I think it's tough for me to see a trajectory where there isn't business
impact for basically every job role in every vertical of company everywhere.
So the scale of it is, is really, I think, difficult for a lot of business
and analyst teams to sort of wrap their melon around, but how much
impact and how, how many like AI calls, how many tokens that it takes.
to construct that business impact, I think
is something we do not have a good handle on.
Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud.
I'm Corey Quinn.
Joining me for the first time since the company
got acquired is Myles Ward, CTO of SADA.
Myles, how have you been?
Completely glorious.
Thank you for having me back on.
I'm really looking forward to it.
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The logo on your site now says SADA, an
insight partner, or insight company rather.
An insight company.
Partner means something different, usually means third party company.
But I guess they went with that instead of, uh, SADSITE
as the, uh, the unified company name for whatever reason.
Couldn't tell you why.
We were just at the Google event, uh, last week and,
uh, uh, the MC, who is spectacular, introduced us.
As Insight, Asada Company.
And I was like, oh, now that's like way better.
Like, the whole exec team was all excited.
They were like, yeah!
And business daddy was less than amused.
Yes, they were like, no, no, hold on, hold on.
It goes the other way.
Uh, so, it's actually been really, really pleasant.
The team there is, uh, is spectacular.
And I don't say that just because I'm on recording.
Uh, they are, uh, they are really a fun crew.
So it's, it's a, it's a fun thing to pursue.
Prior to the acquisition, you folks were Effectively, as
best I could tell, the closest thing that Google Cloud had
to something that would interface directly with customers.
So seeing you be acquired by someone that
wasn't Google was a bit eyebrow raising.
When you win Partner of the Year back to back to back to back to back, uh,
it kind of, it kind of means we're doing an important part of, of the role.
Uh, Google, Google was not likely to acquire us, but I think they
were in, in sort of incredible celebration about this acquisition, uh,
because Insight has something like 10 times as many customers as I do.
So the, you know, having the MSAs and the contractual relationships already in
place for basically every major company is a, is a huge like for it means I can.
Tackle a lot more customers faster.
Which is a nice position to find yourself in.
I would imagine.
Are there any new use cases you can wind
up getting to because of the acquisition?
Like, can you do something now that you could not do previously?
Though I'm sure if I had asked you this prior to the acquisition,
the answer would have been something a little bit different.
No, that's not, that's not true at all.
Uh, I, I felt bad about it.
I always want to be able to say yes to everything, but there's a
whole bunch of stuff that, that just doesn't make any sense, right?
Like.
I was a part of the team that helped propose
Anthos that's now on like name number four.
I think it's called Google Distributed Cloud
Edge or Google Distributed Cloud Air Gapped now.
Uh, and if you're going to deploy a system like that, you have to not only
have the Kubernetes expertise and the Google Cloud general expertise, But
you like, you need computers and like routers and switches and networking
gear, and you've got to actually drive them someplace and turn them
on and like probably rummage around inside of a data center somewhere.
Uh, you know, and those are the skills that my company had not invested in.
So having, uh, you know, this huge logistics and fulfillment machine,
having thousands of engineers that do that kind of work all the time.
Means I can make proposals that are, that actually cover all the
parts of those projects where instead of like doing some weird teaming
agreement or asking Google to try to sort out who does what part that
sucks, like nice to be able to just say, yeah, we can handle that.
Uh, in the same kind of way, a lot of our migrations, uh, you
know, if I was going from AWS to GCP, let's call that the majority
of migration that my business ran over the last three years.
Uh, you know, I have a bunch of people that do have AWS certifications.
You kind of have to know where you're going from.
To be able to sort out where you're going to.
What does
that service do?
Eh, couldn't be that important.
Dynamo sounds weird.
EC7 or what, what is it called again?
Uh, where an increasing fraction of the
migrations that we're doing are from data center.
And that, that's not, there's not like one, there's like a zillion
different ISVs and hardware vendors and all of the rest of it.
The panoply of that stuff is humongous.
So saying like, I have the certifications and those is,
is fairly daunting if you're not quite a bit bigger.
So having insights, whole huge book of credentials in
that environment just means the discovery goes better.
The accuracy, they have this incredible, there's like RV tools for VMware.
That's kind of.
How many VMs do you have?
Basic.
They have this much more advanced snap start that, uh, just
really changes how quickly I can get to a binding proposal.
This is how long it will take and what it
will cost to make your stuff work in GCP.
