Welcome to episode 257 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, Ryan, and Jonathan are in the barnyard bringing you the latest news, which this week is really just Meta’s release of Llama 3. Seriously. That’s every announcement this week. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

• Meta Llama says no Drama
• No Meta Prob-llama
• Keep Calm and Llama on
• Redis did not embrace the Llama MK
• The bedrock of good AI is built on Llamas
• The CloudPod announces support for Llama3 since everyone else was doing it
• Llama3, better know as Llama Llama Llama
• The Cloud Pod now known as the LLMPod
• Cloud Pod is considering changing its name to LlamaPod
• Unlike WinAMP nothing whips the llamas ass

01:27 Valkey is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

• Valkey has continued to rack up support from AWS, Ericsson, Google, Oracle and Verizon initially, to now being joined by Alibaba, Aiven, Heroku and Percona backing Valkey as well.
• Numerous blog posts have come out touting Valkey adoption.
• I’m not sure this whole thing is working out as well as Redis CEO Rowan Trollope had hoped.

03:26 Introducing Meta Llama 3: The most capable openly available LLM to date

• Meta has launched Llama 3, the next generation of their state-of-the-art open source large language model.
• Llama 3 will be available on AWS, Databricks, GCP, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, Nvidia NIM, and Snowflake with support from hardware platforms offered by AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm
• Includes new trust and safety tools such as Llama Guard 2, Code Shield and Cybersec eval 2
• They plan to introduce new capabilities, including longer context windows, additional model sizes and enhanced performance.
• The first two models from Meta Lama3 are the 8B and 70B parameter variants that can support a broad range of use cases.
• Meta shared some benchmarks against Gemma 7B and Mistral 7B vs the Lama 3 8B models and showed improvements across all major benchmarks. Including Math with Gemma 7b doing 12.2 vs 30 with Llama 3
• It had highly comparable performance with the 70B model against Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude 3 Sonnet scoring within a few points of most of the other scores.
• Jonathan recommends using LM Studio to get start playing around with LLMS, which you can find at https://lmstudio.ai/

04:42 Jonathan – “Isn’t it funny how you go from an 8 billion parameter model to a 70 billion parameter model but nothing in between? Like you would have thought there would be some kind of like, some middle ground maybe? But, uh, but… No. But, um, I’ve been playing with the, um, 8 billion parameter model at home and it’s absolutely amazing. It blows everything else out of the water that IR

Welcome to episode 256 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin and Matthew are here this week to catch you up on all the news you may have missed while Google Next was going on. We’ve got all the latest news on the custom silicon hot war that’s developing, some secret sync, drama between HashiCorp and OpenTofu, and one more Google Next recap – plus much more in today’s episode. Welcome to the Cloud!

• I have a Google Next sized hangover
• Claude’s Magnificent Opus now on AWS
• US-EAST-1 Gets called Reliable; how insulting
• The cloud pod flies on a g6

Today, we get caught up on the other Clouds from last week, and other news (besides Google, that is.) Buckle up.

04:11 OpenTofu Project Denies HashiCorp’s Allegations of Code Theft

• After our news cutoff before Google Next, Hashicorp issued a strongly worded Cease and Desist letter to the OpenTofu project, accusing that the project has “repeatedly taken code Hashi provided under the BSL and used it in a manner that violates those license terms and Hashi’s intellectual properties.”
• It notes that in some instances, OpenTofu has incorrectly re-labeled Hashicorp’s code to make it appear as if it was made available by Hashi, originally under a different license.
• Hashi gave them until April 10th to remove any allegedly copied code from the OpenTofu repo, threatening litigation if the project failed to do so.
• OpenTofu struck back – and they came with receipts!
• They deny that any BSL licensed code was incorporated into the OpenTofu repo, and that any code they copied came from the MPL-Licensed version of terraform.
• “The OpenTofu team vehemently disagrees with any suggestions that it misappropriated, mis-sourced or misused Hashi’s BSL code. All such statements have zero basis in facts” — Open Tofu Team
• OpenTofu showed how the code they accused was lifted from the BSL code, was actually in the MPL version, and then copied into the BSL version from an older version by a Hashi Engineer.
• Anticipating third party contributions might submit BSL terraform code unwittingly or otherwise, OpenTofu instituted a “taint team” to compare Terraform and Open Tofu Pull requests.
• If the PR is found to be in breach of intellectual property rights, the pull request is closed and the contributor is closed from working on that area of the code in the future.
• Matt Asay, (from Mongo) writing for Infoworld, dropped a hit piece when the C&D was filed, but then issued a retraction on his opinion after reviewing the documents from the OpenTofu team.

06:32 Matthew – “It’s gonna be inte

Welcome to episode 255 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are here to tackle the aftermath of Google Next. Whether you were there or not, sit back, relax, and let the guys dissect each day’s keynote and the major announcements.

How About Some AI?

“The New Way to Cloud” is a Terrible TagLine (and is what happens when you let AI do your copy)

Welcome Google Cloud Next Where There is No Cloud, Just AI

Ok Google, did your phone go off?

For 100 dollars, guess how many AI stories Google Has This Week

From Search to Skynet: Google Cloud Next’s Descent into AI Madness

‘Next’ Up from Google – AI!

Have Some Conference with Your AI

We’re jumping right into GCP this week, so we can talk about all things Google Next.

01:44 FIrst impressions: Vegas > Moscone, so take that Vegas.

• Both Ryan and Justin agree that Vegas is much better than the Mosconoe center in San Francisco for Google Next
• The Sessions were well organized, but Ryan is a little tired from walking back and forth between them. Exercise is tiring! \
• Vegas infrastructure was well utilized, something Amazon didn’t do as well.
• Folks staying at area hotels that *weren’t* Mandalay Bay had some issues with trying to get onto / off property at the beginning and end of the day.
• Free coffee is still available. *If you can find it.
• Expo hall felt cramped

08:22 Thoughts on the Keynote Address

Note: Not enough space in the arena for keynotes; the arena holds approx. 12k; numbers released by Google say there were 30k in attendance.

• Thomas Kurian kicked off the keynote, introduced their new tagline “The New Way to Cloud”
• Sundar: Months can feel like decades in the cloud… WORD.
• 36B revenue run rate
• Kurian did a rapid fire announcement of all the things coming – which required Justin to rewatch just to get them all.
  • A3 Mega Nvidia H100 GPUs
  • Nvidia GB200 NVL72 (in early 2025
  • TPU v5p GA
  • Hyperdisk ML for Inference
  • Cloud Storage Fuse Caching GA
  • Parallel Store Caching
  • AI Hypercomputer
  • Dynamic Workload Scheduler
  • Nvidia GPU Support for GDC Google Distributed Cloud
  • GKE Enterprise for GDC
  • AI Models on GDC
  • Vector Search on GDC
  • Vertex AI Solutions with GDC
  • Secret and Top Secret Accreditations