Welcome to episode 220 of The Cloud Pod podcast! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew discuss all things cloud, including an AI partnership between Microsoft and Meta for Llama 2 and much more!
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First up, there’s an exciting announcement for those who utilize AWS Lambda: a recursion control feature to detect and stop lambda functions that may be running in a recursive or infinite loop.
Such a feature can be essential in reducing costs from unexpected lambda invocation due to recursion. Although this control can be turned off by reaching out to AWS support for valid use-cases, caution must be taken, or it’ll end up costing you a bundle.
Fargate users have reason to celebrate as AWS now brings seekable OCI or Sochi capability of lazy loading of containers to AWS Fargate.
This time saving feature can enhance deployment and scalability by allowing containers to start without downloading the entire Container Image.
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP has introduced support for Snaplock, an ONTAP feature enabling Write Once Read Many (WORM) functionality.
The Snaplock volumes are designed to prevent the modification or deletion of files within a specified retention period, granting WORM support for regulatory compliance and ransomware protections.
Uniquely, FSx for ONTAP is currently the only cloud-based file system that supports Snaplock. While the advantages of this feature are clear, Jonathan highlights a potential complexity, stating:
“I see the advantage of protecting against ransomware, but also customers or consumers have a right to have the data deleted.”
AWS Fault Injection Simulator (AWS FIS) has now introduced new features that focus on running chaos engineering experiments on Amazon EKS Pods and ECS workloads.
The newly announced support includes ECS Actions such as Task-cpu-stress and Task-io-stress.
Of course, Jonathan humorously quipped, “We don’t need to inject defects. We have plenty of our own.”
Lastly for AWS, the future of Amazon’s Honeycode cloud service is now looking rather uncertain.
Sources have indicated that Amazon is currently providing only minimal support for Honeycode, which appears to have been absorbed by the new Next Generation Developer Experience team.
Hotpatch is now available on Windows Server Azure Edition VMs with the Desktop Experience installation mode, a feature that permits the patching and installation of OS security updates without requiring a reboot.
Previously restricted to Server Core Installations without a GUI, Hotpatch can now be utilized with a full GUI.
However, some opinions differ regarding the necessity of this feature.
Matthew expressed a preference for relying on Azure’s existing automatic update mechanisms, while Ryan highlighted Hotpatch’s contribution to Azure’s appeal.
Azure has introduced the Always Serve feature for Azure Traffic Manager. Now, users can disable endpoint health checks from an Azure Traffic Manager (ATM) profile and constantly direct traffic to a specific endpoint.
Jonathan finds this addition to be “a pretty decent feature.”
Justin, however, expressed concern over the additional effort required.
Microsoft recently announced their declared support for the Llama 2 family of LLMs on Azure and Windows. Llama2 is crafted to empower developers and organizations to create generative AI-driven tools and experiences.
Microsoft and Meta’s shared goal of democratizing AI and its advantages is reinforced by Meta’s open approach with Llama 2.
Furthering our AI ambitions, Microsoft announced Bing Chat Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing at Microsoft Inspire.
Bing Chat Enterprise will bring AI-powered chat capabilities into the workspace, enhancing communication and collaboration.
Details on timing will be shared soon.
Storm-0558 successfully acquired an inactive MSA consumer signing key, utilizing it to forge authentication tokens for Azure AD enterprise and MSA consumer access to OWA and Outlook.com.
Though all active MSA keys from before the incident have been invalidated, the method of acquiring the key is still under scrutiny.
Justin’s commentary captures the complexity of the situation:
“So, they fixed the root, which is good, but they still don’t actually know how they acquired the key…. So, this is not great.”
Lastly, Google continues to prioritize document automation this year with a sequence of launches.
Now, they are introducing the latest feature in Document AI Workbench, the Custom Document Splitter that will allow users to automatically split, classify, and sort multiple documents in a single file.
As Ryan notes, this tool could significantly enhance efficiency.
And that is the week in the cloud! We would like to thank our sponsors Foghorn Consulting. Check out our website, the home of the cloud pod where you can join our newsletter, slack team, send feedback or ask questions at thecloudpod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #thecloudpod
