276: New from AWS - Elastic Commute - Flex Your Way to an Empty Office

Welcome to episode 276 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, our hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan do a speedrun of OpenWorld news, talk about energy needs and the totally not controversial decision to reopen 3 Mile Island, a “managed” exodus from cloud, and Kubernetes news. As well as Amazon’s RTO we are calling “Elastic Commute”. All this and more, right now on The Cloud Pod.
Titles we almost went with this week:

• The Cloud Pod Hosts don’t own enough pants for five days a week

• IBM thinks it can contain the cost of K8s

• Microsoft loves nuclear energy

• The Cloudpod tries to give Oracle some love and still does not care

• The cloud pod goes nuclear on k8s costs

• Can IBM contain the costs of Kubernetes and Nuclear Power?

• Google takes on take over while microsoft takes on nuclear

• AWS Launches ‘Managed Exodus’: Streamline Your Talent Drain

• Introducing Amazon WorkForce Alienation: Scale Your Employee Discontent to the Cloud

• Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab: Now with Real-Time Resignation Prediction

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
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General News
01:08 IBM acquires Kubernetes cost optimization startup Kubecost (techcrunch.com...)

• IBM is quickly becoming the place where cloud cost companies go to assimilate? Or Die? Rebirthed mabe? Either way, it’s not a great place to end up.

• On Tuesday they announced the acquisition of Kubecost (www.kubecost.com/) , a FinOps (www.finops.org/) startup that helps teams monitor and optimize their K8 clusters, with a focus on efficiency - and ultimately cost.

• This acquisition follows the acquisitions of Apptio, Turbonomic (techcrunch.com...) , and Instana (techcrunch.com...) over the years.

• Kubecost is the company behind OpenCost (www.opencost.io/) ; a vendor-neutral open source project that forms part of the core Kubecost commercial offering.

• OpenCost is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundations cohort of sandbox projects. (www.opencost.i...)


• Kubecost is expected to be integrated into IBM’s FinOps Suite (www.ibm.com/bl...) , which combines Cloudability and Turbonomic.

• There is also speculation that it might make its way to OpenShift, too.


02:26 Jsutin- “…so KubeCost lives inside of Kubernetes, and basically has the ability to see how much CPU, how much memory they’re using, then calculate basically the price of the EC2 broken down into the different pods and services.”
AI Is Going Great - Or How ML Makes All It’s Money
05:03 Introducing OpenAI o1-preview (openai.com/ind...)

• Reasoning LLM’s have arrived this week. Dun Dun Dun…

• The idea behind reasoning models is to take more time to “think” before they respond to you.

• This allows them to reason through complex tasks. and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math.

• ChatGPT is releasing the first with OpenAI o1-preview, which they expect to ship regular updates and improvements.

• Alongside the release, they are considering evaluations for the next updates, which are in development.


• In ChatGPT’s tests they said the model performs similarly to PhD students on benchmark tasks in physics, chemistry and biology. It also excels in math and coding.

• In a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO), GPT-4o correctly solved only 13% of the problems, while the reasoning model scored 83%.


• As part of the development of these models, Open AI has come up with a new safety training approach that harnesses the reasoning capabilities to make them adhere to safety and alignment guidelines.

• One way they measure safety is by testing how well the model continues its safety rules after a user bypasses them (jailbreaking). On one of their hardest tests, GP...