Podcasts about Amazon Web Services

The Six Five On the Road at AWS #reInvent 2022. Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman sit down with Susanne Seitinger, Director of AI & ML, AWS. Their discussion covers: AWS end-to-end data strategy How SageMaker & machine learning is leveraged in the data strategy Responsible #AI

The Six Five "On The Road" at AWS #reInvent 2022. Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman sit down with Bratin Saha, VP & GM, AI & ML, AWS. Their discussion covers: Announcement of SageMaker & Omics Progress on Amazon Monitron Key trends driving machine learning & artificial intelligence #ML #AI

The Six Five On the Road at AWS #reInvent 2022. Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman sit down with Shubha Rao, Sr. Manager, Elastic Container Services, AWS at AWS re:Invent2022. Their discussion covers: Containers (ECS) as a critical part of modernization How ECS stacks up in the market Real-life examples of ECS deployed What can we expect in the future from AWS serverless containers

The Six Five In the Booth at #AWS #reInvent 2022. Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman sit down with Roger Premo, IBM's GM, Strategy & Corporate Development. Their discussion covers: The inception of the IBM - AWS partnership The progression of the alliance Priorities and synergies for IBM & AWS What can we expect in the future from this alliance

Can technology, and real-time technology in particular, help companies achieve savings during economic hardship? Alok Pareek thinks it can. Pareek is the Co-founder and EVP of products of Striim, a vendor whose goal and motto is to "help companies make data useful the instant it's born". Depending on which angle you look at it, you could say that Pareek is either biased or in the know. Either way, it was not so long ago that real-time data, or streaming data as this market is also called, was estimated to be worth billions. But then again, as the recent wave of layoffs and market capitalization losses goes to show, many projections around technology are off the mark. Could real-time data be different? Where does cloud modernization come into play and how does Striim's offering relate to that? As Striim today announced the availability of its fully managed Striim Cloud service on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we connected with Pareek to discuss.

Bunnings is facing major warehousing costs after sales for its outdoor category and gardening have been struggling due to poor weather.   Balenciaga, the luxury fashion house, has copped major heat from customers and celebs for its controversial ad campaign that showed children alongside very inappropriate objects.   Amazon will draw on its retail expertise to help other retailers boost sales… if they use Amazon Web Services.   ---   Build the financial wellbeing of your team with Flux at Work: https://bit.ly/fluxatwork Download the free app (App Store): http://bit.ly/FluxAppStore Download the free app (Google Play): http://bit.ly/FluxappGooglePlay Daily newsletter: https://bit.ly/fluxnewsletter Flux on Instagram: http://bit.ly/fluxinsta Flux on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@flux.finance   ---   The content in this podcast reflects the views and opinions of the hosts, and is intended for personal and not commercial use. We do not represent or endorse the accuracy or reliability of any opinion, statement or other information provided or distributed in these episodes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Pathfinder #0025, brought to you by Spaced Ventures, the planet's first public space investment portal. Today, we'll be talking about what in the world Amazon is up to in space, with someone who can speak to this probably better than almost anyone else on the planet. Clint Crosier served in the US Air Force and Space Force for 33 years, and helped stand up the latter branch. After retiring as a major general, Amazon recruited Clint to lead AWS's Aerospace and Satellites division. AWS is short for Amazon Web Services, which you'll hear a lot in this conversation. For the uninitiated, AWS is the world's leading cloud computing vendor by market share and revenue. In the last calendar year, Amazon's cloud unit made $62 billion, representing a 37% year over year increase over 2020. And it posted an $18 billion operating profit. AWS's Aerospace & Satellites group announced today that it had achieved a first, by running artificial intelligence/machine learning algorithms on a real-life, orbiting satellite. Clint and Ryan unpack the announcement, and also discuss what his team's building, who they're working with, how cloud and space fit together, and a whole lot more. ABOUT US Pathfinder is brought to you by Payload, a modern space media brand built from the ground up for a new age of space exploration and commercialization. We deliver need-to-know news and insights daily to 12,000+ decision-makers across commercial, civil, and military space. Payload began as a weekly newsletter sent to a handful of friends and colleagues. Today, we have three media properties and publish across multiple platforms. Our team is distributed across four time zones and two continents. We aim to inform but also educate and entertain, and we serve a highly concentrated audience of decision-makers in the commercial, civil, and military space sectors. And while we have designs on becoming the biggest space content company in the galaxy, for now, we publish: 1) Payload, our flagship daily newsletter, every Monday to Friday morning 2) Pathfinder, this podcast, on Tuesday mornings 3) ...and

Researchers are building robots that can build themselves | Tech Crunch (00:52) MIT researchers are working on a project to develop robots that effectively self-assemble.Team admits this technology is “years away” Work so far has shown positive results At the system's center are voxels, which carry power and data that can be shared between pieces. The pieces form the foundation of the robot by grabbing and attaching additional voxels before moving across the grid for further assembly.Currently working on building stronger connectors to keep the voxels together. States in their paper:“Our approach challenges the convention that larger constructions need larger machines to build them, and could be applied in areas that today either require substantial capital investments for fixed infrastructure or are altogether unfeasible.” The team suggests that using the robots to determine the optimal build could save on a lot of time spent prototyping.“While there has been increasing interest in 3-D-printed houses, today those require printing machinery as large or larger than the house being built. Again, the potential for such structures to instead be assembled by swarms of tiny robots could provide benefits. And the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is also interested in the work for the possibility of building structures for coastal protection against erosion and sea level rise.”   A game-changing new hybrid EV battery recharges in only 72 seconds | Interesting Engineering (06:03) Swiss startup Morand, has developed new battery technology that could see electric vehicle (EV) batteries charge in less time than it takes to fill an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle at a gas station.  Called eTechnology The new technology, which can charge electric cars in only 72 seconds, is a hybrid system that uses technology from traditional batteries and ultracapacitors.ULTRACAPACITORS deliver quick bursts of energy during peak power demands, then quickly store energy and capture excess power that is otherwise lost. The startup says that, during testing, a prototype of its eTechnology solution was able to recharge at up to 900 A/360 kW:80 percent in just 72 seconds,  98 percent in 120 seconds, and  100 percent in 2.5 minutes.  The company also states that Geo Technology performed independent testing. Morand says it has tested its eTechnology prototype over more than 50,000 cycles and claims the technology shows potential for retaining power over far more charge/discharge cycles than a traditional lithium-ion battery. The company is looking to bring the technology to market, no word on the exact date.It will likely be more expensive than lithium-ion battery technology, to begin with. Morand aims to scale production to lower the cost of its potentially game-changing hybrid technology.   Amazon makes a new push into health care | The Economist (13:05) Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, highlighted a big opportunity for the company moving forwards.Health care Many tech firms are already diving into this health marketApple tracks wellbeing through the iPhone Microsoft offers cloud-computing services to health firms Alphabet sells wearable devices and is pumping money into biotech research Amazon is taking a different route with Amazon Clinic, an online service operating in 32 states that offers virtual health care for over 20 conditions from acne to allergies.Described as a virtual storefront that connects users with third-party health providers. The launch follows the $3.9bn takeover, announced in July, of One Medical, a primary care provider that offers telehealth services online and runs bricks-and-mortar clinics Neil Linsday, formerly responsible for Prime,  has said health care “is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention”. This is the latest move the complement previous moves Amazon has made into this space:2021: Amazon Web Services launched specific cloud services for health care 2020: Launched Halo band, which is a wearable device that monitors the user's health status. 2018: Acquired PillPack, a digital pharmacy that is now part of Amazon Pharmacy Amazon Clinic will accept cash for its services, rather than relying on America's insurance system to recoup costs.The company is betting that primary care will become more digital.  Amazon's health push comes with several risks: CVS  reportedly outbid Amazon for Signify Health, a large primary-care provider Walgreens increased its stake in Villagemd JPMorgan recently opened primary-care centers of its own Previous track record in healthcare not 100% success (Amazon Care & Haven) Competition: Worst of all regulators Amazon's jump into this industry should have a positive effect. Its experience at keeping customers happy while generating thin margins could improve primary care and force other providers to up their game.   MRI reveals never-seen-before spaces in brains of migraine sufferers | New Atlas (19:49) Though they are common and can have severely debilitating effects, the precise cause of migraines remains a mystery.From the web MD,  “Doctors aren't totally sure what causes migraine headaches, but they think imbalances in certain brain chemicals may play a role.” A study by researchers at the University of Southern California has shed important new light migraines by leveraging cutting-edge imaging technology to gain a new perspective on structures in the brain.Advanced imaging technology called 7T MRI The research centers on what are known as perivascular spaces, which are gaps around the blood vessels that help clear fluids from the brain. The images of the brain revealed that those spaces were enlarged. Inflammation and abnormalities in the blood-brain barrier can impact their shape and size. The team enlisted five healthy controls, 10 subjects with chronic migraines and 10 subjects with episodic migraines without aura.Without aura means migraines without tingling and visual disturbances. The 7T MRI images compared tiny differences in the participants' brains.“Because 7T MRI is able to create images of the brain with much higher resolution and better quality than other MRI types, it can be used to demonstrate much smaller changes that happen in brain tissue after a migraine,” said study co-author Wilson Xu. Among these changes were cerebral microbleeds, along with enlarged perivascular spaces in the centrum semiovale region of the brain, in the migraine sufferers.Centrum Semiovale – a mass consisting of white matter that is on top of the lateral ventricles or corpus collosum found in each of the cerebral hemispheres at the bottom of the cerebral cortex. According to the researchers these “significant changes” of the perivascular spaces  have never been reported before.  The team hypothesizes that the differences in the perivascular spaces may be indicative of disruption to the glymphatic system, which works with the perivascular spaces to clear waste from the brain.Hope to resolve these mysteries through larger studies on more diverse cohorts, over longer time frames. Xu thinks this could “help us develop new, personalized ways to diagnose and treat migraines.”   Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta is now available to all owners in North America | Electrek (26:09) Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta is now available to all owners who ordered the Full Self-Driving package in North America, according to Elon Musk's Twitter announcement:“Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta is now available to anyone in North America who requests it from the car screen, assuming you have bought this option. Congrats to [the] Tesla Autopilot/AI team on achieving a major milestone!” This enables Tesla vehicles to drive autonomously to a destination entered in the car's navigation system. Since the responsibility rests with the driver and not Tesla's system, it is still considered a level-two driver-assist system, despite its name. Twitter user @WholeMarsBlog posted about his experience with FSD:“Guys. I drove all around LA today and yesterday. Used FSD 100% of the time. Had zero takeovers. Recorded all today's drives to Petersen museum, LA auto show, and then back” Reminder the FSD package subscription price:Basic Autopilot to FSD capability - $199.00 per month Enhanced Autopilot to FSD capability - $99.00 per month