It's really been incredibly useful.
I have never done a cloud migration from one cloud provider to another.
I've done an awful lot of them from data centers into cloud.
Do you find that it is easier?
To go from one cloud to another than from data center to cloud.
Absolutely.
I mean, there are differences between the clouds, but call that 30%, right?
Like, uh, once you've got, you know, uh, we've done
plenty of data center modernization stuff where they, they
aren't on virtual machines yet, let alone on containers.
They aren't, uh, you know, they don't have any kind of
structured networking or, or software defined networking.
It's all manual configuration on devices.
Like if you've gotten to any cloud.
You have already sorted through a whole bunch of that miasma
and now it's just sort of transforming the primitives from one
system to another and working out the plumbing between them.
That's just frankly, a lot more tractable.
And only about half of that is the, the technical work on your, uh,
you know, your technical estate, half of it is Teaching the people.
Uh, and so if you've got humans that have sorted out the difference
between, you know, what it looks like to have a machine that you actually
get the money back when you turn it off, miracle of all miracles, uh, you
know, they will, they will retain those insights as they move from one.
Becomes more of a syntax problem than an entire new way of thinking.
That's exactly right.
There's, there's a couple of spots, right?
Like you probably spend a little more time
disabusing people of sort of horrible notions.
In, in database stuff, because Google has some performance advantages there.
And, uh, you know, there's places where, uh, like, you know, on the AI
side, uh, we've done a whole bunch of refactoring from Azure where it's
like, you have to glue together what to get things to go over there.
Oh my goodness.
Uh, where, you know, on, on GCP a lot.
Your account manager's hands, and then you offer
the solvent only once they give you what you need.
Yeah.
There's.
So there's certainly places where, uh, you know, we're able
to give good news to customers as they, as they take this on.
But, uh, but by and large, it's certainly a lot, a lot shallower.
What have you seen as customer impact from the, we'll charitably
call it the Broadcom pricing changes instead of what I normally
think of it as, as basically Broadcom wearing a VMware skin suit?
It's tough because I really believe strongly that, that especially given.
Uh, you know, what's happening in AI, every company has to get
more comfortable with faster chain, but this is precisely the
kind of change they really don't want to get comfortable with.
Arbitrary, spontaneous, no notice price changes.
In the increase of, you know, 6x, 10x, something like that, uh,
it just, it's just never going to be a thing that businesses have.
But you're getting more for that, what you're
spending, not if you're not using it, you're not.
And most people have not budgeted for that
kind of increase and are not able to absorb it.
So suddenly it's, it really has turned the,
the cloud economics question on its head.
Like when you start doing a TCO analysis, like it, you, like
it becomes a very, well, depending on what you go into as a
precept, you can wind up taking it in a few different directions.
Okay, when you do 10x the price for running VMware that it does
almost doesn't matter what you do in cloud, it's going to be cheaper.
Right, it would have to perform incredible miracles as new features,
and I heard no new feature growth as a result of those changes.
It's absolutely extractive.
A big motion for us, I feel like I'm a fairly good negotiator.
If I used VMware at all, maybe I would feel confident
that I can go fight them about it, but I feel way better
about having Google do that negotiation on my behalf.
So using GCPE makes, makes Google go fight with Broadcom
on, you know, like they, they go do the negotiation.
And there's no proof that they're even able to be negotiated with effectively.
They and AT& T are slugging it out in the headlines about this stuff.
And frankly, okay, if AT& T doesn't have the weight
to throw around in that sort of situation, I sure don't.
Exactly.
How do you expect you're going to go to your You know,
account manager that's been handed all of these changes.
They're just, they're just trying to hang on and look, I understand they feel
like they're in a position where there's not a lot of future in the model.
If you can extract a bunch of that money
up front, there's a time value of money.
And I've heard of that math.
Yeah.
There's no future relationship to it.
It's the other side of the coin that I've always liked to be on
it, where you can either take a bunch of money from people right
now, or you can take a little bit of money over time and build
a working relationship and expand that in the fullness of time.
That seems to be something that they have given up on.
Like, we care about this quarter, next quarter, and then that's basically it.
And once we have, like, the three customers left who
are trapped for regulatory reasons on us, that's it.
But you can't, you can only get so much blood from the stone.
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe they take all of this new large S.
Plow it into product engineering and make
the product radically better over time.
