Low Code meets Professional Developers

Eyal Solomon (@EyalSolomo44643, CEO/Founder of @lunardevapi) talks about integrating, controlling, and observability into 3rd party APIs and services. We discuss the trade-offs of integrating a 3rd party API and how it impacts simplicity and potential loss of insight.

SHOW: 803

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• CloudZero provides immediate and ongoing savings with 100% visibility into your total cloud spend

SHOW NOTES:

• Lunar.dev (homepage)
• Lunar.dev blog
• Lunar.dev on TechCrunch

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before diving into today’s discussion, tell us a little about your background.

Topic 2 - Controlling 3rd party APIs is increasingly becoming an issue for many organizations. As the world gets built on APIs, consumption of another company's APIs to ingest services is critical. But, this leads to all sorts of control and potentially cost issues. Please give everyone an introduction to the problem.

Topic 3 - Does this mean 3rd Party APIs are a tradeoff? Yes, you might be able to integrate APIs for a payment system for instance quickly, or maybe the latest AI SaaS service, but in doing so won’t an organization potentially lose oversight? Where do most organizations run into problems first? This reminds me of the early days of cloud and people leaving instances running and then getting huge bills and not knowing until it was too late. Is this similar?

Topic 4 - We’ve seen a lot of products and companies tackling the issue of internal company APIs, but not 3rd party APIs. Once an organization determines they have a problem, maybe an observability problem, perhaps a cost problem, maybe a compliance issue, etc. how would they get started gaining API observability and control in their org? 

Topic 5 - Is this a solution that sits in traffic flow? Does this potentially introduce latency? Is this almost like a WAF for 3rd party APIs? What kinds of policies or restrictions can be put in place?

Topic 6 - What are some of the most common use cases you’ve seen and how do you solve them? What business decisions have to be made if they decide to restrict access in some way?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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2024 is the year of business accountability across all aspects of the software industry. This means that all variations of the free tier are going away in one way or another. 

SHOW: 802

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• CloudZero provides immediate and ongoing savings with 100% visibility into your total cloud spend

SHOW NOTES:

• Linkerd changes publishing model of images
• PlanetScale discontinues Free Tier (“Hobby”) of service

WHY DID THE FREE TIER(S) EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE?

• Why do free tiers exist? Marketing awareness, experimentation, 
• Why is talking about making money, or profitability considered taboo?
• Why do we reconcile the love of employees and the hatred of paying for software?

WHAT ARE THE TRADE-OFFS WHEN THE FREE TIER GOES AWAY?

• Are free tiers and free open source software the same thing?
• Are “wants” and “value” the same thing? 
• What should be free in the software world? 
• Should end-users want the backers of a project or company to be successful?
• Will VCs continue to back companies that have free tiers, or companies that spend on marketing, or is the game needing new (undefined) rules? 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
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Welcome to the "second monthly" Cloud News of the Month. Aaron and Brian discuss the biggest tech stories and five trends from February 2024.

SHOW: 801

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• CloudZero provides immediate and ongoing savings with 100% visibility into your total cloud spend

SHOW NOTES:

• LINKS TO ALL THE ARTICLES FOR FEB 2024 CLOUD NEWS HERE

Segments Covered in the Show:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues - Speed Round
• Trend 1 - Microsoft is branching out from just OpenAI as a partner, as they should
• Trend 2 - Selling Customer Data for AI training is Suddenly a Revenue Stream (and a source for lawsuits if it isn’t)
• Trend 3 - Chips are cool again - Everyone wants to go after NVIDIA, including NVIDIA
• Trend 4 - Google has more downs than ups - Will AI eat the search business?
• Trend 5 - Hugging Face leads OSS alternative AI but also has bad actors

FEEDBACK?

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Lots of people want to turn their hobby or passion into a money-making activity, or as the kids call it “a side hustle”. Let’s explore how to do it, and some mistakes to avoid. 

SHOW: 800

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• CloudZero provides immediate and ongoing savings with 100% visibility into your total cloud spend

SHOW NOTES:

SO YOU WANT TO MAKE MORE MONEY?

• When do you decide to make more money? 
• Is anyone willing to give you money? Is it profitable money?

HOW MUCH MORE ARE YOU WILLING TO WORK?

• Why are you doing this? What’s the goal? Is there a goal? 
• Are you doing this with anyone else? Are you aligned? Always aligned? 
• Are you willing to put in the hours? Does anyone else care about your hours?
• How much are you willing to invest in order to learn?
• Are you OK with failing?
• Do you understand how people make money in your niche?
• How will you address conflicts of interest? Where do those come from? Do they matter?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
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Ronald McCollum (@RonaldMcCollam, Solutions Engineering @GrafanaLabs) talks about updates in the observability space and learning more about Grafana and data visualization.