Yonatan Cohen – Co-Founder & CTO of Quantum Machines – joins us in this episode to tackle quantum computing!  Did you know anyone can run quantum programs on Amazon Web Services for mere dollars? Learn about this field early to take pole superposition in the race to understand and use quantum computers!00:00:45 Introductions00:01:20 Yonatan's beginnings00:03:49 The simulation question00:05:51 How physics led to quantum computing00:14:56 Richard Feynman00:16:44 On the irreversibility of normal computers00:21:25 Logic gates00:25:04 Qubits00:30:11 An example of qubits00:38:19 Why simulating a quantum computer matters00:42:23 NP-complete problems00:48:57 More people at a higher development level are needed00:54:16 Quantum machines in the middle layer01:02:56 Working at Quantum Machines01:05:05 FarewellsResources mentioned in this episode:Links: Quantum Machines: Website: https://www.quantum-machines.co/ Careers: https://www.quantum-machines.co/careers/ Yonatan Cohen:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yonatan-cohen-10076b113/ References:Getting Started with Quantum Computinghttps://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/how-to-learn-quantum-computing If you've enjoyed this episode, you can listen to more on Programming Throwdown's website: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/Reach out to us via email: programmingthrowdown@gmail.comYou can also follow Programming Throwdown on Facebook | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Player.FM Join the discussion on our DiscordHelp support Programming Throwdown through our Patreon ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

In this episode, Avanish Sahai and Chris Grusz use the marketplace journey of Amazon Web Services as a springboard to discuss a variety of platform-related topics:The driver of a successful flywheel (2:17)Developing products and fostering selection to match customer demand (5:28)Balancing feature development between both buyers and sellers to maximize value for both (7:45)The advantages offered by a marketplace when co-selling with ISVs (14:56)The Amazon leadership mindset, and facilitating feedback from customers (20:54)Maintaining a long view and finding ways to attract new types of customers (25:32)Offering simplification: the key to successful marketplaces (30:00)Guest: Chris Grusz, General Manager, WW ISV Alliances & Marketplace, Amazon Web ServicesChris Grusz is the General Manager, ISV Alliances & Marketplace.  In this role he leads the ISV Partner Development and Marketplace organizations globally. With AWS since 2015, his team is responsible for the adoption of AWS Marketplace - with double digit YoY growth equating to billions in sales on an annual basis, more than 2,000 ISVs and 12,000 software product listings in AWS Marketplace.  Chris' team works with all ISVs to adopt various partner programs and co-sell initiatives.   In addition, his team also works with customers across Commercial and Public Sector on a global basis, helping them utilize AWS Marketplace to change how they find, buy, deploy, and manage application portfolios running on AWS. Prior to joining AWS, Chris held various leadership roles including Director of Sales, Managing Director and Business Unit Executive for IBM in Sales & Distribution as well as IBM Software Group. Chris holds a BA in Business Administration and an MBA in Technology Management from the University of Washington where he graduated Magna Cum Laude.Host: Avanish SahaiAvanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow.  From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase.  Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.About TidemarkTidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale.  Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years.  Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.LinksFollow our guests, Chris GruszFollow our host, Avanish SahaiLearn more about Tidemark

Our founders Daniel Seidel and Sven Przywarra discuss AWS Aerospace with its EMEA department head, Guido Baraglia. Three years ago, Amazon Web Services launched their space and satellite business unit. With his extensive record in the aerospace industry, it's no surprise that Guido became department head in early 2022. “It is a matter of not letting the train go by without jumping on board,” he says, in regards to his new position. The enthusiasm Guido brings to his work at AWS is the same energy he brings to NewSpace. In this conversation, Guido provides a glimpse into the source of his motivation and offers exclusive insights into our increasingly NewSpace dependent world. Listen to this episode to discover how AWS is making history by leading innovation – with its customer-centric approach to cloud operations, its hyper data-driven mindset and its ambitious vision for the future.

How does the left and right brain differ in decision-making? In this week's show, Aaron Longwell, a Software Manager at Amazon Web Services, dives deep into this idea. He joins Etienne de Bruin to talk about the importance of context in decision-making, communication, and how pushing management decisions down in an organization can lead to problems. Some ideas you'll hear them explore are: Throughout history, humans have favored the left-brain model of thinking. "We pay less attention to context and … to emotions, pay less attention to the body and more to the brain," Aaron says. Alternatively, the right side of the brain is more creative. Good communication is a major factor in solving challenges. Code is communication, so being able to communicate effectively will allow you to code more effectively.  Getting communication right from the start saves you time. Don't assume that you're being understood, verify that you are. Ask questions that can let you know that the other person is understanding what you are saying and that you're both on the same page.  The mentality of reusing what you can is flawed. The idea that because someone already built in some component of the communication in the software, so it doesn't need to be reworked opens you up for a lot of third-party dependencies and increases complexity. Pushing management decisions lower down in an organization creates redundant decision making. Complexity is a prerequisite to being robust. Resources Aaron Longwell | LinkedIn  Thinking, Fast and Slow The Master and His Emissary 

IN EPISODE 107: Why do some people flourish in new roles while others fail? Too often, transitioning managers and employees don't live up to their organizations' expectations. In Episode 107, David Sylvester shows how "fast movers" — the people who are the most productive, innovative, and engaged in new roles — thrive through a combination of broad networks, beneficial relationships, and a bias for action. You'll learn the five behaviors of fast movers and how you can adopt these practices and ensure that your next career transition succeeds from the start. ABOUT DAVID SYLVESTER: David Sylvester is the Director of Global Executive Recruiting at Amazon Web Services, where he builds the mechanisms designed to hire and accelerate success for the top 1% of AWS's executive leadership globally. Prior to joining AWS, he was the Director of Global Learning & Development at Booz Allen Hamilton. David is a member of the Connected Commons research consortium and has written about recruiting and onboarding for Harvard Business Review.

เดือนตุลาคมที่ผ่านมา Amazon Web Services หรือ AWS ผู้ให้การ Cloud Computing ที่ครองสัดส่วนการตลาดมากที่สุดของโลก ประกาศลงทุนสร้าง Data Center ที่ประเทศไทย โดยตั้งชื่อว่า AWS Asia-Pacific (Bangkok) Region คิดเป็นมูลค่ากว่า 1.9 แสนล้านบาท ทำให้หลายคนหันมาจับตามองว่า เหตุการณ์ครั้งนี้จะเป็นจุดเปลี่ยนที่ยกระดับให้ไทยกลายเป็น Data Center Hub แห่งเอเชียได้หรือไม่ เคน นครินทร์ ชวนร่วมวิเคราะห์ถึงสาเหตุเบื้องหลังการตัดสินใจของ AWS พร้อมฉายภาพให้เห็นถึงผลประโยชน์ที่เกิดขึ้นจากการลงทุนของบริษัทระดับโลก และฟังคำตอบจากปากผู้บริหารตัวจริง แม็กซ์ ปีเตอร์สัน Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS ถึงความมุ่งมั่นที่จะถ่ายทอดองค์ความรู้ระดับโลกมาสู่คนไทย

Digital transformation isn't just a buzzword, it is a reality. And cloud computing is the chief protagonist of this game. Are we still in the early innings of the cloud computing journey? What impacts are the current macroeconomic headwinds having on this sector? 7investing Lead Advisors Matthew Cochrane and Anirban Mahanti consider these and other related questions in this podcast. Cochrane and Mahanti look at the recent results from the cloud hyperscalers: Google Cloud Computing (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to Mahanti, GCP's performance was the bright spot in Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) recently reported results. Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Azure and Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) AWS have experienced some softness in recent quarters. However, their growth at scale is still phenomenal. AWS remains the crown jewel of the Amazon empire in so far as generating gobs of operating income is concerned! In the podcast, Cochrane dives into management commentary about managing the macroeconomic environment. Both companies focus on their customers' long-term success, making these platforms sticky and incredibly powerful over the long term. In particular, Microsoft and Amazon have hinted at working with customers to optimize workloads and, thus, costs to help them through this difficult time. Towards the end of the podcast, Cochrane and Mahanti identify a dark horse in the race for being the fourth pillar of the hyperscale revolution. Which company is it? And does it deserve your attention? Listen/watch to discover this company's name and learn what it is doing to tackle the big three of cloud computing. Readers interested in this topic may want to pair the podcast with Anirban Mahanti's quarterly cloud computing checkin report. The November 2022 edition of this report is available here. Welcome to 7investing. We are here to empower you to invest in your future! We publish our 7 best ideas in the stock market to our subscribers for just $49 per month or $399 per year. Start your journey toward's financial independence: https://www.7investing.com/subscribe Stop by our website to level-up your investing education: https://www.7investing.com Join the 7investing Community Forum: https://discord.gg/6YvazDf9sw Follow us: ► https://www.facebook.com/7investing ► https://twitter.com/7investing ► https://instagram.com/7investing --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/7investing/message

