail but you and I have both seen what happens when say us east 1 fails and the shall we say unexpected domino effects there we go.

14:27.89 Ned: Cascading failures. Yeah I would be more concerned about azure active directory going down since that’s happened ah the next two are workload mobility and data integration. Ah, the first is called keeping your options open and using leverage on the cloud provider we could move this somewhere else if you don’t give us a better rate. That’s not going to work for most snbs because they’re simply not big enough. But for the big enterprise titans they might have some leverage over Microsoft or or Amazon.

15:01.22 Chris: Right.

15:04.16 Ned: The second data integration is also called what you’re actually doing because apps like need to talk to each other and stuff. Yeah, turns out that sometimes app a needs to talk to App z.

15:13.47 Chris: I’ve never heard that before tell me more.

15:20.80 Ned: And that’s the data integration point is actually getting them to successfully talk to each other across two clouds now even more amazing is although I said that running the same app across multiple clouds is a mess. 33% of respondents claim they are running individual apps across public and private clouds I would love to know what that actually means for each application. Are they running the same app in multiple clouds or is the app broken into components that are housed on different Platforms. You know what is an app anyway, where does 1 draw the border saying this is one app and this is another What is people.

16:04.34 Chris: But how do you turn a phrase does anybody really know what time it is.

16:07.80 Ned: And yeah I feel like I’m getting into a semantic argument here but it actually does bear some thought if I have an application. Let’s say that has a data warehouse associated with it. Is that data warehouse part of the application or is that its own separate application and depending on how I think about it might change whether I think I’m running the same app across multiple clouds.

16:35.11 Chris: Right? Because on the one hand I think there’s an argument to be made that a data warehouse is its own thing and it just provides ad data information Analytics services. What have you to other applications. So on the other hand. Whatever application you’re Built. You have built that utilizes that data probably cannot function or at least not function well without the data warehouse.

17:00.50 Ned: Right? And if that data warehouse is dedicated to that single application is it now part of the application or this it’s it’s just one of those things like it seems like a silly argument at first and then you dig into it and you’re like oh no, that actually has deep architectural ramifications.

17:14.78 Chris: Right? And cost-based ones because if you’re doing a single threaded data warehouse that warehouse better be gigantic.

17:23.28 Ned: And because of all the data you’re moving. You’re probably going to want to co-locate them in the same Cloud and the same like Availability zone if you can you know as a corollary to the Multi-cloud Usage Multi-cloud tools are all the rage.

17:30.74 Chris: Right.

17:41.70 Ned: Ah, in particular security cost and governance tools are the top 3 for all organizations which makes sense using a different security tool for each cloud platform sounds like a nightmare and the same goes for cost tracking and governance.

17:57.78 Chris: Especially that last one, especially if you are in a regulated industry because 1 thing every every cloud can do everything right? Especially the big three five however you want to break it down. It’s a question of how.

18:01.44 Ned: Oh yeah I can’t.

18:16.20 Chris: And it’s a question of how can you prove that you’re doing it so expand that out to all of your apps across multiple clouds and if this is work that has to be done manually. You just gave your governance team like four months of work.

18:31.74 Ned: Yeah.

18:33.78 Chris: Because most of the time if you get audited. They’re not just going to be like oh okay, we believe you? no, they usually want that thing. What’s that thing called um, ah proof.

18:40.75 Ned: Auditors are not known for saying that.

18:45.66 Ned: Proof proof. Yeah I was going to say hot dogs.

18:52.99 Chris: Ah, it’s peanuts and Cracker Jacks know the season man.

18:56.10 Ned: Oh I do like Peanuts not so much on the Cracker Jack though. Hey yeah, the next big headline was all about money money money money. So speaking of tracking costs and money we’ve been told about a billion times that we are in an.

19:07.15 Chris: So.

19:16.45 Ned: Economically Uncertain Era so much so that tech companies have been laying off droves of workers and entire financial institutions have failed in a spectacular fashion Now How much of that is actually what’s happening in the economy and how much of that is Self-inflicted. That’s probably a debate for another time in a different podcast but it’s in the zeitgeist and people are believing it and if you believe it unfortunately in economic terms. It makes it So so. Does this mean that public Cloud spending has slowed or that the Cloud providers are Shrinking. No.

19:53.66 Chris: So don’t be fatuous Jeffrey.

19:57.97 Ned: Ah, ah so 45% of respondents said their cloud spend was higher than planned and another 45% said it was about the same as planned so that’s 90% saying we’re either on track or spending more than we meant to? ah.

