Welcome to episode 243 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a bit of a slow new week, but we’re not hitting the snooze button! This week Justin, Matthew and Ryan are discussing more changes over at Broadcom after VMware buyout last year, HPE buying out Juniper Networks, why all the venture capital money seems to be going into trying to take down Nvidia, and changes to WHOIS lookup over at AWS certificate manager. Plus we’ll find out exactly what that special something is that makes Justin the perfect executive. 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• 📰New Years Happened and there is no Good New News 
• 🔐The Cloud Pod Was Always Security Challenged 
• 💸Azure Shows the Health of Their Business by Springing into Discounts 
• ⚙️Network Gear Powers AI – Who Knew? 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very niche market of cloud engineers? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel. 

Follow Up

01:48 More news from Broadcom – and this time they’re coming after the cloud.  Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers 

• Remember in November when Broadcom bought VMware for $61 billion dollars? Well, the reorganization from that purchase is continuing. 
• Broadcom is reportedly ditching the majority of their VMware Cloud Service Providers as part of the shakeup of the partner program. 
• Notable companies in the CSP program include Oracle, Azure, Rackspace, and Google. These larger companies most likely won’t be impacted (yet.)
• It’s suspected that they will get moved over to a new partner program, but Broadcom is culling it down to only the largest partners to remain in the program.
• There are lots of smaller cloud players who are in the CSP who will likely be impacted and should keep an eye on this over the next few months. 
  • https://cloud.vmware.com/providers/search-result 
• It’s a bad look for Broadcom, as they told the EU that acquiring VMware would increase competition in the cloud space – but cutting partners out of the program seems to be a consolidation to me. 

03:29  📢 Ryan – “I wonder if this is just going to be like new sales or something. Cause that seems very short notice if you’re on VMware as on one of these smaller cloud providers, that seems incredibly risky.”

03:45  📢 Matthew – “I feel like they have to have something lined up. Or let me rephrase that. I would assume slash hope they have something lined up because otherwise they’re gonna really piss off a lot of people.”

General News

04:40 Hewlett Packard Enterprise buying Juniper Networks in deal valued at about $14 billion

• HPE is buying Juniper Networks in an all cash deal valued at $14B, which will double the HPE networking business.
• HPE will be paying $40 per share, prior day close was 30.19.
• The transaction will strengthen HPE’s position at the nexus of accelerating macro-AI trends, expand their total addressable market, and drive further innovation for customers as we help bridge the AI-Native and CLoud native worlds, while also generating significant value for shareholders. 
• Juniper CEO Rami Rahim will lead the combined HPE networking business. 
• The deal should close late 2024 or early 2025 – after approval from shareholders and regulators. 
  • Monopoly? What monopoly? We don’t see any monopolies. 

06:47 📢 Ryan – “I will say, I hope HPE doesn’t sort of like torch Juniper. I do like their access system. They were the first sort of big network provider to offer API-driven interactions with their network gear. And overall, they’ve been sort of at the forefront in automation space.”

AI is Going Great (or how ML Makes all Its Money)

11:21 The Twelve Startups Battling For a Slice of Nvidia’s Pie 

• 12 startups are vying to take down the mighty Nvidia, the maker of GPUs for the AI boom. 
• In August there were 8 and now there are 12, so it’s clearly a big investment area for the VCs and startups.
• We’ve heard of 3 of them… and the one I’ve heard the most about was Grok because of the issues with X naming their AI Grok. 
• Lots of companies we’ve never heard of. We’ll see which ones can actually take on Nvidia.
• DId you make money on Nvidia stock? We didn’t. Back to day jobs. 

AWS

13:16 AWS Accounts discontinues the use of security challenge questions

• Starting January 2024, AWS accounts will no longer support security challenge questions for accounts that have not already enabled them. 
  • This will remove the option completely. 
• In general I hate security challenge questions. 
• They’ve decided this is a terrible model, (because it is) and can be easily phished. 
• We’re not sad to see them go. 

14:03 📢 Ryan – “Because of their risk of exploitation by phishing and just internet research, I don’t answer those sensibly. And so I have algorithms that I apply for different types of questions, so I can sort of figure out what I would have answered based off of criteria, but it’s not relevant to the actual questions. Good luck with that.”

16:48 AWS Certificate Manager will discontinue WHOIS lookup for email-validated certificates 

• Starting June 2024, ACM will no longer send domain validation emails by using WHOIS lookup for new email-validated certificates that you request.  
  • THANK GOODNESS. 
• Starting October 2024, ACM will no longer send domain validation emails to mailboxes associated with WHOIS lookup for renewal of existing email-validated certificates.  
• They will, however, continue to send validation emails to the five common system addresses for the requested domain. 
  • The common system addresses? Glad you asked. They include administrator, hostmaster, postmaster, webmaster, and admin.  
• Our recommendation for everyone: just move to DNS.

19:39 📢 Matthew – “It still baffles me that Azure doesn’t have nearly as good of a comparable service to ACM. Like they have it, but it doesn’t work as well. Like you can’t use it for all the managed services.”

22:11 AWS Cancels Serverless Postgres Service That Scales to Zero 

• AWS has notified customers of its Amazon Aurora Serverless V1 service that it will cease supporting the offering at the end of 2024. 
• Of course they have already released the V2 version, but it has one major difference: it can’t scale to 0. 
• V1 is lacking several features of V2 including Replicas, logical replication and global databases that can support millions of writes per second. 
• We’re a little sad about this one; we like the option of having one that scales to zero. 
  • Do keep that in mind re your monthly bill. The minimum will be around $50. 

23:20 📢 Ryan – “I can attest to the notifications because for all of my like sort of internal development that I’ve done, I usually, this is where I start for any kind of database that’s, you know, gonna be Postgres or related. And so like, there’s several of mine that are like this. And I kind of really wish they were sort of keeping this as their own thing, versus sort of spinning it off into V2 with all the replication because I don’t really want any of those features. I just want the scale to zero so that I can continue to use this for development purposes.”

25:22 📢 Justin – “Yeah. And it’s, I just don’t think it’s, I think, cause they think it’s network magic. And it’s like, no, DNS is not that magical. Like it’s a very simple directory service. You have to think about it as a directory service. Like if you were moving to a new phone, would you move the number, or would you get a new one every time? It’s like, oh, I moved the number. Then why aren’t you moving the number? That’s the DNS entry.”

Azure

26:15  Azure Spring Apps Enterprise is now eligible for Azure savings plan for compute 

• Azure Spring Apps enterprise Plan is now eligible for Savings Plan for Compute.

This can save you 20% for one year, or 47% for three years compared to pay as you go pricing. Woohoo! 

26:57 📢  Ryan – “If you have to have a spring app and which if you do, you’re probably already invested in the entire framework and then all the patterns that come along with it, so kind of neat. And then, uh, yeah, you never want to touch that code again, which you have already basically said by it still being a spring in the spring framework. So savings plans. Perfect. I like it.”

Closing

And that is the week in the cloud! Just a reminder – if you’re interested in joining us as a sponsor, let us know! Check out our website, the home of the Cloud Pod where you can join our newsletter, slack team, send feedback or ask questions at theCloud Pod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #theCloud Pod