Andrea Caldini, VP of network engineering at Verizon, has seen a lot of wireless technology evolution during her 20 years at the telecom giant. This includes that carrier's initial 3G launch based on CDMA technology, its radical move to 4G LTE more than a decade ago, and its more recent push into 5G. “I remember at some point thinking 64 kb/s was really fast,” Caldini joked during an interview with SDxCentral. Caldini cited Verizon's early 5G work, including its early work toward 5G standards that were initially outside of the normal standards bodies. Verizon has also been able to inject a lot more spectrum into its 5G services based on that technology standards ability to support larger “chunks” of spectrum. Caldini cited the carrier's extensive millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum holdings that support significant capacity and its ongoing deployment of its C-Band spectrum that is providing a broader reach. As part of that push, Verizon itself has been able to expand those network updates broadly across the organization, including into its Verizon Business Group. That group has been a driver of Verizon's recent business operations. Verizon 5G and the Private, MEC Space That work has also begun to spread more into the private 5G space, which Caldini said is a “huge opportunity here,” and the is “a gateway into mobile edge compute.” Verizon's MEC efforts include agreements with all three major hyperscalers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – to provide optionality to enterprises. This allows the carrier to support two deployment models: private MEC and public MEC. The private MEC path involves an on-premises device deployment that allows an enterprise to maintain total control over its data. The carrier runs this on top of its agreement with AWS, Microsoft, and GCP. The public MEC work taps into nearly 20 locations where Verizon is collocated with the hyperscalers. This model is one Verizon executives have previously stated provide a connection point to within 150 miles of most enterprises. “As you're creating these solutions, you're looking to have your workloads closer, so you might have a low-latency need and need to have that workload closer,” Caldini said, adding that this private and public MEC integration then allows an enterprise to adjust where they want to run applications and still have it all under strict control. “They all come together as you create these new services to support a business need.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As COP 27 kicks off in Egypt, The UN chief says we're not doing enough to prevent a climate catastrophe. On the bright side, France is mandating all parking lots have solar panels over them resulting in the power of 10 nuclear reactors. An analyst says Tesla may never achieve full self-driving. South Dakota produced more energy from wind than any other source. Why a switch in power in the United States Congress won't kill Biden's Inflation Reduction / Climate act. Brian's PTC cabin heater in his Tesla Model 3 had to be replaced and that meant driving in a parka for two and a half hours to the closes service center. Clip from the Energy Vs Climate podcast with guest Katherine Hamilton. Netflix has a documentary on Nissan head and current criminal Carlos Ghosn called 'Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn." He was accused of stealing millions from Nissan and escaping in a storage chest on a plane. The eight billionth human being is about to be born. We disguss the Energi Media YouTube channel where Markham Hislop talked to an analyst from Guidehouse Insights about what's taking level 4 autonomy so long. Porsche has made 100,000 EVs. Tesla (TSLA) is now earning eight times more per car than Toyota, and they are starting to notice back in Japan. Pakistan's utility knows going green means consumers pay less for their electricity bill. Electrek editor Fred Lambert on Elon Musk's feedback loop of constant praise. The "hydrogen-is-not-all-that" podcast suggested by one of our listeners can be found here. Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show. Follow us on TikTok! @cleanenergypod Check out our YouTube Channel! @CleanEnergyShow Follow us on Twitter! @CleanEnergyPod Your hosts: James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstockton Email us at cleanenergyshow@gmail.com Leave us an online voicemail at http://speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow Tell your friends about us on social media! What should we do for Patreon perks coming in 2023? Let us know your ideas! Transcript  Hello and welcome to Episode 138 of the Clean Energy Show. I'm Brian Stockton. I'm James Whittingham. This week, several companies are throwing to the towel and full selfdriving, but please keep your hands on the wheel and your attention on the road as you listen to this podcast. The state of South Dakota and now produces more electricity from wind than any other source. Must be the hot air coming from Mount Rushmore, am I right? No. UN Chief Antonio Gutierrez says we are on the highway to Climate Hill with our foot still on the accelerator. Again, please keep your hands on the wheel and your attention on the road as you listen to this podcast. In France, the government has ordered that all parking lots must be covered by solar panels, all because President Emmanuel Macron can't get the top back up on his convertible Renault. All that and so much more on this edition of the Clean Energy Show. And also this week, Brian, why a switch in power in the United States Congress, which is voting as we speak, as we record this won't kill Biden's inflation reduction act, but a change in government in Canada actually would be problem for us north of the border because well, I'll get to that later. And we also have a bit of an update live from Cop 27, sort of. And what's new with you? How was your trip to Saskatoon? Because last week you're heading north two and a half hours in the snowy Canadian winter to get your Tesla fixes. That's the closest Tesla service center to you. Yeah, that's right. So the heater has not been working right and didn't seem to be working quite right last winter, but kind of not enough to generate an error message. But now I had an error message, so they seemed to know what to do to fix it. So drove up Saskatoon, where the closest service center is, and yes, they replaced the whole heater. That's what they did. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's under warranty. Everything's fine, isn't it? Everything's fine. When does the warranty end? Let me ask you, because it has, as we pointed out a couple of weeks ago, two and a half years, a quarter decade, getting close to the point where this is going to start killing you in the wallet. I don't recall when it ends, but I think it might say specs of warrant. It says in the app somewhere. Yes, here in the app. The Tesla app, basic vehicle, limited warranty, expires in March 2024 or 80,000, battery 2028 or 160 and the drive unit 2028 or 160,000 km as well. So, yeah, a couple more years to go on the basic warranty. Okay, I see. This could be a different discussion in the future. OK, what was it? Was it the PTC heater, the resistive heater? Yeah. Or you don't have a heat pump, so that's what it was. No heat pump. So the resistive heater. Yeah, for some reason they were sure about that. They were pretty sure by the time I got there. Because they have all the data from the car, like everything, the car is digitized and they can see all the data from my car. So as I dropped it off, they said, yeah, it's probably the whole heater needs to be replaced. And they were prepared to do that. And at the same time, too, there's been a recall for the trunk lid harness or something. I think it's to do with the cables, the wire harness to the camera in the back. So they did that at the same time. And it took about like 4 hours for them to do it. Wasn't too bad. Is that right? You had an appointment at 08:00 a.m. And they went right at it and started working on it. Yes. Call me around 1130. And they had the part, which is good again, I assume because they had all the data, they could order the parts ahead of time that they would need. That's nice. Yeah. And they gave me a loaner car, which I drove around Saskatchewan for a while. And yes, I got back before there was another blizzard. What was that? A couple of days later, our second blizzard of the year. Which is not technically a blizzard environment. Canada doesn't call it a blizzard. Do not call it a blizzard. But boy, was it a blizzard. It was crazy. Another nasty, nasty one. And I think we were the epicenter this time. Last time it was Moose Jaw. Yes, really nasty. Tons of snow. Yes. Crazy out there. How was your trip back? Was it okay? And the heater was all hot. How was it there, though? It was below zero, so I put on my parka. So you didn't have heat? There was a little bit of heat, not enough. And the heated seat was still working, but with the parka on, it was fine. Here's what I'm thinking, and that is the newer cars have a heat pump. Yeah, that's right. Newer cars have a heat pump instead of a resistive heater. So they don't have both then? I don't think so, no. You'd think that they might need one as a backup. But maybe the car generates enough heat that it holds. It's taking heat from the motor, it's taking heat from the from the batteries or something. There's a loop of different things that heat up here. But we do know there has been problems with some of the heat pumps as well in extreme cold. Is it in the heat pump itself or something related to the heat pump? Anyway, that's interesting because you didn't get a price on what that would be. Didn't show the invoice of what that repair would cost. No, they didn't. Just said zero. I'd be interested. I guess you could look it up online. What somebody else did we'll talk more about this sort of thing in future months. So anything else? You went up? You managed, your feet didn't get cold? Yes. No. It was a little bit chilly, but it wasn't too bad. Was it the most unpleasant trip you've had because you work cold? Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. I've got a really warm parka, so it felt almost normal. With that on, the heat can radiate up from the heated seat and fill the market. There you go. And then the other thing that's going on with me is they started shooting a TV show across the street from me here in the neighborhood. Really? You know, that's happened before, hasn't it? What is it about across the street? Because there used to be somebody of relevant who lived there who was connected to the film industry. Yes. They're gone. Not anymore. And it's their house that's being rented for this shoot. That's a weird coincidence, though. Yeah. And our good friend Jay is working on the shoot, so I've run into him out there on the street. Wow. I bet he doesn't know we're talking about him. No, probably not. I assume he doesn't listen to the podcast. No, he wouldn't. He's an old man. I don't think he knows what a podcast oh, he's an angry old man, Brian. Angry, angry old man who is actually six months younger than me. So he's working in winter and there's a TV show shooting across the street from you. I think Jay would prefer to be shooting in a sound stage where there's a lot more room for everybody and it's a lot more comfortable because, of course, it's a blizzard, remember? Why couldn't it be a James Cameron green screen affair? That's what you want to work on. But yeah, no, there's a lot of traffic on the street, lots of cars parked on our streets. But it's fine. Back in the day when I was a kid, I did a couple shows outside. It's horrible. Even in the fall when it's warmer than this, to spend 14 hours outside is just not good. I mean, they're shooting really inside the house, but there's so many crew people that they got to have to spill out into the cars and into the yard and everything. Is there somebody blocking traffic? No, no one closing off the traffic so far. Okay, that'd be annoying. You're coming home, you got to pee. Some little film student has a stop sign and says, no, you can't. So it's really weird. Happened to be on Sunday. I was biting my own business watching TV. We were snowed in. It was a blizzard, as you say, right. I couldn't do anything. So my son's home from college, and he took a shower. And I got to thinking, what is that cable cam on football games called? What is the brand name for that? Because I started thinking about that, and so I googled it, and it's called a Sky Cam. And then that took me to the Wikipedia page of the sky camp. And then I found out that the Sky Cam company was bought by this company, then bought by that company, and then it was bought by the person my son hates most of the world, which is Stan Crockey, the owner of the Arsenal Football Club in the Denver Broncos, and a bunch of other things. He's a bad man, according to people who support the team. And then I was gravitated towards a section that said incidents, because of course, that's sexy. I'm going to go there. There were three incidents, Brian. One in, like, 1981, when they first invented, and by the way, it