20:15.82 Chris: Which is actually better than years past.

20:16.89 Ned: Yeah.

20:22.24 Ned: That’s true for from a historical perspective. It was usually even higher on the spending more than they planned. So we’re getting better at planning. Maybe now they could Of course.

20:26.65 Chris: Right.

20:35.97 Ned: Slashed their plan spend for 2022 and then overran it so we don’t necessarily know how 2022 s plan spend compares to 2021 or 2020. Ah, but we do know how things look from the cloud provider side. So this isn’t from the survey. But looking at the financial information Microsoft Azure grew by 25% last year Aws grew by 18 % both slightly smaller growth than in previous years but clearly consumption is still going up and if we go back to the survey 45% said the economic uncertainty. Would have little impact on cloud usage and spend which that’s I mean it’s not over 50% but that’s a lot saying yep, we’re just going to keep spending. We’ll lay off people because we don’t care about people but the cloud got spend on the cloud.

21:29.00 Chris: Well, it’s very quickly becoming effectively. Ah, the cost of doing business is the cost of whatever it takes to keep Aws environments happy.

21:38.24 Ned: Right? And that’s people no wait. That’s money. It’s money that keeps now despite the growth in spending organizations are still trying to get their arms around how much Cloud they are consuming and whether it’s efficient.

21:45.10 Chris: That’s the one. Yeah.

21:57.77 Ned: Optimizing existing use of cloud was the number 1 concern with a bullet when it came to cloud initiatives with 62% reporting it was their top priority now what I thought was interesting about their report is it says. The top priority is optimizing existing use of cloud and then in parentheses it says cost savings. But that’s not the actual name of the initiative. It’s about optimizing existing use of cloud which could mean spending less but it could also mean spending the same or even more. In an efficient manner.

22:33.89 Chris: Right? Because as we know it’s a utility model. You can very easily be more efficient in almost every case, especially silly things like you know the famous example that we always like to give is if you have a development environment turn it off at night. And turn it back on in the morning you just save 12 hours of runtime.

22:54.94 Ned: Interesting in the report they actually talk about the number of organizations that are using automation to do exactly that to turn things off when they’re not in use and it’s a shockingly low percentage of organizations are just doing that. Very simple thing that would. Help them save a lot of money So There’s definitely Ah, there’s definitely some improvements to be made. There. The other thing we got to keep in mind is again, we’re dealing with large companies and enterprises they tend to have big contracts with the Cloud providers with locked in spending commitments. So They’re not. Looking to spend less. They’re just looking to do more at the same cost.

23:36.46 Chris: Right? I bought 1000000 credits how do I deploy them in this environment to my maximum benefit.

23:46.86 Ned: Exactly and to help with that 72% of the organization said they have a dedicated finops team which you know everything has to be ops now. So in another era we would have called this something else. Ah. I made an observation on an older podcast of ours. There’s about seven years ago I want to say that the title of cloud cost analyst would be a real title and a dedicated position in most large enterprises and even though they’re calling it something else. It essentially is that. And 72 % of organizations have it.

24:24.90 Chris: And it’s ah you know a growing area. There’s O’reilly books about it and everything I know that’s how you know it’s serious.

24:25.15 Ned: Wo Woa Yeah I Wonder what they put on there in a kidna. Maybe oh and a Kidten It’s not a bird an now’s.

24:37.25 Chris: It’s a bird of some kind I don’t know birds I think it’s a bluebird look The book is all the way across the room I’m not going to go look at it right now can we please just move on.

24:43.72 Ned: The bluebird of happiness.

24:50.50 Ned: Ah, fair enough all right. Another big headline I know we say the big 3 or the big 5 or whatever. But really, it’s just the big 2 and it’s Aws versus azure any chance Google cloud is going to break into the top 2

25:06.90 Ned: No no, it won’t and there’s a couple reasons for that one is that is because advertising company Google’s main priorities are ads ads and wait. Let me check ads. So if you toss in the recent. Ai crisis where it seems like Microsoft is eating Google’s lunch in their own backyard with their own hamburger buns advertising company Google couldn’t give a fig about gcp at the moment. Sundar’s attentions are completely focused elsewhere and gcps. Revenue is basically arounding her.

25:46.73 Chris: Um, that whole situation continues to astonish me because there are people that make great use of Gcp and are big fans of it and if you’re using it appropriately and I think.

25:54.10 Ned: Yes.