I suspect instead they will probably hand it to
their shareholders, but that's their choice to make.
You know, I think businesses have a choice to make about how they react.
And what I've seen, you know, frankly, even more than I expected, is a
willingness from businesses To get serious about a proactive, uh, you
know, approach there, some, some way of getting into a relationship where
they feel like they have much more control over their destiny, at least
as it relates to costs and the cloud providers for all of their ills
and problems have at least been fairly linear about prices and not done.
Totally ludicrous things like this.
So fingers crossed, it would be nice if that
was something that was guaranteed contractually.
You know, there are some structures that enable that, but by and large,
they've got at least a better reputation for pursuing cost savings
for their customers than, than is the current competitive state.
What have you seen happening with the world of cost and AI these days?
I can tell a story that goes in almost any direction based
upon that depending on which stories I wind up picking.
Folks who have tripled their cloud bill, folks who have
seen no change, folks who have saved money, etc, etc.
But what are you seeing as the dominant narrative?
I'll rewind way back.
Uh, you know, I was, You know, I was the
fifth solutions architect worldwide for AWS.
I hear they eventually hired a sixth, but I can't prove it.
Yeah.
And then several thousand more after that, they
were really some of my favorite times in my career.
I literally had back to back 20 minute meetings.
Lord knows you couldn't afford 30 minute meetings
with customers and you're just trying to get.
To a place where they're doing smart things with the platform.
And I don't, I mean, I had several hundred conversations
with customers asking for a larger virtual machine than the
M1 large with its glorious seven and a half gigs of memory.
Uh, and the reason they wanted a bigger virtual machine It's because
they were putting every conceivable thing in it, database, the queue
and the storage, all of it, just ram all of that bad boy in there.
So the recommendation to them that typically for most customers
saved them an incredible amount of money was not, you need a
bigger virtual machine, but you need to refactor what you're doing.
And you know, the queue goes over here and it
costs a zillionth of a penny per end queue.
And what do you mean you put storage in the middle of your web server?
Put that on S3.
S3's great.
You're re architecting their system to take
advantage of the primitives that are available.
So fast forward 15 years, we're doing generative AI, and I'm
watching customers put unmitigated mayhem into their prompts,
into that context window that's not big enough, right?
And they're, they're just like, I have customers, I
swear to you that are re implementing like Boolean logic.
They are working out chunks of what should be like one liners in JavaScript.
They're teaching the thing in English.
How to do a bubble sort.
I swear to you, I saw a bubble sort implementation in English
in a prompt because that's the tool you gave some developer
and they want to be an ML developer and so they're going
to do everything they can possibly do inside that prompt.
So I'm right back to the beginning.
Oh, hey, you know,
I would use this computer that's bad at math,
right?
Like over here, you can use this little chunk of deterministic
software that might possibly have a chance of giving you truth back.
Uh, you know, and there, you know, there's this model over here called flash
that costs a 20th of the model that you're using for every conceivable thing.
Maybe it makes sense to prototype some of this stuff in the big heavyweight
models that you kind of don't waste a bunch of cycles debugging.
But, uh, but there is a generative solutions architecture that's
being born at my company and companies all over the place.
As we go through trying to help customers refactor these things into one systems
that are, you know, more truthy and reliable and actually produce results.
RAG is one sort of outcome of that.
But a lot of this is, uh, you know, figuring out which kinds of
model does what kind of thing at the right kind of price point.
So it actually makes sense to do it in production because
we're watching our experiments seem to turn into production.
A lot more than when we compare back to Google what they say the averages are.
So I think some of that is a symptom of doing a better job at helping people
navigate the complexity of this whole new discipline of our application design.
You'd like to hope so.
I think that there's been a lot of noise around this and whenever you have
people seeing hype and more importantly money flowing toward a particular
technology, well they want to, you know, Get exposure to that even if for no
other reason than it seems like this might be advantageous for their career.
And I've, I've made something of a career pattern out of avoiding the
hype just because I've seen too many cycles where the hot next thing
becomes yesterday's legacy garbage that you have to wind up supporting.
It's clear that AI is a useful tool and I
don't think we're going to see it going away.
But I do question whether it's worth these multi trillion
dollar valuations we're starting to see talked about.
I think it's tough for me to see a trajectory where there isn't business
impact for basically every job role in every vertical of company everywhere.
So the scale of it is, is really, I think, difficult for a lot of business
and analyst teams to sort of wrap their melon around, but how much
impact and how, how many like AI calls, how many tokens that it takes.