was invented by the same person who invented the steadicam. Yeah. So that person, I'm assuming, is rich now. Yeah. So this is a camera that's on a giant cable that runs across the stage, two cables. So it's a couple of cables so it can fly over the players during a football game with a camera, I believe it's like a big X of cable, so it can go in three dimensions, back and forth. And just above the helms of it, you see them, you may not notice them. I don't think anybody who's paying attention notices them. Anyway, there was one incident at a small college football game back in the 80s when it was first came out. There was an incident in like, 25 years ago, and the third incident was an hour before I read it. An hour before I read it. It was a game that we didn't have. Here was the New York Jets game, and apparently the game was delayed by an hour because the Sky Cam fell from the I just thought that was weird. You're reading three incidents in history and going, this was an hour ago. The third one was an hour ago. And somebody had updated the Wikipedia. And of course they did, Brian, because Wikipedia, it's all about updating quickly. When we die, our family won't know before Wikipedia knows. Like, it will be updated instantly. Well, you know, there's no entry about me on Wikipedia, so if anyone out there well, there will be by then to write one. Me, too. I keep begging people to write one for years. I keep writing it myself, and they rejected, even though I have many awards if you're not allowed to accolades. And yeah, last night my partner had a grocery store order far away, and we went to the east end of town to pick up groceries because she ordered it in advance before the blizzard without checking the weather. It was a herring affair. And we decided to use her coupons for Carl's Jr. Which she never go to, but we thought that would be exotic someplace. We have a bit, let's go there and try this coupon out. And we got there and ordered it all went smoothly. And we got to the drive through window and there was this car load of teenagers in front of us who had been stuck there for an hour. And no one at the drivethrough told us anything. But the car in front of us was stuck right at the window for an hour. So we had the card that my partner uses and many, many years ago we went to the grocery store chain Superstore and they had clearance, these pieces of rectangular plastic that are grippy that you put under your wheel. They're like a little tread of plastic that's really pointy. Yeah. So it's something you keep in the trunk and if you get stuck in the snow, you put them under your wheels. Never used them. Cost about $0.50, like they were discounted from like twelve bucks to fifty cents. Never used them. But she had them in the car, put one under the front wheel, cut them out of there in a second. Wow. And they threw $20 at me, which I refused, of course, but they were so thankful to get out, they ever would. And of course it's embarrassing because you're blocking a fat guy from getting his burger behind you and that's no good. So, yeah, we got them out instantly, which was funny as hell. Good deed of the week. Sure. Now let's get on to some discussions with past stories because I wanted to talk about the Energy Vis Climate podcast. Okay? This is my name's. Sake ed. Woodynham calls himself I call myself Whittingham. He calls himself Woodynham. He's from Alberta. It's 90% chance for cousins. Okay, I haven't worked it out yet, but two people, there's like six Whittingham in Canada and apparently two of them fell into clean energy somehow. But whose podcast is more popular, that's what I want to know. Well, he's a big deal. He's been in the news for working for governments as a consultant. So he would have a lot of like this is not the same kind of podcast that people necessarily listen to because it's in the weeds, it's in policy. There's a lot of policy for people who work in the industry. That's a huge news. Well, I do listen to it. And they had Kathryn Hamilton on, who used to host the Clean Energy or the Energy Gang podcast. Now she's gone off to other things and I think she worked for the US government for a while. She's from the States, of course, and she's a clean energy expert and got decades of clean tech and policy in DC. And she was talking about the US midterms. And I was worried, I've said before on the show that I'm worried about what's going to happen because it's probably going to change. Power is going to change in one way or another in Washington, whether it's now or later, it always changes. How safe is the clean? The big biden thing is not going to be reversed because they're evil, they reverse things. They don't believe climate change at all. They're a hoax. So I just thought she had a really interesting answer that I'll play for you now. So I don't think that shift will have a direct impact yet on the climate goals. It will certainly prevent anything additional from happening. And the US. Congress holds the purse strings for the federal government. So just on appropriating funds to keep the government going, that will have an impact. But the pieces that are in IRA are pretty strong. I mean, they are tax credit, unless they were to completely rewrite the tax code. And I'll give you a little secret. When you give somebody something, don't ever try to take it away. So you're going to have all of these people taking advantage of credits. And in fact, manufacturers are already moving into states that are heavily Republican states and the last thing they want is those tax credits to go away. In fact, during the Trump administration, they never put on the table rolling back solar and wind tax credits. They just didn't because they knew that was a losing proposition for them. Yeah, I didn't realize that even during Trump they didn't roll back very much, did they, as far as climate goes, because business people were investing and that's the thing. Now in Canada, it's a different story. What they call it, and they refer to it as a runway. In the states, solar and wind have a ten year runway that it's guaranteed that if you invest, you can keep investing and it will still work out. You're not wasting your investment. You need to give assurances and security to people to make these investments because that's what the clean energy transition is. It's largely investing, but in Canada we don't have that. So our government is a minority parliamentarian. Government that may switch to 2025 will probably I mean, the government don't last forever around here either. And that government hardly wants to get rid of carbon taxes and doesn't seem to legitimately believe in climate change either. They're not that far off in the Republicans. But yeah, apparently the Canadian government is working on making that so that it's a guaranteed thing because investors are already threatening. They might be grandstanding, but they're threatening the one is going to the states because that's where the guarantee is, I don't know. And there's even definitely companies worried about doing business in places like Alberta because of the sort of backwards looking energy policy that they have there. If you're a giant business, giant international business, you're going to think twice setting up a business in a place that is denying climate change. And we were talking about Carlos Gon last week, the former chairman of Nissan who oversaw the implementation of the Nissan Leaf, the first mass produced electric car, which I happen to own a ten year old version of that. And there's actually a Netflix documentary that just came out a week ago as we were talking about that. Oh, fantastic. Well, I don't know that it is fantastic. I'm not reviewing it. I'm not endorsing it. It's called fugitive. The Curious Case of Carloscone. And I watched a bit of a lot of talking heads. It's interesting because it's kind of like a heist movie, right? Because he's accused of stealing millions from the car company he led, he was arrested in Japan and smuggled out of the country by two Americans in a storage chest, who, coincidentally, were also just convicted this week. As soon as I brought it up, things started happening. Brian wow. Okay. Well, I think I'll check that out. It was an interesting story just because of that one detail that he had to escape the country in a storage chest. Yeah. Oh. We have some breaking news. The 8th billionth human being is about to be born in the world. We go now to Antonio Gutiris, the head of the United Nations. The 8th billionth member of our human family is born. How will we answer when baby 8 billion is old enough to ask, what did you do for our world and for our planet when you had the chance? After President Trump announced that America would withdraw from the Paris Climate Change Accord, elon Musk immediately announced he would quit presidential business councils. We are in the fight of our lives and we are losing. Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising, and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. Twitter owner Elon Musk has told his followers on the platform to vote for a Republican congress. Tuesday, Musk tweeted, quote to independentminded voters, shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties. Global warming, which a lot of people think is a hoax. The Earth will end only when God declares it's time to be over. We are on a highway to Climate Hill with our foot still on the accelerator. This is a clean energy show with Brian Thompson and James Whittingham. Okay, so a quick start here from South Dakota. Now, we often talk about North Dakota here on the show because we're just above North Dakota here. In many ways. In many ways, I love North Dakota. Home of the Fargo Film Festival. Home of the Fargo Theater. Anyway, South Dakota, which is just below North Dakota, it is now getting most of its electricity from wind they previously had. Hydroelectric was the biggest source, but now 52% is coming from wind turbines in the province there. So congratulations to South Dakota. And what I say to that initially is, why not us? Brian why not us? I wonder what led that to happen. Like, what was it? Private investment? Because we have a utility owned, government owned utility here. Was it the private sector that saw cheap electricity that drove the investment in? That what sparked that? Because South Dakota is not in the day and age of accusing everything green as being on one side of the political spectrum and therefore the enemy the other, then I'm surprised that a state like South Dakota was able to do something like that. Yeah, in South Dakota and North Dakota, both tend to be conservative leaning states. It is slightly surprising, but as we know, it's a great idea. So we have very similar wind profile here in our province and a little bit of wind power, but it really needs to be cranked up. You know, it's interesting politically when I was in Fargo with you, that I was asking, because that was just when Trump was becoming a thing and I was trying to get a Trump sign to bring over, was asking around for one. They were all lefty apologizing for their country. But it just goes to show that even in very right wing states, you have pockets of people who are, you know, not everybody is going to be one way or the other. There's always pockets, even in the most extreme leaning states. Yeah, fargo is a college town. They've got, like, I think, three universities in Fargo or Fargo morehead. And of course, people involved in the film festival, I guess, tend to be people in the arts, more left leaning, but as a whole, pretty conservative places. And my son always points out that Wyoming has Casper, which is also a small college town, because we've been through Wyoming a few times and I've been shaken by some of the images I've seen there. And there's lots of bad things to look at and signs and messages. But, yeah, Casper, which is a town we did go to, it was like a Fargo of Wyoming. It was kind of like a cool little college town with a nice Taco Bell, I may add. Nice. And, you know, I wanted to go there for the eclipse. The total eclipse of the sun that was the closest to us was Casper, Wyoming. Oh, interesting. I think we had just done a six week vacation in the mountains with our camper, and I couldn't convince my partner to do it. I regret that ever since, because it would have been a one day trip to see something remarkable. No. And I thought about driving to Calgary or Winnipeg to see Kate Beaton, author of the Duck's graphic novel, which I was plugging on the show. But these blizzards prevented these blizzards are bad. You never know this time of year whether we live in western Canada, where you're going to get bad weather, and certainly any mountain pass, even the Sierra Nevada mountains, are getting killed with a whole whack of snow. I've got a story I wanted to talk about. I guess a few companies, at least a couple in the last week or so, that have dropped plans, like, Ford has announced that it has dropped plans for a level three driver assistance, which would lead them to robotaxis. And they're going to focus on level two just for the consumer rather than as a business. So that's been a big