232: The CloudPod Is Tired of Talking About New Instance Types

Welcome to The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Jonathan and Ryan, are talking all about EC2 instances, including changes to AWS Systems Manager and Elastic Disaster Recovery. And speaking of disasters, we’re also taking a dive into the ongoing Google DDOS attacks. Plus, we’ve even thrown a little earthquake warning into the podcast, just for effect. 

Titles we almost went with this week:

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

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General News this Week:

01:08 Why AMD’s Upcoming Chips Won’t Be the Savior AI Startups Are Hoping For 

• A few weeks ago many got excited about the new AMD chips coming to help with AI workloads. 
• The Instinct MI300A has often been touted as an alternative to Nvidia’s H100. 
• But… it’s not as easy to use those chips.  
  • The startup that tweeted about using the new AMD chips has been working on it for multiple years, and most startups who would want to switch would have to throw out their code and start from scratch. We’re not super sure about that claim, but we shall see…
  • Plus, Nvidia has a 20 year head start when it comes to Cuda and other development tools for AI. 
• It’s not all bad news though – AMD does have some advantages that may make it worth it, including a chip that combines the GPU, which performs multiple computations simultaneously, and a CPU which executes more general instructions and manages the systems broader operations. 
  • (Nvidia plans to do the same with the Grace Hopper Superchip). 
• The AMD chips also have more memory than the H100 at 128gb vs 80gb. 

02:20 Ryan – “Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting how complex these have become, right? When it used to just be – sort of – you had optimized at the computer level and maybe at the OS level, but now the workloads are so specific because they’re so demanding, and then power is also very challenging. So that’s kind of neat. I’m kind of glad I don’t have to deal with it much.”

03:38 Report: Amazon will use Microsoft 365 cloud productivity tools in $1B ‘megadeal’ 

• Amazon has reportedly committed 1B to license M365 cloud productivity software for 1 million of its corporate and frontline workers in a surprise megadeal.  
• Amazon will upgrade from traditional MS office software to the cloud productivity suite, (Probably because MS stopped supporting it? But we digress) according to the report, which notes that Amazon had been reluctant to do so previously. 

04:40 Jonthan – “I’m surprised they haven’t worked on their own office suite. They could have taken some open-source thing and made it their ow