To construct that business impact, I think is something we
do not have a good handle on and there are architectures and
implementations that are going to use one or two or 3 percent AI
instead of 90 percent AI to produce the outcomes that we all want.
I think in a lot of ways, the, the innovation that happened
is we got to a place where I can produce inputs and receive
outputs in, in, in a language that I'm much more familiar with,
much more comfortable with that a lot more business people.
Are much more familiar with and comfortable with that doesn't mean that
like the actual legwork in most cases should be done by an LLM, right?
Like I'm watching customers try to cram all of their raw data into a
prompt in order to be able to do what would be seven or eight lines of SQL.
It's just going to work better if you make the AI write the SQL for you.
There is a future here.
And I think that the idea of, of getting value out of it is still a little
early, but because it is so fiendishly expensive to build and run these things,
especially at hyperscale, these companies are falling all over themselves to
wind up monetizing it and at least getting it to break even as fast as possible.
But, As a customer we're still seeing use cases
evolve and capabilities change week to week.
It's a, maybe I don't need to be trying to hit
the moving target when it's going this quickly.
I can instead focus on the myriad other concerns that my business has
that, believe it or not, are not shaped like AI solvable problems.
I think there's a lot that at least that we're running into where,
uh, my expectation is a lot, you know, Google has a, a Gemini Pro 1.
5.
They name it like it's a Samsung monitor, but yeah.
Yeah.
You can put 2 million characters into the context window, right?
You can put the works of Shakespeare in and start asking
questions about it, but they also have a model called Gemini.
You can download, stick it on your laptop and ask questions
and stuff comes out and it doesn't cost you anything per call.
And I, and I think that there's, uh, you know, The difference
in, in the cost profile and the level of model that you need.
They've been talking a lot with us internally about, uh, this concept of
distillation, uh, using what they call a teacher student model to have the large
models build the smaller models you need to actually do the work you're doing.
Matt has these like Multiple order of magnitude impacts in the
cost profile of the executions that you're actually trying to do.
Cause like not every chat box needs to be able to answer
the open ended questions of the entire world, right?
Like most use cases are just ever so slightly more narrow than that.
So we are in very early days.
I think that means that.
Yes, the, uh, the total consumption of tokens through
things like this is probably radically inflated.
From a scale perspective, too, I, even just, funny you
mentioned this, yesterday, I was getting, uh, Llama running on
my laptop, and it's still now spitting, on my desktop at the
moment, this morning, it was spitting out 98 tokens a second.
Uh, for Lama 2, uh, 3.
2.
And that's great.
It's, it's wild to be running it locally just because for the first time
it's in, I think, ever using computers, it's, wow, I can ask it questions
and not have the FBI showing up on my doorstep if I ask the wrong question.
As a sense, this has never happened to me, but I do wonder how
many times I can ask Google for bomb making instructions before
the police would like to have some assistance with their inquiries.
Not that that's the direction I am drawn within, obviously.
But it's just the sense of not having a surveillance system looking
over my shoulder while I asked the computer to help with things.
It's kind of, it's surprisingly freeing, even though all it has to do
is things like help me build a packing list for a camping trip, but
suddenly nothing's trying to sell me ads for camping equipment either.
You're describing it in the micro, but, but think about it in the macro.
So you're a country that Google doesn't currently do business in.
They don't have a region there.
So that means necessarily any application that you build, you're
shoving all of your data over the wire to some other jurisdiction.
With Google Cloud AirGapped, you buy the racks.
It will literally never connect to a Google service.
Ever.
Period.
Air gapped.
And you still get GKE and Vertex.
You build a bunch of models, run a bunch of tests.
Like, this thing functions.
AWS Outposts will not do that.
You can, you can get them only in some countries
because again, there's always going to be regulatory.
Let's, let's be clear here.
You're going to have a bad time if you're Iran or if you're in
North Korea, trying to get any large company to sell you things.
But if you break the AWS Outpost RAC's connection to AWS, it will, over
a non deterministic period of time, stop working as IAM tokens expire.
From the SDS tokens expire, so it continues to work with IAM.
Permissions models break down, it fails
close, because that's what we want it to do.
But it's absolutely not one of those things you can run disconnected forever.
Yeah, this is a permanently disconnected, Google compatible
cluster, which is, it's just, you know, I fought violently
for this like nine years ago and they finally got there.