shift. Mercedes is kind of doing the same. They say robotaxis are no longer a goal. We thought that in 2016 or 17, and that's kind of when the neural net sort of became a thing and they thought, well, everything is going to be solved quickly, but now they're backing off of that and they thought they could solve the robotaxi problem quite quickly. And so did certain CEOs who now social media magnets, but committing to both a ride hailing solution and a passenger driven assistant solution was expensive. So they thought they just concentrated on the one that make people because people are demanding it now. They're demanding basically the different versions of autopilot for different cars just to drive itself on the highway. How was your autopilot, by the way, in wintertime? How is it doing on actual highways? Yeah, generally really good. It can kind of sense generally through the snow. Okay, well, self driving taxis that operate all day, every day and all kinds of weather have been a dream for many for decades, including one of the Google people who started their autonomous program, Waymo. Yes. So now he's programming trucks to operate within the confines of industrial sites. Only one of these guys. And he says the foreseeable future, that's as much as the complexity as any driverless vehicle will be able to handle, in his opinion. He says, forget about the profits, the combined revenue of all the robotax the robotruck companies, it's not a lot right now. It's probably more like zero. So our friend of the show, Mark Hislamp, who is one province over from us or two provinces over, but from where we live, he's got a YouTube show called Energy Media, and he also has a podcast from time to time, and he has a guest on from Guidehouse Insights. He's an automotive engineer and EV analyst. His name is Dulce Meade and he's somebody that I go to for EV information and sort of market knowledge like that. And boy, he's got some cold water to throw on the robotaxi thing. I got some clips from him. This is him talking about that it's going to be a while before someone solves this to be at the point where you can really start to scale it up dramatically and get to a level of number of vehicles on the road where you can start to build a really viable business out of it. It's probably closer to eight to ten years, closer towards the end of this decade than where we are today. And again, this is Marks YouTube show energy Media. I'll have a link to it in the show notes, so we can borrow from him without guilt. And also he's talking about how AI sort of plateaued. What I was just talking about, the Neuron net development in early 2010s was something that people thought would move fast but apparently he sees a big plateau happening and slowing down. We had that big advancement in the middle part of the last decade, and that suddenly moved things forward very quickly. But then it plateaued and it's been climbing very slowly ever since it hit that plateau. And so that's why it's hard to predict when we'll get to that stage where these systems are at least consistently as good as or better than humans. Now, there's been a Department of justice investigation into Musk over full selfdriving claims. According to Reuters, prosecutors in Washington, San Francisco are examining whether Tesla misled customers. I hear when you look at sort of on stage discussions from people in this space, they're really bad mouthed Tesla. Now, you could take that with a grain of salt and say it's envy, or I don't believe in their approach, but Tesla is always proving people wrong. Anyway, this is his opinion, his contrary opinion on the Tesla approach, and he doesn't think much of it. There are some fundamental flaws in the Tesla approach relying on cameras only, and particularly because of the way they've configured the cameras, where you don't have any stereoscopic imaging, so you can do parallax imaging to get some accurate distance measurement. Tesla is relying entirely on AI inference to try to measure distance to objects, which is an inherently flawed approach. The system that they have devised is not really capable of robust automated driving, and probably never will be. Between the name and what Elon Musk has consistently said for the last six years, since October of 2016, when they launched autopilot version two. And he started his presentation with starting today, all vehicles rolling out of the Tesla factory have all the hardware they need to get to level five. Autonomy. Which was a lie then and it's a lie today. He's a pinch angry, I think, which is up to the sort of a toad that I hear of these things. But yeah, well, we'll see. But Tesla's future is highly reliant on that's one big aspect of it. It's not just selling cars. Yeah, well, I suspect that they probably wouldn't do the same thing now. So that's back in 2016, and Tesla was not in a profitable position back then, so they started selling full selfdriving, I think partly just as a way to get revenue into the company, a future promise of a future feature. Since then, they've become very profitable and very stable. So if they were starting this program now, I don't think they would be selling this feature for the future at ten, $20,000. But, yeah, I suspect back then they just wanted the cash flow. And another problem that I've seen come up is people like you who have the full self driving beta but aren't using it. So apparently that's a bit of an issue because it's kind of annoying. Right? It turns off and you think, Well, I'll just drive normally for now. Yeah, I've. Got better things to do. Sure. Even as you're retirement. But this has become an issue because they're getting less data and they need more data, which is maybe one of the reasons why they're trying to roll it out to even people with bad driving scores. Yeah, but could they possibly even crunch all the data that they're getting? Almost on the inside observer, I have a friend who owns a Tesla, but you I'm amazed at how the promises keep coming that it's later this year, end of the year, next year, and year after year it's always there. But watching the progress of Auto full self driving beta, it does seem to be a slow crawl. Something could happen where everything comes together. I don't know, everything about it to ComEd and maybe they'll solve something that puts everything together and suddenly it makes a giant leap forward. But right now and we'll see. We'll see. Because we're six months away from testing your car again on the same route, and we'll see how it does. And we had a rainy day last year, so it wasn't perfect, but yeah. Anyway, France is doing something quite unusual, even for France. Yeah. So there is new legislation that was approved this week that requires all parking lots in France with spaces for at least 80 vehicles. This is both existing and new parking lots be covered by solar panels. So this is great. You think that has an 80 vehicle parking lot? What would that be? A strip mall? A strip mall would have that. Yeah, I guess so. We have quite a few kind of small parking lots in our city. I think that wouldn't qualify. Or even a big hotel. Brian would have 80 spots, wouldn't it? I mean, if you have 80 rooms, you'd have 80 spots. Yeah, it just makes sense. Like, this is schools, maybe. Yeah, schools. This is space that it's just there. And if we put solar panels on it, it will keep the rain off the cars and produce electricity. It's a nice incentive. So you have to do this. Yeah, this is the law. So according to the government, the potential of the measure could reach up to eleven gigawatts, or the equivalent of the power of ten nuclear reactors at midday on a Sunday in the summer. So that's interesting. That's a lot of power just from parking lots. No, and we've had stories in the past about covering canals. Like in California, I might as well cover the canals. It's just all this space that we have that could have a double use. And parking lots is one of them. You know, though, I wonder what the business model is for this, what the payback is, because I don't know what France's tariff system is, or if they have any money for just putting out the panels or the feed in of the electricity to the grid, how they pay and what the payback period is. But let's say that it's reasonable. You would have customers that would be pretty happy to be parking under a structure, an outdoor structure that shaded you, perhaps shield you from precipitation. And you could sit and wait for your spousal unit to shop. And you wouldn't cook in the sun. He would be shaded and comfortable. No, we have a real problem here. We have very hot sun in the summertime, so always better to get a parking spot with shade. I thought this was interesting. So it's the bigger parking lots that are going to have to do this first. Car parks with 400 spaces or more have about three years to comply, and then the smaller parking lots get about five years to complete. So this isn't just new construction. This is existing construction. Existing parking lots. That is a big deal. My goodness. Yeah. No, and if you think of some of the like, think of I don't know if they have Walmart in France, but you think of Walmart, the Walmart, the giant parking lots that we have for places like Walmart or shopping malls. Man, that would be a lot of solar panels. Yeah. I've been thinking about what we'll use, because the grocery store that we went to last night of the blizzard actually has a bunch of stuff built on the outside of what used to be a parking lot. There's actually an office building there with yeah, they've been restaurants used to be a gigantic parking lot, but they keep adding businesses to it. And that confused me because it's hard to find now it's easy to find a store at the end of a giant parking lot that's 10 miles away. There are walmarts in China. Do they? Yeah, they do. Wow. There's no French walmart in France, so I just Google that. Of course, there's a French Disneyland, but there's no French Walmart. It's basically the same, right? Yeah. Disney. When we do go to a robot taxi future, we're going to need less parking spaces. Right. So the way I envision it is, say I've got a shopping mall close to me that's got lots of parking spaces. And I think that what they could say is, well, you know, part of this shopping mall can be designated for Robotaxis because, you know, robotaxis will go mostly at the peak of when people get on and off work and on and off school. It's just like rush hour. But for the rest of the day, they'll have to sit somewhere. They'll need somewhere to have they'll need to go somewhere where they can charge and where they can somewhere nearby, different areas of town. I don't know where that's going to be. Yeah. Plus, I imagine it will be like the movie Cars, and they'll want to hang around together at a party, have social issues and things like that. Of course it will be like that. But at the same time, I'm wondering if we'll need less. Well, I mean, that's what Tony Seba says. We'll need less parking lots. And there's a significant amount of Los Angeles that has nothing but parking lots. And that's also a heat gainer for it increases the urban island, t island of cities as parking lots. Yeah. Well, hopefully we can densify all of our cities and just start building more building and housing on all these parking lots we're not going to. Right? And that'll be an exciting future. Plus like a driven right to the door. And hopefully some sort of device will lift me up and put me on an automated cart that will drive me around. Because walking is just too much for sure in the future, I think. So Porsche has made 100,000 cars. What does it mean? 100,000 of Brian? This is the Porsche Taycan electric car. They've now produced 1000 of this car. So it's been a pretty big success for Porsche. These are in demand. They are selling more of these than the 911, which is kind of the marquee car for Porsche. What I didn't know is it's not a huge company. This is really a niche player. So they delivered just over 300,000 vehicles last year. So they're a small car company niche and of course, very expensive. Tesla deliver like, one and a half million. Yeah, and they're just getting going. This is with two new factories that just went up. This is just with one. Yeah. So they delivered just over 300,000 vehicles total, and 41,000 of them were the all electric Ticans. So they have plans to electrify more of their lineup. But like a lot of things, it's been a little bit delayed. The Macan was the next one that they were going to electrify, and so far they haven't managed to do that. They've been surprised by that, haven't they? I mean, I think they've been overwhelmed by demand, but they've also stepped up to meet that demand, which is great, too. Yeah, but it really does make sense if you're someone who's interested in a Porsche, you're interested in performance driving. And as we know, Electric makes for fantastic performance driving. And if you're wealthy, then you want to impress your wealthy green friends. Well, there's nothing more luxurious, though, than driving quiet, so I love that. I don't know. Would that impress your green friends to a Porsche can? Some of