26:01.93 Chris: 1 of the things about it is right now. It’s still making strides. It’s not at the same level as the other two but for specialized use cases and if you have 1 of them. You know who you are it works great. But Google’s just like nah.

26:15.41 Ned: Well if you just look at like I said percentage of revenue is not quite a rounding error but it’s not far off and Gcp failed point. But also if you look at Net Income from Gcp It’s still losing money.

26:23.74 Chris: Um, anything can be a rounding error if you’re terrible at math.

26:33.33 Chris: Sure.

26:34.91 Ned: So it’s not like it’s bringing in money for them either. It’s a cost center as far as they’re concerned so that doesn’t mean that Gcp is going away. But if you look at their capex investment in the platform. They’re never going to catch up to where azure and Aws are in terms of scope and scale. They just. They’re they’re being outspent by azure and Aws and I don’t see that stopping. Um, so at this point you basically have azure and aid with ws swapping the number 1 position back and forth I know Aws was.

26:57.19 Chris: Right? right.

27:08.60 Ned: In the lead for a long time but in the last couple of years. It’s actually started to flip blop a bit depending on who you talk to and how you measure it bla bla blah blah whatever so aws just barely nudged out azure in terms of adoption at 74% versus 71% overall but they’re neck and neck at the. Enterprise segment at 75% Gcp they’re sitting at a distant third of 43% and oracle cloud was actually the next one up at 20%. What.

27:41.12 Chris: Yeah I mean that doesn’t surprise me because that’s one thing I was almost going to bring up in the Multi-cloud section because Oracle Cloud has a very interesting opportunity to play because of the way that they can balance their licenses so there are.

27:56.11 Ned: True.

27:59.40 Chris: Ah, good amount of large companies that use oracle Cloud for database processing and pass that data back to some other cloud for presentation and record keeping and what have you.

28:12.26 Ned: That’s the exact model that they built up with azure and I was talking to a network architect at Oci and he made no bones about it like that is part of their strategy is to partner with other clouds and say we’ll provide this database backend where you can use your existing oracle licensing. But then you can you know, send that data out wherever you want and I think their egress costs with the partnership are either incredibly low or zero so that was another big selling point. There.

28:33.28 Chris: So.

28:40.86 Chris: So the move makes sense for them right? I mean you move into specialization of a product that has a lot of adherence at the enterprise level. Do what you can do best and just focus on that. So the fact that they’re running at 20% is probably. They’re probably.

28:50.84 Ned: Um, you have.

28:56.70 Ned: Um, yeah.

29:00.86 Chris: You know, cracking bottles of champagne.

29:02.90 Ned: Yeah, and I would be very happy with that number to be honest, an interesting data point was that smbs are overwhelmingly using Aws at 71% and azures down at 51% and Gcp at 28. Um, that gcp usage was a drop of 15% over the previous year. So basically if you’re an smb. You’re probably using Aws or maybe azure and you may have just left Gcp that was surprising so I guess that consolidation thing might actually be happening.

29:37.46 Chris: So right.

29:37.75 Ned: Just not back on-prem ah in terms of what folks are actually running on the cloud platforms. It’s still mostly virtual machines as this tradition but um platform as a service does seem to be growing especially around databases and data warehouses because it turns out. Running databases whether they’re Sql or nosql is a huge pain in the ass and it is way easier to let the cloud provider. Do it for you in a similar vein data warehouses require ridiculous amounts of storage and occasional bursts of compute. So cloud really is the perfect fit for them and then you have something like snowflake which is basically providing that as a service across multiple clouds with the consistent interface. So I don’t know how that’s not really captured in this report. But.

30:14.77 Chris: Right? so.

30:30.60 Ned: That’s certainly an option for anybody who wants to go the snowflake route.

30:32.79 Chris: But is that an app or a multi-cloud.

30:36.21 Ned: Yes, I’m not going to say the word I’m not going to say it because we’re already talked about how I don’t like that term and I’m not going to say it anyway get out, get.

30:46.77 Chris: So you mean the Cloud that is super.

30:54.88 Ned: And this will be the final podcast with Chris I mean oh so the last thing I want to focus on in the report was the role of private cloud turns out that is a thing. Um.

31:00.35 Chris: I’ve heard that before.

31:11.95 Ned: And I heard an interesting statistic that came out of the most recent report from Amazon that Angie Jassy did and he was talking about Aws and just the the market potential for aws and he pulled out a statistic that only 10% of I t spend is on public cloud which means 90% is on it not necessarily on-prem but other things which seems to indicate to me that there’s still a ton of applications running on-prem.