I'm stoked.
It feels like Oracle's dedicated region with customer at cloud
where they will deploy their stuff entirely into your facility.
It might even be your hardware, but that's unclear to me.
And it's every Oracle cloud service.
Now that would be more useful if more people use them, but you know.
Every one of the Oracle ones that I saw, they make you buy all of it.
All new, all shiny, shrink wrap galore.
All of the air gapped ones that I've seen so far from Google are
the same, but they have also asserted that if you fit into this.
Very narrow list of gear that they will support it.
So that's not a, it's not a hard rule.
That's bold of them just because hell is customer hardware power network.
Absolutely.
The nice thing is like, I remember this is eight and a half, nine in
the same kind of time window right after I started on the Google side.
We're like, look, we need way more regions.
This is lame.
They should be all over the place.
We should put in, I even wrote a proposal to
stick them in every embassy around the world.
Then you have jurisdiction at the same time.
It's like a smooth idea.
The reason to
do that,
based upon being close to customers, or was it for data residency reasons?
Absolutely jurisdiction and residency.
Famously, Ben Treanor, the kind of core operations lead for Google
and Alphabet, uh, had worked out the math for user experience
and the 17 locations that Google was in so far covered their
performance goals for 99 percent of humans online and not online.
Once they all got online, it still worked.
So they didn't need any more regions.
As of six years ago, because of jurisdiction, they continue to build them.
One of the topics I want to get into as we're talking about comparative
theology, for lack of a better term here, is, a year ago, I would have
basically more or less given you crap for fun about Google killing things.
This year, that joke turns back around and Amazon is effectively
I don't want to say that they're killing beloved services because
a lot You should not have been using almost any of these things.
If you're still on SimpleDB, if you still are on SimpleDB, I'm sure there's an
entire Amazonian team reaching out to see what they can do up to and including
sending engineers to do rework to get you off of it onto something like Dynamo.
These are not These are not embedded services that people love and trust.
They have not yet pulled the equivalent that I'm aware of, of the, of
Google killing IoT Core, where, well, hang on a second, that's embedded in
devices we've shipped to customers and we can't change the pricing on that.
We've already sold them.
How, how, how is that supposed to work?
That was a weird one, but I have not yet seen that from Amazon.
What I have seen is the drip, drip, drip, drip, drip all year.
Of them killing things every week.
So in the event that they're afraid, we're
going to stop talking about them killing things.
Obviously a product strategy and not a PR strategy.
And it's clear to me that they want to do a bit of a house cleaning.
Anybody who's logged into the console on the AWS side, anything recently seen.
would probably find that somewhat overdue.
It is a daunting list of products.
And I'm working on Google Cloud that has
187,000 SKUs or something possibility like that.
So there is room to consolidate and focus.
Google certainly got a bad rap for that.
And I think deservedly so that they absolutely could have done a
better job in a hundred different ways on a dozen different products.
I want to call out your evolution on this too, because back in the early days,
uh, that I was making fun of this and had enough of a voice to matter, you would
challenge me pretty heavily when I would call Google out for killing services.
A lot of people did, but those voices have gotten quieter
and quieter over the years of them doing it because now
it's become indefensible the way that they've been doing it.
I remember working really early with the Stadia dudes.
They were awesome.
That thing was great.
The technology remains great.
It has been licensed to a whole bunch of other companies.
It absolutely functions like it's now chunks of it
are available as an open source thing called Selkies.
If you ever want to build like.
Absolutely glorious remote streaming environment, but, uh, but
no, they like, I think that there's plenty of places where, where
these evaluations are just, they're just beyond the pale and, uh,
and, and I don't care if a business changes its mind, but it has
a responsibility to, to carry customers through that transition.
And those are the places where, you know, a customer service function has to
be mature enough and empowered enough and funded enough to be able to handle.
Such a thing.
And, and they've fallen short of that.
What I haven't heard back.
And I, you know, this is praise for AWS.
Like, uh, I'll agree with you that they're slaying stuff and
they're, they're doing it in this weird drip, drip, drip.
But I don't have a whole bunch of customers that are like, Oh
my God, this ruins my business model and I raised money on this.
And what are you talking about?
Like they seem to have selected stuff.
Not just unloved, but unused and, uh, and maybe
wasn't, wasn't as scary a thing to get rid of.
Yeah.
There's a, there's a way to do deprecations that doesn't aggravate people.