them seems a little excessive. I've impressed myself. Maybe that's really what counts in the car world. Yeah. I don't know. It's a lot of money and you could probably solve the world hunger in a small nation somewhere for the purchase of that car. But Electric says that Tesla is now earning eight times more per car than Toyota. And Toyota is basically one of the world's largest automakers, and they're starting to apparently notice. Back in Japan, according to Electric, for example, tesla reported $3.3 billion in net profit last quarter, compared to Toyota earning just roughly 3 billion. So. Yeah, Tesla. This is despite Toyota delivering eight times more cars than Tesla in the same time period, and Tesla beat them on profits. That's kind of wild. It is. So they made the same money, same profits. But wow, I mean, the demand for Tesla is high. There's this whole inflation thing going on. There's the supply problem, the chip shortages. So they have eat up their prices a little bit. Thousand here, thousand there, as a lot of people are. What do you think it is? It's like a third of profit per car or something like that. It's really high. It's higher than most people. Yeah, I don't know. But the traditional automakers make more money on things like service and part of stuff. So this milestone of Tesla beating Toyota and earnings during a quarter is especially impressive when you consider that just a decade ago, toyota owned 3% of Tesla with just a $50 million investment. Think of how they get rid of that. So now Tesla generates $50 million in free cash flow almost every day, which is why the CEO can do cookie things and do whatever they want. So it's now time for the Tweet of the Week. This is where I highlight a tweet that I like. There's a couple of good ones. Maybe I'll do two. This week from Jenny Chase, solar analyst with Bloomberg NEF New Energy Finance. It's a casual line from those hippies at Pakistan's National Electric Power Regulatory Authority. And this is basically what they said in their report. They said the existing average cost of supply electricity to consumers is high, way too high. And one way to reduce this high cost is to procure cheap electricity from indigenous resources like wind and solar. Now, if we heard that from our utility in Canada, that would be remarkable. But this is coming from Pakistan, a very conservative place, who is not known, especially in governmental terms, to talk like this. But they see the value of this. No utility talks this way, actually. But Pakistan is and because she lives in the solar space, she knows nobody else is saying that but Pakistan Solar, or pardon me, the electricity utility is saying that one way that we're going to lower prices is by buying wind and solar. So good for them. Yeah. As we've said before, the fuel costs for wind and solar are zero. And now a secondary Tweet of the week. Just because I wanted to do too, and I hate deciding, brian, it's a lot of work to decide. Why should I have to decide? Fred lambert lambert. Lambert. Lambert. Fred Lambert, editor in chief at Electric. He says his personal account he says when I talk about Elon's feedback loop being hijacked by superfans, this is what I mean. And he has a story from the Mercury News in San Jose, California. And before I go on, I just want to say that Fred owns like, five teslas has been the biggest fan of Tesla and he's a journalist, but he's been reporting on Tesla forever. He is an enthusiast. He's cheering them on in every way. But Elon Musk blocked him once a long time ago because he had something mildly critical to say and Elon couldn't just take that. So what Fred thinks is that Elon like Michael Jackson and other people, they have this feedback loop of everybody who's constantly praising them. And this is a story from the San Jose newspaper that says that this one guy who's like a dad was tweeting him like 19 times a day or something. And Elon was often responding to him because it's such praise. And the softspoken superfan dad praised him for being fit, ripped and healthy and asked, hey Elon Musk, what's your secret? It sounds like almost a joke, like a comedian might do that because it's the opposite of true. He's not fit, he's not ripped, he's not healthy. You look at him and you see a guy who doesn't he's like an It guy who never gets an hour of sleep. It looks like he hasn't had sleep in years. And certainly not the healthy lifestyle and certainly no son. And the world's richest man's response was how do I keep fit and healthy? Fasting and diabetic drug that promotes weight loss. So good for you. When you're rich, you get to have the diagnosis. Drugs that promote weight loss and fasting is not good. Sumo wrestlers fast. They don't eat until 01:00 p.m. In the afternoon. Yeah. Wow. Not to 01:00 p.m. In the afternoon. That is a CES fast fact for you. That's because they store more weight if they don't eat all day. They train their body to fast. See, in human history, back when we were in caves and such, ten years ago, if you didn't eat, your body would think it was a famine and it would store extra weight. It would just change. So like fat people like me would survive in a zombie apocalypse. So my nutritionist tells me because we would need 20% less calories because we're that more efficient. Anyway, so we get a little bit of feedback here from the Twitter says clean energy fraud. You guys are talking about the future of hydrogen. So check out this podcast and what was it? It says this guy's super anti hydrogen and has some great points. And this is from Nelson. The podcast was our friend Mark Mslop at Energy Talk Show. He has a podcast as well. Occasionally puts out a guest, Paul Martin, a chemical engineer with a 30 year history of working with hydrogen and a member of the Hydrogen Science Coalition. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you want to hear some smack talk on hydrogen. And coming up in the show is the lightning round zoom through the rest of the week's headlines in a fast fashion. We like to hear from you. It's really what we live on. Brian doesn't get up in the morning without the hope of somebody contacting us. Clean energy show@gmail.com. We're on TikTok and Instagram and everywhere else. Clean energy, pond. We're on mastodon. At Mastodon Energy. We're on YouTube. Clean energy show. Speak Pipe. You can leave us an online voicemail message. Speak pipe.com. Cleanenergyshow. That sound means it is time for the lightning round, where we'll end the show this way. A fast paced look of the week in clean energy and climate news. Canada is putting the break on China's $4 billion lithium acquisition free. China is here buying up all the lithium they can, and Canada has finally said no. So Chinese companies have been the biggest financers of overseas lithium projects globally in recent years, including purchases of Canadian listed assets. And that's a new development, Brian. Yeah. So this is new legislation that limits the foreign ownership of some of these critical minerals that we're going to need for the electric revolution. Call it the biden approach, saying no more China. The Charging Interface Initiative, a global industry association focused on the electrification of transportation, has launched its new megawatt charging system. MCs is going to be called. We have CCS, the non Tesla standard for charging connectors. This is going to be MCs. So memorize that term. Brian. MCs is the new megawatt charging system standard for North America. So this will be some specific kind of plug and protocol for how to charge at even higher speeds. Megawatt speeds for trucks, basically for trucks, big trucks. Not necessarily all semitransport trucks, but medium trucks as well. This is interesting. The 2023 Kia EV six base trim has been dropped. And the starting price that means has dropped to an unfortunate $50,000 US. That means brian, I can't afford it. Yes, that's too bad. I mean, we sometimes do get different trim levels here in Canada, so we'll see. But 50,000 is a lot. Another CS fast fact, the golden toad is the first species to go extinct to climate change. Put that in your toaster and smoke it. It's too warm for them. And I guess the towed has had enough. Panasonic has broken ground on their EV battery factory in Kansas. This is what we refer to early red states getting a lot of this EV manufacturing, green tech manufacturing and jobs. And they'll be making 2070 cylindrical cells. A Viking bus orders 31 Mercedes Benz E Cetera buses as long distance runners in the country known as Denmark. Hello, Denmark. The reason I bring that up is because we've mentioned this before. When will long distance city to city buses electrify? Well, the answer is, I guess it's starting. That's great. The market share of zero mission light duty vehicle registrations in Canada hit 9.4% in the third quarter of this year. And that's a new record. It's up from any previous record which shows that the EV adoption is accelerating in Canada. Yeah, we're definitely past some sort of a tipping point, which is often said to be around 5% of the market. So, yeah. Canada at 9.4% EVs. That's fantastic. How many Ford Mustang electrics do you see around? I see them almost every day now. Maybe it's the same neighborhood, I don't know, but I see them everywhere. The North End, one of 600 EV sold in Europe will be made by Chinese makers of EVs by 2025. Fitch solution says, according to the China EV Post, So that's interesting. Something we've been following since the early days of this podcast is when will Chinese EV makers start to make gains in Western markets? Yeah, and I guess you're at first, because it's always Europe first, isn't it? Because they need their EVs over there. It's physically closer and they have tougher regulations to kind of phase out combustion. A slight majority of California voters favor the recently announced ban on new sales of gasoline powered vehicles by 2035. Only 52% and 43% disapprove, but hopefully they'll come around when prices do. I don't think anyone's going to complain about the range and prices there and charging infrastructure. Another fast fact air conditioners and heating elements consume 50% of electricity in America. Did you know that? That's a lot. No, that's a lot. Analysis as seen by the BBC shows that the production and transport of LNG causes up to ten times the carbon emissions compared to pipeline gas. So build more pipeline. I'm kidding. This around here, liquid natural gas as opposed to actual gas that goes through pipes. The greater than 8% electricity from a solar club in Europe for 2021. Here's the countries that have 8% or more just from solar germany, Spain, Greece, Italy, Netherlands not bad. And there's a whole bunch of 5%. A whole whack at 5%. Good for you. Greece, by the way. I always think of Greece as a leader in clean energy, but these things, they sneak up on you. Amazon is meeting holiday demand this year with a fleet of over 1000 Livian electric vehicle delivery vans. So we are talking about those for a long time now. And I guess there's a thousand on the roads for Christmas this year. Yeah, that's not bad. But 10,000 next year and 50,000 a year after that or something. Yeah, they've definitely ordered more than that. Amazon is a big investor in Rivian and they're desperately trying to scale up their production of these vans and their pickup trucks. So hopefully things speed up nicely. And finally this week, Tony Sieve says in a post that speaking of Amazon, amazon created a vast information technology infrastructure, but the use of just five weeks of the year, the holiday shopping season, which is Christmas in November and December where we live, they overbuilt capacity for the rest of the year. And he says, well, let's call that super data center. And thus the Amazon AWS cloud was born, which you see advertised on TV. It's now a trillion dollar business because they overbuilt something. So the reason he mentions that, Brian, is why? Because this is what's going to happen to solar, wind and batteries. Because solar is intermittent. Wind is intermittent. We need to overbuild it. But because these technologies are so cheap and getting cheaper, we can easily overbuild it. So Amazon, of course, a large amount of shopping happens in November and December, the Christmas shopping season here in Canada and the US. So they had to really beef up their online system to handle all these transactions in December. And what did they end up with? Amazon Web Services, which is now a trillion dollar business, apparently. Yes, it's a lot of money just for overbuilding something, because that's what's going to happen with the energy markets, because we're going to have extra solar, extra wind around. That is our show for this week. You know what? Next year we're going to have a Patreon. If you have any ideas for the patreon, let us know what kind of perks you might be interested in. And by God, write us right now. Cleanenergytow@gmail.com or clean energy pond everywhere on social media. If you're new to the show, remember to subscribe to our show on your podcast app to get new shows, new episodes delivered every week. We'll see you next time. See you next week!  