SHOW: 799

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• Find "Breaking Analysis Podcast with Dave Vellante" on Apple, Google and Spotify
• Keep up to date with Enterprise Tech with theCUBE
• Learn More About Azure Offerings : Learn more about Azure Migrate and Modernize & Azure Innovate!
• Azure Free Cloud Resource Kit : Step-by-step guidance, resources and expert advice, from 

SHOW NOTES:

• Grafana (homepage)
• Getting Started with Grafana Book by Ronald

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before diving into today’s discussion, tell us a little about your background.

Topic 2 - We last talked about Grafana back in 2019 and 2020. Observability continues to be a hot topic, how are you seeing the open-source community and open-source tools evolve in this space?

Topic 3 - We always hear about Grafana as a visualization tool. Grafana AND something (Grafana and Prometheus, Grafana and (insert logging/observability tool here). Is that still a fair assessment? Where does Grafana fit in a modern cloud-native observability stack these days?

Topic 4 - When you are speaking to folks out there, where does the data visualization story resonate the most in the organization, and does it become at times political and cultural (meaning cultural changes need to happen)? There can be an ROI/Business case to be made; developers integrations that will need to happen, SRE operations changes, etc. How do you get something that likely spans many different parts of the organization on board?

Topic 5 - Anytime I think about observability I think in two stages. Identification of the problem and resolution of the problem. Some tools address one or the other, and some attempt to do both. Where does Grafana fit on this continuum?

Topic 6 - I have to ask the AI question. How has AI changed or in your opinion will change observability and visualization in the near future?

Topic 7 - You’ve literally written the book on Grafana so this is a softball question. For those who are interested, how would you recommend they get started with Grafana

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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If you have to build a keynote presentation, or any presentation for a large audience, what are the key areas to focus on? Here’s some tips on story-telling and audience engagement.

SHOW: 798

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• CloudZero provides immediate and ongoing savings with 100% visibility into your total cloud spend

SHOW NOTES:

BUILDING THE OVERALL STORY

• Think of your presentation as a story. It can be hero/villian, preacher approach (tell, tell, tell), an analogy, partially educational. Lots of different approaches work. 
• Put yourself in the audience’s shoes. Who are they? Would they want to hear your story?
• What does the audience get out of your talk? 

THE KEY AREAS TO FOCUS ON

• Are you bringing the right level of energy for the room? Are you educating, or motivating, or introducing new ideas?
• Are you bringing empathy for your audience, or are you trying to portray confidence/leadership?
• Are you at the right level for the audience? Technical vs. Business. Prior knowledge required? What about a mixed audience?
• How are you interacting with the audience? Do they provide any feedback (raising hands, laughing at jokes, applause, etc.)?
• Plan for 2-3 minutes per slide. Try not to waste any slides. 
• If you’re introducing new ideas, don’t make people listen AND read at the same time. Keep the visual simple and easy to view. 
• “Sell” the important parts. Emphasize them. Alter the pace to ensure people get it. 
• Use data (stats, graphs, charts) that make concepts easier to understand, or better emphasized.
• Use comparisons - especially with new ideas. 
• Demonstrations can be valuable, but make sure it’s at the right level for the audience - and that it works (pre-recorded is an option)

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
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Shreya Rajpal (@ShreyaR, CEO @guardrails_ai ) talks about the need to provide guardrails and validation of LLM’s, along with common use cases and Guardrail AI’s new Hub.

SHOW: 797

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• Learn More About Azure Offerings : Learn more about Azure Migrate and Modernize & Azure Innovate!
• Azure Free Cloud Resource Kit : Step-by-step guidance, resources and expert advice, from migration to innovation.CloudZero – Cloud Cost Visibility and Savings
• Find "Breaking Analysis Podcast with Dave Vellante" on Apple, Google and Spotify
• Keep up to date with Enterprise Tech with theCUBE

SHOW NOTES:

• Guardrails AI (homepage)
• Guardrails AI Hub
• Guardrails AI GitHub
• Guardrails AI Discord
• Shreya on TWIML podcast
• Guardrails AI on TechCrunch

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we dive into today’s discussion, tell us a little bit about your background.

Topic 2 - Our topic today is the validation and accuracy of AI with guardrails. Let’s start with the why… Why do we need guardrails for LLMs today?

Topic 3 - Where and how do you control (maybe validate is a better word) outputs from LLM’s today? What are your thoughts on the best way to validate outputs?

Topic 4 - Will this workflow work with both closed-source (ChatGPT) and opensource (Llama2) models? Would this process apply to training/fine-tuning or more for inference? Would this potentially replace humans in the loop that we see today or is this completely different?

Topic 5 - What are some of the most common early use cases and practical examples? PII detection comes to mind, violation of ethics or laws, off-topic/out of scope, or simply just something the model isn’t designed to provide?

Topic 6 - What happens if it fails? Does this create a loop scenario to try again?