And I think AWS largely has been doing most of those things.
It's just rip the bandaid off at once, please.
Especially when it's inside of sort of a business unit like that, like
AWS for, for all of its weirdness is, you know, absolutely contains the
product inside of AWS in the same way that Alphabet contains the products.
Inside of sort of broader Google in a way that GCP maybe doesn't, right?
Some of the things that GCP got made fun of
for deprecating were not actually GCP products.
They're, they're over in different departments of Alphabet.
Like the domain stuff.
Like I, when I, I remember that hit, I was, I was reaching out to people and
asking this barely politer version of, What do you idiots think you're doing?
And many of these people were finding out
this had happened from my insulting question.
It was, wait, they did what?
It was their reaction, but they couldn't say that to me
because, you know, it's, you're supposed to at least pretend
you know what's going on with your employer most of the time.
But it was, yeah, it's the left hand never
knows what the right tentacle is doing.
That is almost the definition of enterprise.
Continues to give me eyeball twitches.
Uh, I, I get it, you know, especially with the,
the kind of antitrust stuff that's going on.
I suspect that there's, there was more blues there than there was to gain, but
that's particularly a place where like, you are not just pissing off customers.
You are pissing off operators and, and you are doing stuff that is necessarily
going to make them stay up late, do weird shit that they don't want to do.
Right.
There's, there's just, just no good outcome there.
And Squarespace has not made it easier or better.
I don't, I don't know what.
They are not an enterprise, that's the problem is because it's
Google, the, they are simultaneously consumer and enterprise
facing, and it's very hard to find a registrar that does that well.
I've moved all my registration over to Cloudflare, just because
they not only, Can handle it all, but either is a single portal.
Every employee I need to log in to look at these things can be
assigned the right permissions and can see this all in one place.
Even in an AWS org, you get to play account whack a mole.
Where was that particular domain registered?
A recent trick I picked up is using an SCP to restrict it in
other accounts, but that still creates friction for people.
And any service that expects to reach out directly
to the zone record won't be able to do it.
I had somebody, you know, uh, push him back.
Like, why, why would you, uh, you know, why, why would you, you
know, build an app in an environment where you can't buy a domain?
And so I was like, can you buy a domain and all the rest of them in AWS?
You absolutely can.
Um, but, but then it's inside your AWS account.
So if you like screw up your builds, it's your domain implode.
That like seems a little weird.
Azure just delegates this to GoDaddy.
Oh God, I have a standing policy and most, as most responsible
infrastructure people do, you should never have a company on your
infrastructure critical path with the word daddy embedded in their name.
That is generally sound advice.
I went with, uh, you know, out of the possible options, like
maybe this seems like this would been my expectation as to
your selection criteria, like funniest product marketing.
So pork bun has been like, Unbelievably easy
to use and half of the pages crack me up.
It's great.
It's perfect.
Everyone keeps mentioning that one.
I haven't looked into it yet.
I honestly, none of them have yet have what I'm looking for as the
I'm out having too much to drink with over a beer or six with you.
I come with a funny idea to repoint a domain to some other company's website.
Uh, like, I don't know, ClownPenis.
cloud is a purely hypothetical example of that.
And it takes so many different services
working together for the enterprise stuff.
You can just do it with a few clicks in the consumer stuff.
But none of the enterprise stuff even has a
website that works on mobile for those moments.
WorkFun has done the, uh, That's a great idea.
That would be a good joke.
I buy the domain and put up a silly picture
and then text it to my buddy over beers.
That's, that workflow functions.
And so it at least checks that box for me.
Yeah, let me check right now here.
That's sure.
Yeah.
Hey, wow.
Their website works on an iPhone.
They're done.
Thank you.
You've convinced me.
The bar, the bar is not high out there, everybody.
It's really not.
And it's the challenge too, is so many domain
registrars I've, over years, were so sketchy.
Just, they keep having the multiple upsells and
all the rest and trying to do like the FUD moment.
You sure you don't want an expensive certificate to go with it?
Because, you know, hackers.
This is the fifth interstitial page in the checkout flow.
Knock it off.
I just want to buy an insulting name and repoint it somewhere.
Not to go into, uh, you know, what is a fairly hot region?
No, I don't want to buy WordPress hosting from you right now.
Oh yeah.
Let's not touch that one.
That's a whole separate episode of nonsense and another drama to go into.
