228: Microsoft and Oracle Unite Their Legal Departments to Bring You…

Welcome episode 228 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts are Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan – 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• The Cloud Pod gets scanned for a malware infection
• The Cloud Pod gives up on security 
• The Cloud Pod burns cash on a new Mac instance
• Copilot’s Copyright Crusade – Microsoft’s Got Your Back in Copyright Battles
• The Cloud Pod loves it when the clouds come together
• The Cloud Pod doubts 90 day account expirations are a good idea
• Matt brings a bit of class to the Cloud Pod

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.

General News this Week:

AWS

02:56 Amazon EC2 R7a Instances Powered By 4th Gen AMD EPYC Processors for Memory Optimized Workloads AND New Amazon EC2 R7iz Instances are Optimized for High CPU Performance, Memory-Intensive Workloads

• Amazon has a couple of new instances for us this week, including Amazon R7a, which is powered by the 4th generation AMD EPYC (Genoa) processors with a maximum frequency of 3.7ghz – this has 50 percent higher performance compared to the previous generation instances. 
• The R7a supports the AVX-512, Vector Neural Network Instructions and Brain Float Point (bfloat16https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bfloat16_floating-point_format).
• It also supports Double Data rate 5 (DDR5) memory. 
• From 1 vcpu and 8gb of ramp to 192 vcpu 1.5tb of memory
• Not excited for AMD? Would you rather pay more money for an Intel version? Well fear not! Also available is the new R7iz instances – which are the fastest 4th generation scalable-based (sapphire rapids) instances with 3.9ghz sustained all-core turbo frequency.  
• The R7iz has four built in accelerators including the advanced matrix extensions (AMX), intel data streaming accelerator (DSA), intel in-memory analytics accelerator (IAA) and intel quickassist technology (QAT).  
• Listeners take note: you may need to use a specific kernel version, driver or compiler to take advantage of these. 
• You can get these in 2 vcpu /16gb configurations up to 128 vcpu/1024gb of memory. 

04:39 Matthew – “I’m just more impressed it’s still DDR5. I feel like 20 years ago I built a computer with DDR3 or 4. So I really feel like…”

04:49 Justin – “DDR4 was very long in the tooth.DDR4 lasted a very long time. DDR5 is actually pretty new, I think. I don’t know when you can kind of mass populati