Con la llegada de Amazon Web Services y la pujanza de muchas de las empresas aragonesas, el sector TIC afronta un futuro brillante pero con un problema persistente: "Faltan profesionales". Analizamos la situación con Manuel Pérez, gerente del Clúster Tecnara que la semana pasada celebró el décimo aniversario de su gala anual. En nuestro consultorio fiscal respondemos la duda de Javier. ¿Me beneficia el descenso del IRPF aprobado por el Gobierno si cobro 26.000 euros brutos? Lo resuelve, Alberto Joven, de Seico Asesores.

This week Ali and JoDee sit down with Tasha Penwell, who worked in higher ed for 8 years and is now an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Solutions Architect, Grow with Google partner, as well as the founder of Bytes and Bits. Together, they will discuss what AWS is, how to become an AWS Educator, and what teachers can bring into the tech world.Connect with Tasha:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tashapenwellLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tashapenwell/Website: https://bytesandbits.org/Connect with Ali and JoDee: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tgtrpodcast/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tgtrpodcastAli's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisimon/JoDee's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodeescissors/

About ChetanChetan Venkatesh is a technology startup veteran focused on distributed data, edge computing, and software products for enterprises and developers. He has 20 years of experience in building primary data storage, databases, and data replication products. Chetan holds a dozen patents in the area of distributed computing and data storage.Chetan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Macrometa – a Global Data Network featuring a Global Data Mesh, Edge Compute, and In-Region Data Protection. Macrometa helps enterprise developers build real-time apps and APIs in minutes – not months.Links Referenced: Macrometa: https://www.macrometa.com Macrometa Developer Week: https://www.macrometa.com/developer-week TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Forget everything you know about SSH and try Tailscale. Imagine if you didn't need to manage PKI or rotate SSH keys every time someone leaves. That'd be pretty sweet, wouldn't it? With Tailscale SSH, you can do exactly that. Tailscale gives each server and user device a node key to connect to its VPN, and it uses the same node key to authorize and authenticate SSH.Basically you're SSHing the same way you manage access to your app. What's the benefit here? Built in key rotation permissions is code connectivity between any two devices, reduce latency and there's a lot more, but there's a time limit here. You can also ask users to reauthenticate for that extra bit of security. Sounds expensive?Nope, I wish it were. tail scales. Completely free for personal use on up to 20 devices. To learn more, visit snark.cloud/tailscale. Again, that's snark.cloud/tailscaleCorey: Managing shards. Maintenance windows. Overprovisioning. ElastiCache bills. I know, I know. It's a spooky season and you're already shaking. It's time for caching to be simpler. Momento Serverless Cache lets you forget the backend to focus on good code and great user experiences. With true autoscaling and a pay-per-use pricing model, it makes caching easy. No matter your cloud provider, get going for free at gomomento.co/screaming That's GO M-O-M-E-N-T-O dot co slash screamingCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today, this promoted guest episode is brought to us basically so I can ask a question that has been eating at me for a little while. That question is, what is the edge? Because I have a lot of cynical sarcastic answers to it, but that doesn't really help understanding. My guest today is Chetan Venkatesh, CEO and co-founder at Macrometa. Chetan, thank you for joining me.Chetan: It's my pleasure, Corey. You're one of my heroes. I think I've told you this before, so I am absolutely delighted to be here.Corey: Well, thank you. We all need people to sit on the curb and clap as we go by and feel like giant frauds in the process. So let's start with the easy question that sets up the rest of it. Namely, what is Macrometa, and what puts you in a position to be able to speak at all, let alone authoritatively, on what the edge might be?Chetan: I'll answer the second part of your question first, which is, you know, what gives me the authority to even talk about this? Well, for one, I've been trying to solve the same problem for 20 years now, which is build distributed systems that work really fast and can answer questions about data in milliseconds. And my journey's sort of been like the spiral staircase journey, you know, I keep going around in circles, but the view just keeps getting better every time I do one of these things. So I'm on my fourth startup doing distributed data infrastructure, and this time really focused on trying to provide a platform that's the antithesis of the cloud. It's kind of like taking the cloud and flipping it on its head because instead of having a single region application where all your stuff runs in one place, on us-west-1 or us-east-1, what if your apps could run everywhere, like, they could run in hundreds and hundreds of cities around the world, much closer to where your users and devices and most importantly, where interesting things in the real world are happening?And so we started Macrometa about five years back to build a new kind of distributed cloud—let's call the edge—that kind of looks like a CDN, a Content Delivery Network, but really brings very sophisticated platform-level primitives for developers to build applications in a distributed way around primitives for compute, primitives for data, but also some very interesting things that you just can't do in the cloud anymore. So that's Macrometa. And we're doing something with edge computing, which is a big buzzword these days, but I'm sure you'll ask me about that.Corey: It seems to be. Generally speaking, when I look around and companies are talking about edge, it feels almost like it is a redefining of what they already do to use a term that is currently trending and deep in the hype world.Chetan: Yeah. You know, I think humans just being biologically social beings just tend to be herd-like, and so when we see a new trend, we like to slap it on everything we have. We did that 15 years back with cloud, if you remember, you know? Everybody was very busy trying to stick the cloud label on everything that was on-prem. Edge is sort of having that edge-washing moment right now.But I define edge very specifically is very different from the cloud. You know, where the cloud is defined by centralization, i.e., you've got a giant hyperscale data center somewhere far, far away, where typically electricity, real estate, and those things are reasonably cheap, i.e., not in urban centers, where those things tend to be expensive.You know, you have platforms where you run things at scale, it's sort of a your mess for less business in the cloud and somebody else manages that for you. The edge is actually defined by location. And there are three types of edges. The first edge is the CDN edge, which is historically where we've been trying to make things faster with the internet and make the internet scale. So Akamai came about, about 20 years back and created this thing called the CDN that allowed the web to scale. And that was the first killer app for edge, actually. So that's the first location that defines the edge where a lot of the peering happens between different network providers and the on-ramp around the cloud happens.The second edge is the telecom edge. That's actually right next to you in terms of, you know, the logical network topology because every time you do something on your computer, it goes through that telecom layer. And now we have the ability to actually run web services, applications, data, directly from that telecom layer.And then the third edge is—sort of, people have been familiar with this for 30 years. The third edge is your device, just your mobile phone. It's your internet gateway and, you know, things that you carry around in your pocket or sit on your desk, where you have some compute power, but it's very restricted and it only deals with things that are interesting or important to you as a person, not in a broad range. So those are sort of the three things. And it's not the cloud. And these three things are now becoming important as a place for you to build and run enterprise apps.Corey: Something that I think is often overlooked here—and this is sort of a natural consequence of the cloud's own success and the joy that we live in a system that we do where companies are required to always grow and expand and find new markets—historically, for example, when I went to AWS re:Invent, which is a cloud service carnival in the desert that no one in the right mind should ever want to attend but somehow we keep doing, it used to be that, oh, these announcements are generally all aligned with people like me, where I have specific problems and they look a lot like what they're talking about on stage. And now they're talking about things that, from that perspective, seem like Looney Tunes. Like, I'm trying to build Twitter for Pets or something close to it, and I don't understand why there's so much talk about things like industrial IoT and, “Machine learning,” quote-unquote, and other things that just do not seem to align with. I'm trying to build a web service, like it says on the name of a company; what gives?And part of that, I think, is that it's difficult to remember, for most of us—especially me—that what they're coming out with is not your shopping list. Every service is for someone, not every service is for everyone, so figuring out what it is that they're talking about and what those workloads look like, is something that I think is getting lost in translation. And in our defense—collective defense—Amazon is not the best at telling stories to realize that, oh, this is not me they're talking to; I'm going to opt out of this particular thing. You figure it out by getting it wrong first. Does that align with how you see the market going?Chetan: I think so. You know, I think of Amazon Web Services, or even Google, or Azure as sort of Costco and, you know, Sam's Wholesale Club or whatever, right? They cater to a very broad audience and they sell a lot of stuff in bulk and cheap. And you know, so it's sort of a lowest common denominator type of a model. And so emerging applications, and especially emerging needs that enterprises have, don't necessarily get solved in the cloud. You've got to go and build up yourself on sort of the crude primitives that they provide.So okay, go use your bare basic EC2, your S3, and build your own edgy, or whatever, you know, cutting edge thing you want to build over there. And if enough people are doing it, I'm sure Amazon and Google start to pay interest and you know, develop something that makes it easier. So you know, I agree with you, they're not the best at this sort of a thing. The edge is phenomenon also that's orthogonally, and diametrically opposite to the architecture of the cloud and the economics of the cloud.And we do centralization in the cloud in a big way. Everything is in one place; we make giant piles of data in one database or data warehouse slice and dice it, and almost all our computer science is great at doing things in a centralized way. But when you take data and chop it into 50 copies and keep it in 50 different places on Earth, and you have this thing called the internet or the wide area network in the middle, trying to keep all those copies in sync is a nightmare. So you start to deal with some very basic computer science problems like distributed state and how do you build applications that have a consistent view of that distributed state? So you know, there have been attempts to solve these problems for 15, 18 years, but none of those attempts have really cracked the intersection of three things: a way for programmers to do this in a way that doesn't blow their heads with complexity, a way to do this cheaply and effectively enough where you can build real-world applications that serve billions of users concurrently at a cost point that actually is economical and make sense, and third, a way to do this with adequate levels of performance where you don't die waiting for the spinning wheel on your screen to go away.So these are the three problems with edge. And as I said, you know, me and my team, we've been focused on this for a very long while. And me and my co-founder have come from this world and we created a platform very uniquely designed to solve these three problems, the problems of complexity for programmers to build in a distributed environment like this where data sits in hundreds of places around the world and you need a consistent view of that data, being able to operate and modify and replicate that data with consistency guarantees, and then a third one, being able to do that, at high levels of performance, which translates to what we call ultra-low latency, which is human perception. The threshold of human perception, visually, is about 70 milliseconds. Our finest athletes, the best Esports players are about 70 to 80 milliseconds in their twitch, in their ability to twitch when something happens on the screen. The average human is about 100 to 110 milliseconds.So in a second, we can maybe do seven things at rapid rates. You know, that's how fast our brain can process it. Anything that falls below 100 milliseconds—especially if it falls into 50 to 70 milliseconds—appears instantaneous to the human mind and we experience it as magic. And so where edge computing and where my platform comes in is that it literally puts data and applications within 50 milliseconds of 90% of humans and devices on Earth and allows now a whole new set of applications where latency and location and the ability to control those things with really fine-grained capability matters. And we can talk a little more about what those apps are in a bit.Corey: And I think that's probably an interesting place to dive into at the moment because whenever we talk about the idea of new ways of building things that are aimed at decentralization, first, people at this point automatically have a bit of an aversion to, “Wait, are you talking about some of the Web3 nonsense?” It's one of those look around the poker table and see if you can spot the sucker, and if you can't, it's you. Because there are interesting aspects to that entire market, let's be clear, but it also seems to be occluded by so much of the grift and nonsense and spam and the rest that, again, sort of characterize the early internet as well. The idea though, of decentralizing out of the cloud is deeply compelling just to anyone who's really ever had to deal with the egress charges, or even the data transfer charges inside of one of the cloud providers. The counterpoint is it feels that historically, you either get to pay the tax and go all-in on a cloud provider and get all the higher-level niceties, or otherwise, you wind up deciding you're going to have to more or less go back to physical data centers, give or take, and other than the very baseline primitives that you get to work with of VMs and block storage and maybe a load balancer, you're building it all yourself from scratch. It seems like you're positioning this as setting up for a third option. I'd be very interested to hear it.Chetan: Yeah. And a quick comment on decentralization: good; not so sure about the Web3 pieces around it. We tend to talk about computer science and not the ideology of distributing data. There are political reasons, there are ideological reasons around data and sovereignty and individual human rights, and things like that. There are people far smarter than me who should explain that.I fall personally into the Nicholas Weaver school of skepticism about Web3 and blockchain and those types of things. And for readers who are not familiar with Nicholas Weaver, please go online. He teaches at UC Berkeley is just one of the finest minds of our time. And I think he's broken down some very good reasons why we should be skeptical about, sort of, Web3 and, you know, things like that. Anyway, that's a digression.Coming back to what we're talking about, yes, it is a new paradigm, but that's the challenge, which is I don't want to introduce a new paradigm. I want to provide a continuum. So what we've built is a platform that looks and feels very much like Lambdas, and a poly-model database. I hate the word multi. It's a pretty dumb word, so I've started to substitute ‘multi' with ‘poly' everywhere, wherever I can find it.So it's not multi-cloud; it's poly-cloud. And it's not multi-model; it's poly-model. Because what we want is a world where developers have the ability to use the best paradigm for solving problems. And it turns out when we build applications that deal with data, data doesn't just come in one form, it comes in many different forms, it's polymorphic, and so you need a data platform, that's also, you know, polyglot and poly-model to be able to handle that. So that's one part of the problem, which is, you know, we're trying to provide a platform that provides continuity by looking like a key-value store like Redis. It looks like a document database—Corey: Or the best database in the world Route 53 TXT records. But please, keep going.Chetan: Well, we've got that too, so [laugh] you know? And then we've got a streaming graph engine built into it that kind of looks and behaves like a graph database, like Neo4j, for example. And, you know, it's got columnar capabilities as well. So it's sort of a really interesting data platform that is not open-source; it's proprietary because it's designed to solve these problems of being able to distribute data, put it in hundreds of locations, keep it all in sync, but it looks like a conventional NoSQL database. And it speaks PostgreSQL, so if you know PostgreSQL, you can program it, you know, pretty easily.What it's also doing is taking away the responsibility for engineers and developers to understand how to deal with very arcane problems like conflict resolution in data. I made a change in Mumbai; you made a change in Tokyo; who wins? Our systems in the cloud—you know, DynamoDB, and things like that—they have very crude answers for this something called last writer wins. We've done a lot of work to build a protocol that brings you ACID-like consistency in these types of problems and makes it easy to reason with state change when you've got an application that's potentially running in 100 locations and each of those places is modifying the same record, for example.And then the second part of it is it's a converged platform. So it doesn't just provide data; it provides a compute layer that's deeply integrated directly with the data layer itself. So think of it as Lambdas running, like, stored procedures inside the database. That's really what it is. We've built a very, very specialized compute engine that exposes containers in functions as stored procedures directly on the database.And so they run inside the context of the database and so you can build apps in Python, Go, your favorite