239: The Cloud Pod Sees the Irony of Using AI to Assist with Climate Change

The Cloud Pod Sees the Irony of Using AI to Assist with Climate Change 

Welcome to episode 239 of The Cloud Pod podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are your hosts this week as we talk about all things AI and Climate Change – and Google’s assertion that their AI is going to fix it all. Also on today’s agenda: updates to Google Next’s new dates, Azure’s chips, Defender, and all the shenanigans over at OpenAI. Join us! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

Microsoft Ignites my dislike for their conferences 

Google keeps using that Sustainability word….

The gift of no cost learning

The CloudPod has an advent calendar for AI

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

00:50 Broadcom announces successful acquisition of VMware 

• Broadcom has completed its acquisition of VMware… and apparently it’s a new and exciting era! (Hopefully more exciting than Tanzu has been.) 
• Broadcom is mostly known for networking communication chips, but has been diversifying their portfolio for a while now.  
• Vmware joins companies such as:
  • Rally Software
  • CA Products
  • Plex (not *that* plex)
  • Appneta
  • Clarity
  • Symantec
  • Siteminder

01:58 Matthew – “I feel like whenever you get acquired, a lot of the duplicated admin services and like HR, finance, some of those kind of naturally – like whenever a company gets acquired, I feel like there’s always layoffs within the first six months, and it’s really just a lot of those overlapping services now that the parent org has. But I know that they own Symantec. That was news to me.”

04:36 Ryan – “I think that the big value prop was for a lot of these things was, you know, being able to run that virtualized infrastructure and then the partnerships are, you know, to be able to run that with the same skill sets and the same people running both without having to get into the specifics of, you know, AWS or Azure cloud specifics. And so offering that as sort of a generalized compute… I think as cloud has become more prevalent and popular and there’s more people that know it, not enough, but still more. I think that value really goes down where you no longer need that sort of UI driven cloud management service that VMware provided for years.”

AI is Going Great!

06:11 **See Aftershow**

AWS

06:17 If you haven’t already, go listen to ep 238! 

That’s our AWS re:Invent recap show; there really isn’t any AWS news outside of that for this week. 

GCP

06:28  Early Registration Now Open for Google Cloud Next ’24 (April 9-11) in Las Vegas

• You may think Google Next just happened… and you would be right. But as part o