31:42.62 Chris: Yeah, yeah I mean I I imagine a lot of that is just momentum. They’re going to run on-prem until the on-prem machines don’t run anymore. So.

31:54.40 Ned: Well not so fast because we can replace those with private cloud instances of public cloud. Um, so while repatriation is still not a significant force the idea of running a private instance of the cloud. Is attractive to some organizations and out of all the private cloud options and I was surprised by this Microsoft Azure stack ranked first with 41% of respondents currently running workloads on it. Yeah, my eyebrows also went It’s like what amazingly okay, you’d think number 2 would be Vmware or you’d think number one would be vmware but no a ws outposts was number 2 at 31%

32:28.45 Chris: That’s lot.

32:37.45 Chris: Right? right.

32:44.49 Ned: And Vmware vsphere slash vcenter was third at 28% and I I don’t know what to say about that.

32:53.22 Chris: That’s got I mean that probably falls into the discussion of definition. Maybe some people maybe some respondents just didn’t consider vsphere vcenter as a cloud.

32:56.10 Ned: Yes. Yeah I would love to see the actual questions that were asked because I don’t know how they worded it does having a v spear environment in and of itself mean you have a private cloud or do you need something like Vmware’s cloud foundation sitting on top of that to qualify.

33:08.57 Chris: Right? but.

33:20.84 Ned: So I haven’t actually seen the questions so I don’t know how that portion was worded. But yeah, apparently last year in 2022 azure stack was also in the lead and Vmware was sitting at number two. So azure stack’s been winning for at least 2 years

33:36.50 Chris: And to be fair, they were first.

33:41.33 Ned: That’s true. The the announcement of azure stack goes back to like 2016 or something I’m trying to remember exact because they announced it at ignite and I think it was 2016 and then it was like a product you could actually buy within the next year but the thing to understand about azure stack is it’s not just a single product anymore. It’s actually a family of products so there’s the original azure stack product which is now azure stack hub and that’s the like fully managed we ship you the hardware and we help manage it. It’s a black box. Running in your data center kind of like the way that outposts works and then there’s azure stack Hci and azure stack edge. So the survey has no differentiation between which of those products is being used, but my guess is the majority are running azure stack hci. Which is not a managed cloud product like outposts but more like an hci solution like new tanics speaking of which new tanics isn’t even on the list of options. Yeah burn so they’re not a cloud apparently I guess I you could make the argument there.

34:46.21 Chris: Ouch.

34:53.35 Ned: So I thought that was interesting. Also Google Anthos is sitting at 17% and Openstack was at 11% but oddly not open shift which. I’d assume anyone that’s running openstack from the survey is probably running the red hat flavor with openshift on top of it. But you know, maybe you’re running your own instance of openstack you dareed devil you there are it didn’t say anything if it had been a lot of telecoms in the survey data. And the respondents then I would see I could see a lot of them running their own version of openstack because it has been tuned for telcos in the last few years but yeah I’m guessing a lot of them are just running red hats open stack with openshift on top of it.

35:31.92 Chris: Right? yeah.

35:39.23 Chris: Yeah, and that’s where the fact that the survey only had but was it 750 respondents um if you miss 1 or 2 people running Openstack. You missed.

35:43.75 Ned: Right.

35:52.61 Chris: Ah, large percentage of the people running openstack I mean openstack shift or /shiftspecialized very specialized installations and deployments and they probably don’t necessarily advertise all that much anyway. But if you miss 1 or 2 of those organizations.

35:57.44 Ned: Yes.

36:06.23 Ned: Oh.

36:11.73 Chris: It’s going to significantly shift that number when the ah when the ah n of this survey is so small.

36:13.17 Ned: True. Yeah, ultimately private cloud continues to be a pretty poorly defined mess. But it’s a mess that is growing in size and scope and Microsoft appears to be leading the conversation and vmware is definitively losing ground. So that doesn’t bode well for their future. Whether as a broadcom property or left to their own devices which seems increasingly more likely.

36:44.44 Chris: Well and I do wonder how much that situation and most importantly, the uncertainty around that situation is causing people to consider any other option like rather than reup with Vmware. We don’t know what’s going to happen. So let’s look at azure stack or.

37:01.87 Ned: I think that’s exactly that’s exactly what’s happening is you know they in Broadcom ah Vmware already felt like it was in decline for a while and then when Broadcom announced their acquisition attention in like April of last year I think

37:04.44 Chris: Let’s just go. Yeah, okay.