Topic 7 - Let’s talk about Guardrails AI specifically. Today you offer an open-source marketplace of Validators in the Guardrails Hub, correct? As we mentioned earlier, almost everyone’s implementation and guardrails they want to implement will be different. Is the best way to think about this as building blocks using validators that are pieced together?  Tell everyone a little bit about the offering

FEEDBACK?

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Stu Miniman (@stu, Senior Director of Market Insights @RedHat) talks about the experience of The Sphere (@SphereVegas) in Las Vegas

SHOW: 796

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• CloudZero provides immediate and ongoing savings with 100% visibility into your total cloud spend

SHOW NOTES:

• The Sphere (Las Vegas)
• What’s inside of The Sphere (video overview)
• Postcard from Earth (trailer)
• Stu’s “In the Clouds” interview series

Topic 1 - Welcome back to the show. I think it’s fair to say that you’re a veteran of Las Vegas. How many times do you think you’ve been out there for tech-event related things? 

Topic 2 - With tech events coming back, and even non-tech events going live again, Las Vegas is going to be a destination for a lot of people around our community. What did you know about The Sphere prior to visiting this past week? 

Topic 3 - Tell us about the basics of The Sphere. How do you get there? Where is it in Las Vegas? What’s the entrance like?

Topic 4 - Beyond the movies or concerts in the stadium, what else is going on in the building? 

Topic 5 - Let’s talk about the actual stadium experience. What’s the seating like, what are you seeing, how’s the sound? 

Topic 6 - Any tips or tricks for anyone considering a visit to The Sphere? 

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod

Marco Palladino (@subnetmarco, CTO/Co-Founder @thekonginc) talks about the evolution of APIs, the need for consolidation and integration of AI APIs, and introduces the AI Gateway.

SHOW: 795

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• Find "Breaking Analysis Podcast with Dave Vellante" on Apple, Google and Spotify
• Keep up to date with Enterprise Tech with theCUBE

SHOW NOTES:

• Kong (homepage)
• What is an AI Gateway?
• Kong launches AI Gateway (Marco's blog on Kong homepage)
• Kong introduces AI Gateway (Silicon Angle)
• Hugging Face (AI model community)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we dive into today’s discussion, tell us a little bit about your background at Kong and prior to Kong.

Topic 2 - Now that the world is obsessed with AI and AI Models, what roles do APIs continue to play for applications?

Topic 3 - You’ve lived through the API marketplace days. Do you see a lot of differences between API marketplaces and model marketplaces (e.g. like HuggingFace)?

Topic 4 - You’ve talked recently about the concept of an AI Gateway, somewhat as an evolution of an API Gateway. Walk us through this new concept.

Topic 5 - API Gateways can provide a lot of protection for known things by looking into various headers, security keys, and packet data. Can you imagine AI Gateways being able to have insights into model data to do things like Prompt Control, Hallucination Control, etc.?

Topic 6 - We’ve seen the merging of API Gateways (North/South) and Service Mesh (East/West) traffic as new application patterns emerged. Do you think we’ll see new traffic patterns again with AI traffic and AI model interactions? 

FEEDBACK?

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Big 3 cloud providers investing in AI with cloud credits. $7 trillion dollar big plans. VCs concerned about AI valuations. It feels like a new set of rules are being created. 

SHOW: 794

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• CloudZero provides immediate and ongoing savings with 100% visibility into your total cloud spend
• Learn More About Azure Offerings : Learn more about Azure Migrate and Modernize & Azure Innovate!
• Azure Free Cloud Resource Kit : Step-by-step guidance, resources and expert advice, from migration to innovation.CloudZero – Cloud Cost Visibility and Savings

SHOW NOTES:

• Microsoft invests $10B into OpenAI
• Amazon invests $b in Anthropic
• Google invests $2B in Anthropic
• Cloud GPUs
• Can you trust AI valuations, MANG investments (BG2 Podcast)  
• Big Cloud deploys 1000s of GPU for AI - but revenues should be higher (El Reg) 
• Tracking CAPEX by the big 3 cloud providers
• Sam Altman seeks (up to) $7 trillion for new chip building (and comps)

ARE CLOUD CREDITS THE NEW VENTURE CAPITAL?

• “Microsoft's Q2 2024 earnings report states that AI services contributed 6 percentage points of growth to Azure revenue. This is an increase from 3 percentage points in the previous quarter.” 

KEEP AN EYE ON AI USAGE “TRENDS” FROM THE BIG CLOUD PROVIDERS

• Is this a problem for VCs? 
• Is this “good” revenue for the cloud providers?
• Are they just smart for utilizing an asset that they can monopolize?
• How to track user-growth (e.g. OpenAI) and cloud-usage-growth (e.g. Big 3)
• How much will people invest to build an alternative to NVIDIA?

FEEDBACK?

• Email: show at the cloudcast dot net
• Twitter: @cloudcastpod
• Instagram: @cloudcastpod
• TikTok: @cloudcastpod