220: The Cloud Pod Read Llama Llama Red Pajama

Welcome episode 220 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew discuss all things cloud, including virtual machines, an AI partnership between Microsoft and Meta for Llama 2, Lambda functions, Fargate, and lots of security updates including the Outlook breach and WORM protections. This and much more in our newest episode. 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• Too Many Bees died for Honeycode
• Microsoft announces that AI will only cost you 3 arms and a leg.  
• The Cloud Pod also detects Recursive Loops in cloud news
• The cloud pod disables health checks bc who needs them

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

AWS

02:02 Detecting and stopping recursive loops in AWS Lambda functions

• Do you utilize AWS Lambda? Here’s an update for you. 
• AWS Lambda is introducing a recursion control to detect and stop lambda functions running in a recursive or infinite loop.  
• This supports Lambda Integrations with SQS, SNS or directly via the Invoke API.  
• Lambda defects functions that appear to be running in a recursive loop and drops the request after exceeding 16 invocations
• This can help reduce costs from an unexpected lambda invocation because of recursion. 
• You’ll receive notification that this action was taken through the AWS Health Dashbboard, email or by configuring Amazon Cloudwatch Alarms. 
• You can turn this off by reaching out to AWS support, if you have a valid use-case where recursion is intentional, or if you need to loop something through more than 16 times.
• This is also the trap – if you say turn it off and then cry about a ridiculous bill due to your runaway recursion – they will now force you to pay it. So, listeners beware.

03:50 Matt- “I can definitely say I’ve caused an ‘in the hundreds of dollars’ very rapidly by this in the past in a dev account. So it’s definitely something that’s easy to do if you are doing recursion and you make an ‘if’ statement the wrong way.”

04:28 AWS Fargate Enables Faster Container Startup using Seekable OCI

• Are you a Fargate user who has been jealous of all those folks using ECS who have been able to utilize the seekable OCI or Sochi capability of lazy loading of containers? Well pine away no more! This feature