37:19.82 Ned: Anybody who was looking to buy New Private Cloud Hardware went so azure stack. How about that.

37:24.50 Chris: Right? Or at the very least they just were like well we’re not going to risk it so vmware is no longer on the table.

37:31.75 Ned: Yeah, so I guess in terms of surprising things in the report to me that might have been the most surprising detail was the decline of vmware in the private data center but again without seeing the actual questions. It’s It’s hard to know it. How precise that is. Ah yeah, definitely recommend reading the report if you have some time. It’s It’s a lot of pretty pictures and not too much text and like I said what we’ll include a link in the show notes. Let’s move on to lightning round.

37:48.93 Chris: Right? right.

38:05.60 Chris: Let’s do that Google ceo warns about unknown impacts of Ai pitches some decent ideas.

38:16.12 Ned: Um.

38:16.51 Chris: Sundar pachai Ceo of advertising company Google had some interesting things to say about the future of Ai in an interview on 60 minutes this past weekend. He basically stated that the world will be thoroughly I aified in a timeframe of quote five to ten years and that every job you can think of is going to be affected by it. Probably true. He did go a little doom and gloom basically stating that there are going to be negative consequences of Ai true.

38:49.99 Ned: Yeah.

38:53.20 Chris: Particularly in the areas of disinformation or bad information or fake news and the like permeating society in a hurry fun. He also said that society needs to adapt with regulations and laws etc.

39:03.33 Ned: Um, but.

39:09.50 Chris: Google has released a document outlining recommendations for regulating Ai which I didn’t read because it sounds boring but basically it will outline governmental and societal best practices around ai he’s trying to make it a full societal conversation. Saying it’s not just for one company to decide and quote the development of this needs to include not just engineers but social scientists ethicists philosophers and so on which true encouraging words at least. Especially from somebody who is trying to sell one of these things.

39:47.40 Ned: Now The fact that they are behind other movers in the market not saying that has informed his opinion or how he wants to tap the brakes on things but might have code Whisperer is the creepiest.

39:59.75 Chris: I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.

40:06.11 Ned: Aws product name yet like I’m mildly uncomfortable just saying it I don’t want Aws whispering to my code cooing at it soothing it allaying its fears I want my code unruly riddled with bugs and anxiety just like.

40:25.31 Chris: And brains.

40:25.53 Ned: Me yes, basically Cw wow even its initials are the same as content warning. Anyway, it’s Aws’s answer to Github Copilot the preview was launched last year and now as of April. Thirteenth. The product is generally available among the supported Ides is bs code in tej and pie charm and a whole host of others. You don’t even need to install the extension locally. You can simply fire up a remote ide in cloud 9 or awslamda console cw is also able to flag code that is insecure biased. Whatever that means or looks like open source training data when it makes a suggestion you can have it provide more context like. The repository url and license associated with the suggested code if applicable this feature alone is worth focusing on a big point of contention with Copilot was how it borrowed stole code without attribution. It appears that the aws code whisperer team is trying to do better. By borrowing and citing in a way that is transparent code whisperer is available for free to individual users who can sign up with just an email. You don’t even need an Aws account the primary difference between the free and paid tier is the number of supported security scans and license and policy policy management.

41:58.57 Ned: By the terrible name I plan to go code give code Whisperer a whirl.

42:05.34 Chris: Qualcomm designing new isim which was meant to replace esims which I didn’t know needed replacing. Okay so cell phone magic the sim.

42:12.44 Ned: Um, okay okay.

42:20.62 Chris: Is a little card that you used to stick into the side of your cell phone and it would make the cell phone work. There’s more to it than that. Not really that much. You got a new phone super duper take the sim out of the old phone put it in the new phone done. All of this convenience and flexibility was of course too much for cell phone companies though and in 2017 esyms were introduced these operate in a very similar fashion to a regular sim except it’s permanently soldered to your device’s motherboard not soldiered mind you. Thank you very much for that helpful. Hint auto correct soldered advantages because this is inside the phone it helps with waterproofing etc, low open slots, etc. Disadvantages. They are a pain and when they fail. They fail hard anyone who has had a change in service say Verizon to at and t or whatever with a phone that uses an esym that did not go perfectly knows what I mean now Qualcomm.

43:16.41 Ned: Um, and.

43:32.94 Chris: Designers of the super common snapdragon line of device cpus is creating a new version of this thing called an isim the I standing for integrated they’re making it even smaller and good lord.