Maybe by the time we record next time that will all be sorted out.
Fingers crossed.
So something Google did very well this year that I love is
they moved next to April, which is basically a cloud dead zone.
So I am still dealing with the Q3 turning into Q4 being an absolute disaster.
And that is through the joy of dealing with the Planning for re invent.
Although this year I'm doing it surprisingly lightly and
I'm looking forward to that like you wouldn't believe.
But there's a, there's a strong feeling that I've got where by doing
it in April, that's great because there's nothing else going on.
They get all the attention.
Now, this does blow back on them when I started progressively putting on a
clown suit in TK's keynote because I didn't want him to be the only person
in the room feeling like a clown as he continued to go down the AI path.
I'll be clown myself too.
But okay, that was humorous and got the right, the right
laugh at the right level, which I think is the way to play it.
But that was just good, clean fun.
I mean, AWS now has had, you know, additional six, seven
months to wind up responding to that in an effective way.
Hopefully they'll talk about things that aren't just AI, because
most of the infrastructure problems customers have aren't.
So maybe there's a balance in this.
I feel really good in our position backing up, uh, you know, the
GCP AI practice, but the far side of that, you're exactly right.
A majority of workloads have to do with.
Making computers cheaper and get hosting to
work right and get infrastructure to work right.
And AWS has an incredible brand and an incredible business there.
They have every reason to be really leaned into that.
I, I, I do know how hard it is, right?
I watched Tim Cook talking about, maybe we won't do updates to
iPhone every single year because like, what are they on now?
I was looking at a M8.
G instances or NX eight.
Yeah.
They're still updating iPhones.
It's other stuff that they're going to back off.
I just for marketing reasons alone,
how do you get excitement up about like computer version number 78, right?
Like
AWS also change EC2 instances where now like to like
from successive generations is no longer less expensive.
It's more expensive.
So I have a, I have a single dev box that is.
Running 24 7 because it does a few things for me that I just want to have my, my
Unix server, my Linux servers hanging out there doing a thing, which is great.
I don't need a lot of those, but I do need one.
And if I upgrade to the latest generation, it just boosts the price by 10%.
Okay, but there's a performance story.
Maybe?
But it's not a useful one for me.
I don't care about its performance.
For my thing that runs at like 3 percent utilization, right?
Like, I don't care.
I just need a persistent endpoint.
So what does that computer do?
Uh, 99 percent of the time, it sits there very bored.
Right?
It's, it can, you know, can you out compete a Raspberry Pi 5?
is the use case, right?
And, you know, I think that's actually a difficult target for cloud vendors.
They have got to get into something that's a lot
leaner while preserving all of the compatibility.
You joke, but I have a Kubernetes cluster in my spare room running
on top of Raspberry's Pi and most of the stuff that I use these
days, my RSS reader, the rest, is All tend to live on that cluster.
One of the things I need that dev box for is a public IP address that just
does reverse proxy over tailscale to, so I can have a consistent IP address
to point a domain at and call it good because I already have the box there.
That's not a critical thing.
I could find other ways around that pretty easily if I had to.
I don't think AWS is trying to lose to that, to that architecture.
And I think they, you know, obviously spend a lot more time thinking
about folks that are running a half million cores on various runs, but,
uh, but there's a part of meeting the developer and operator users where
they are and making the concessions to them that I think is useful.
It is stunning to me that there is not You know, multiple free ultra
low utilization yet when I'm logged in relatively high performance, uh,
you know, end points for me to use at any time on all the providers.
It's just crazy that they don't do that.
It's not like it would consume this huge block of
infrastructure that they're not already assigned, right?
Like if they're not at a hundred percent
utilization on the fleets, it costs them nothing.
That's a fun place to be at.
I suppose.
I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me.
If people want to learn more.
Where's the best place for them to find you?
Sure.
SADA.
com.
Nice and short.
Four letters.
Uh, not registered on Porkbun, but it's okay.
That's kind of the front end.
If you want to get to me on Twitter, it's at Myles Ward or,
uh, also Myles Ward on LinkedIn is pretty easy too as, as
Musk continues to do strange things to that environment.
So, uh, happy to talk shop.
It's also just the sada.
com, a complicated address.
So happy to, happy to reach out.
We'll definitely put all of that in the show notes.
Thanks so much for your time.
I appreciate it.
Great talk.
Miles Ward, CTO at SADA.
I'm cloud economist, Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud.
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