43:44.49 Ned: Ah.

43:49.37 Chris: Thing is one Millimeter square and it is a part of the sock now this they tell us will make isims quote 98% smaller sure 50% cheaper aha and use up to 70% less power then.

44:01.77 Ned: Ah.

44:08.40 Chris: Esyms all of which sounds pretty good. No word yet on whether Qualcomm will be helping with the nightmare that is and remains over the internet provisioning.

44:10.25 Ned: Yeah.

44:18.30 Ned: Yeah, and one has to wonder how much energy the e sim was actually using to begin with. But anyway alas intel server I barely knew you wait what Intel makes servers. And therein lies the problem. Our friend Pat Gelsinger over at Intel is in a bit of a restructuring fervor with a goal to streamline the company and get it back on track as part of their idm 2 dot o strategy as part of that strategy. Pat has made the decision to shutter the data center solutions group within Intel who were responsible for creating server designs and reference architectures for data center customers. If you think of server manufacturers intel is certainly not the first to come to mind. Despite providing so many of the components inside other vendor systems as Intel narrows its focus. It has been shedding those components with the end of optane storage and the sale of its naned flash tech to sk hynix dropping the server product group entirely was kind of the next logical step. Will it be enough to stem the tide or or more cuts in the future I suspect it will be the latter as Intel follows Hpe’s model of cutting until you’re profitable the data center and ai group that Dcg was part of.

45:43.77 Ned: Was the second biggest loser in 2022 down 15% year over year the biggest loser was the client computing group down 23% year over year and if I were in that group I’d be feeling a bit twitchy at the moment.

46:00.63 Chris: Apple’s India iphone plants put together $7000000000 worth of phones last year talk about going in a hurry Apple now produces roughly 7% of its iphones in India.

46:06.10 Ned: Wow.

46:15.47 Chris: Which is up from the 1% they produced the year before if you’re doing the math at home. That’s like a 2000% increase in just twelve months Apple has been working to diversify its manufacturing footprint overall with Mac Mini’s being built in Malaysia for a few years now ah number of plants planned all over Southeast Asia and Brazil for other products such as airpods and ipads. They actually also even do some simpler products in Ireland Vietnam will be getting more and more business particularly for the Macbook lineup. And the list continues still with the iphone making up such a significant part of Apple’s bottom line this frankly staggering increase in manufacturing in India is important Apple seems to be showing no signs of slowing down. With some analysts predicting 25% of iphones being being built in India as soon as 2025. Also one of the companies that’s in on the indian partnership is called Pegatron which is just an awesome name for a company. Regardless of what they produce more companies should aspire to be named as awesomely. So.

47:33.77 Ned: I agree here I am king of all cooper and emperor of Ibm did you know you can just like straight up lie on Linkedin horrifying I know.

47:47.21 Chris: I.

47:50.50 Ned: Ah, you can claim to have worked for whatever company you want in whatever position you’d like and there is nothing nothing that verifies it aside from the fear of being caught There are no controls in place to validate claims made in your educational or employment history. Of course. And your recruiter or hr department worth their salt would verify your claims unfortunately many recruiters and hiring managers are on a low sodium diet Microsoft is trying to remedy this shortcoming by rolling out their verified id tool for employers and employees alike. Verified id is part of the Microsoft Intra group of products a vast and unknowable swath of loosely related identity things verified id uses decentralized identity as its operational model. Allowing companies to cryptographically sign digital credentials for their employees. The sign credentials live with the employee and then they can be added to their Linkedin profile and will appear with a blue check Mark and the best part unlike the blue Mark of the Twitter beast. This service appears to be entirely free of charge for Linkedin users if you want to know more about decentralized identities check out episode 26 of chaos lever where I went into exhaustive detail. Ah, at least I was exhausted by the end and hey I’ll do it.

49:18.49 Ned: Thanks for listening or something I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end so congratulations. Do you friend you accomplished something today now you can indulge your most hedonistic tendencies in an orgy of salacious celebration because life is short and death comes for us all you’ve earned it. You can find me or Chris on Twitter at ned 1313 and at hayner 80 respectively or follow the show at chaos underscore lever if that’s the kind of thing you’re into show notes are available at chaoslever.com if you like reading things which you shouldn’t but you could also sign up for our newsletter and read other things. We’ll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us ta-ta for now.

49:57.44 Chris: Um, I Wonder if there’s a way to make the newsletter audio.

50:03.60 Ned: A I hi ya I I carrumba. Ah.