language; it compiles down into a [unintelligible 00:15:02] kernel that actually runs inside the database among all these different polyglot interfaces that we have. And the third thing that we do is we provide an ability for you to have very fine-grained control on your data. Because today, data's become a political tool; it's become something that nation-states care a lot about.Corey: Oh, do they ever.Chetan: Exactly. And [unintelligible 00:15:24] regulated. So here's the problem. You're an enterprise architect and your application is going to be consumed in 15 countries, there are 13 different frameworks to deal with. What do you do? Well, you spin up 13 different versions, one for each country, and you know, build 13 different teams, and have 13 zero-day attacks and all that kind of craziness, right?Well, data protection is actually one of the most important parts of the edge because, with something like Macrometa, you can build an app once, and we'll provide all the necessary localization for any region processing, data protection with things like tokenization of data so you can exfiltrate data securely without violating potentially PII sensitive data exfiltration laws within countries, things like that, i.e. It's solving some really hard problems by providing an opinionated platform that does these three things. And I'll summarize it as thus, Corey, we can kind of dig into each piece. Our platform is called the Global Data Network. It's not a global database; it's a global data network. It looks like a frickin database, but it's actually a global network available in 175 cities around the world.Corey: The challenge, of course, is where does the data actually live at rest, and—this is why people care about—well, they're two reasons people care about that; one is the data residency locality stuff, which has always, honestly for me, felt a little bit like a bit of a cloud provider shakedown. Yeah, build a data center here or you don't get any of the business of anything that falls under our regulation. The other is, what is the egress cost of that look like? Because yeah, I can build a whole multicenter data store on top of AWS, for example, but minimum, we're talking two cents, a gigabyte of transfer, even with inside of a region in some cases, and many times that externally.Chetan: Yeah, that's the real shakedown: the egress costs [laugh] more than the other example that you talked about over there. But it's a reality of how cloud pricing works and things like that. What we have built is a network that is completely independent of the cloud providers. We're built on top of five different service providers. Some of them are cloud providers, some of them are telecom providers, some of them are CDNs.And so we're building our global data network on top of routes and capacity provided by transfer providers who have different economics than the cloud providers do. So our cost for egress falls somewhere between two and five cents, for example, depending on which edge locations, which countries, and things that you're going to use over there. We've got a pretty generous egress fee where, you know, for certain thresholds, there's no egress charge at all, but over certain thresholds, we start to charge between two to five cents. But even if you were to take it at the higher end of that spectrum, five cents per gigabyte for transfer, the amount of value our platform brings in architecture and reduction in complexity and the ability to build apps that are frankly, mind-boggling—one of my customers is a SaaS company in marketing that uses us to inject offers while people are on their website, you know, browsing. Literally, you hit their website, you do a few things, and then boom, there's a customized offer for them.In banking that's used, for example, you know, you're making your minimum payments on your credit card, but you have a good payment history and you've got a decent credit score, well, let's give you an offer to give you a short-term loan, for example. So those types of new applications, you know, are really at this intersection where you need low latency, you need in-region processing, and you also need to comply with data regulation. So when you building a high-value revenue-generating app like that egress cost, even at five cents, right, tends to be very, very cheap, and the smallest part of you know, the complexity of building them.Corey: One of the things that I think we see a lot of is that the tone of this industry is set by the big players, and they have done a reasonable job, by and large, of making anything that isn't running in their blessed environments, let me be direct, sound kind of shitty, where it's like, “Oh, do you want to be smart and run things in AWS?”—or GCP? Or Azure, I guess—“Or do you want to be foolish and try and build it yourself out of popsicle sticks and twine?” And, yeah, on some level, if I'm trying to treat everything like it's AWS and run a crappy analog version of DynamoDB, for example, I'm not going to have a great experience, but if I also start from a perspective of not using things that are higher up the stack offerings, that experience starts to look a lot more reasonable as we start expanding out. But it still does present to a lot of us as well, we're just going to run things in VM somewhere and treat them just like we did back in 2005. What's changed in that perspective?Chetan: Yeah, you know, I can't talk for others but for us, we provide a high-level Platform-as-a-Service, and that platform, the global data network, has three pieces to it. First piece is—and none of this will translate into anything that AWS or GCP has because this is the edge, Corey, is completely different, right? So the global data network that we have is composed of three technology components. The first one is something that we call the global data mesh. And this is Pub/Sub and event processing on steroids. We have the ability to connect data sources across all kinds of boundaries; you've got some data in Germany and you've got some data in New York. How do you put these things together and get them streaming so that you can start to do interesting things with correlating this data, for example?And you might have to get across not just physical boundaries, like, they're sitting in different systems in different data centers; they might be logical boundaries, like, hey, I need to collaborate with data from my supply chain partner and we need to be able to do something that's dynamic in real-time, you know, to solve a business problem. So the global data mesh is a way to very quickly connect data wherever it might be in legacy systems, in flat files, in streaming databases, in data warehouses, what have you—you know, we have 500-plus types of connectors—but most importantly, it's not just getting the data streaming, it's then turning it into an API and making that data fungible. Because the minute you put an API on it and it's become fungible now that data is actually got a lot of value. And so the data mesh is a way to very quickly connect things up and put an API on it. And that API can now be consumed by front-ends, it can be consumed by other microservices, things like that.Which brings me to the second piece, which is edge compute. So we've built a compute runtime that is Docker compatible, so it runs containers, it's also Lambda compatible, so it runs functions. Let me rephrase that; it's not Lambda-compatible, it's Lambda-like. So no, you can't take your Lambda and dump it on us and it won't just work. You have to do some things to make it work on us.Corey: But so many of those things are so deeply integrated to the ecosystem that they're operating within, and—Chetan: Yeah.Corey: That, on the one hand, is presented by cloud providers as, “Oh, yes. This shows how wonderful these things are.” In practice, talk to customers. “Yeah, we're using it as spackle between the different cloud services that don't talk to one another despite being made by the same company.”Chetan: [laugh] right.Corey: It's fun.Chetan: Yeah. So the second edge compute piece, which allows you now to build microservices that are stateful, i.e., they have data that they interact with locally, and schedule them along with the data on our network of 175 regions around the world. So you can build distributed applications now.Now, your microservice back-end for your banking application or for your HR SaaS application or e-commerce application is not running in us-east-1 and Virginia; it's running literally in 15, 18, 25 cities where your end-users are, potentially. And to take an industrial IoT case, for example, you might be ingesting data from the electricity grid in 15, 18 different cities around the world; you can do all of that locally now. So that's what the edge functions does, it flips the cloud model around because instead of sending data to where the compute is in the cloud, you're actually bringing compute to where the data is originating, or the data is being consumed, such as through a mobile app. So that's the second piece.And the third piece is global data protection, which is hey, now I've got a distributed infrastructure; how do I comply with all the different privacy and regulatory frameworks that are out there? How do I keep data secure in each region? How do I potentially share data between regions in such a way that, you know, I don't break the model of compliance globally and create a billion-dollar headache for my CIO and CEO and CFO, you know? So that's the third piece of capabilities that this provides.All of this is presented as a set of serverless APIs. So you simply plug these APIs into your existing applications. Some of your applications work great in the cloud. Maybe there are just parts of that app that should be on our edge. And that's usually where most customers start; they take a single web service or two that's not doing so great in the cloud because it's too far away; it has data sensitivity, location sensitivity, time sensitivity, and so they use us as a way to just deal with that on the edge.And there are other applications where it's completely what I call edge native, i.e., no dependancy on the cloud comes and runs completely distributed across our network and consumes primarily the edges infrastructure, and just maybe send some data back on the cloud for long-term storage or long-term analytics.Corey: And ingest does remain free. The long-term analytics, of course, means that once that data is there, good luck convincing a customer to move it because that gets really expensive.Chetan: Exactly, exactly. It's a speciation—as I like to say—of the cloud, into a fast tier where interactions happen, i.e., the edge. So systems of record are still in the cloud; we still have our transactional systems over there, our databases, data warehouses.And those are great for historical types of data, as you just mentioned, but for things that are operational in nature, that are interactive in nature, where you really need to deal with them because they're time-sensitive, they're depleting value in seconds or milliseconds, they're location sensitive, there's a lot of noise in the data and you need to get to just those bits of data that actually matter, throw the rest away, for example—which is what you do with a lot of telemetry in cybersecurity, for example, right—those are all the things that require a new kind of a platform, not a system of record, a system of interaction, and that's what the global data network is, the GDN. And these three primitives, the data mesh, Edge compute, and data protection, are the way that our APIs are shaped to help our enterprise customers solve these problems. So put it another way, imagine ten years from now what DynamoDB and global tables with a really fast Lambda and Kinesis with actually Event Processing built directly into Kinesis might be like. That's Macrometa today, available in 175 cities.Corey: This episode is brought to us in part by our friends at Datadog. Datadog is a SaaS monitoring and security platform that enables full-stack observability for modern infrastructure and applications at every scale. Datadog enables teams to see everything: dashboarding, alerting, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, UX monitoring, security monitoring, dog logos, and log management, in one tightly integrated platform. With 600-plus out-of-the-box integrations with technologies including all major cloud providers, databases, and web servers, Datadog allows you to aggregate all your data into one platform for seamless correlation, allowing teams to troubleshoot and collaborate together in one place, preventing downtime and enhancing performance and reliability. Get started with a free 14-day trial by visiting datadoghq.com/screaminginthecloud, and get a free t-shirt after installing the agent.Corey: I think it's also worth pointing out that it's easy for me to fall into a trap that I wonder if some of our listeners do as well, which is, I live in, basically, downtown San Francisco. I have gigabit internet connectivity here, to the point where when it goes out, it is suspicious and more a little bit frightening because my ISP—Sonic.net—is amazing and deserves every bit of praise that you never hear any ISP ever get. But when I travel, it's a very different experience. When I go to oh, I don't know, the conference center at re:Invent last year and find that the internet is patchy at best, or downtown San Francisco on Verizon today, I discover that the internet is almost non-existent, and suddenly applications that I had grown accustomed to just working suddenly didn't.And there's a lot more people who live far away from these data center regions and tier one backbones directly to same than don't. So I think that there's a lot of mistaken ideas around exactly what the lower bandwidth experience of the internet is today. And that is something that feels inadvertently classist if that make sense. Are these geographically bigoted?Chetan: Yeah. No, I think those two points are very well articulated. I wish I could articulate it that well. But yes, if you can afford 5G, some of those things get better. But again, 5G is not everywhere yet. It will be, but 5G can in many ways democratize at least one part of it, which is provide an overlap network at the edge, where if you left home and you switched networks, on to a wireless, you can still get the same quality of service that you used to getting from Sonic, for example. So I think it can solve some of those things in the future. But the second part of it—what did you call it? What bigoted?Corey: Geographically bigoted. And again, that's maybe a bit of a strong term, but it's easy to forget that you can't get around the speed of light. I would say that the most poignant example of that I had was when I was—in the before times—giving a keynote in Australia. So ah, I know what I'll do, I'll spin up an EC2 instance for development purposes—because that's how I do my development—in Australia. And then I would just pay my provider for cellular access for my iPad and that was great.And I found the internet was slow as molasses for everything I did. Like, how do people even live here? Well, turns out that my provider would backhaul traffic to the United States. So to log into my session, I would wind up having to connect with a local provider, backhaul to the US, then connect back out from there to Australia across the entire Pacific Ocean, talk to the server, get the response, would follow that return path. It's yeah, turns out that doing laps around the world is not the most efficient way of transferring any data whatsoever, let alone in sizable amounts.Chetan: And that's why we decided to call our platform the global data network, Corey. In fact, it's really built inside of sort of a very simple reason is that we have our own network underneath all of this and we stop this whole ping-pong effect of data going around and help create deterministic guarantees around latency, around location, around performance. We're trying to democratize latency and these types of problems in a way that programmers shouldn't have to worry about all this stuff. You write your code, you push publish, it runs on a network, and it all gets there with a guarantee that 95% of all your requests will happen within 50 milliseconds round-trip time, from any device, you know, in these population centers around the world.So yeah, it's a big deal. It's sort of one of our je ne sais quoi pieces in our mission and charter, which is to just democratize latency and access, and sort of get away from this geographical nonsense of, you know, how networks work and it will dynamically switch topology and just make everything slow, you know, very non-deterministic way.Corey: One last topic that I want to ask you about—because I near certain given your position, you will have an opinion on this—what's your take on, I guess, the carbon footprint of clouds these days? Because a lot of people been talking about it; there has been a lot of noise made about, justifiably so. I'm curious to get your take.Chetan: Yeah, you know, it feels like we're in the '30s and the '40s of the carbon movement when it comes to clouds today, right? Maybe there's some early awareness of the problem, but you know, frankly, there's very little we can do than just sort of put a wet finger in the air, compute some carbon offset and plant some trees. I think these are good building blocks; they're not necessarily the best ways to solve this problem, ultimately. But one of the things I care deeply about and you know, my company cares a lot about is helping make developers more aware off what kind of carbon footprint their code tangibly has on the environment. And so we've started two things inside the company. We've started a foundation that we call the Carbon Conscious Computing Consortium—the four C's. We're going to announce that publicly next year, we're going to invite folks to come and join us and be a part of it.The second thing that we're doing is we're building a completely open-source, carbon-conscious computing platform that is built on real data that we're collecting about, to start with, how Macrometa's platform emits carbon in response to different types of things you build on it. So for example, you wrote a query that hits our database and queries, you know, I don't know, 20 billion objects inside of our database. It'll tell you exactly how many micrograms or how many milligrams of carbon—it's an estimate; not exactly. I got to learn to throttle myself down. It's an estimate, you know, you can't really measure these things exactly because the cost of carbon is different in different places, you know, there are different technologies, et cetera.Gives you a good decent estimate, something that reliably tells you, “Hey, you know that query that you have over there, that piece of SQL? That's probably going to do this much of micrograms of carbon at this scale.” You know, if this query was called a million times every hour, this is how much it costs. A million times a day, this is how much it costs and things like that. But the most important thing that I feel passionate about is that when we give developers visibility, they do good things.I mean, when we give them good debugging tools, the code gets better, the code gets faster, the code gets more efficient. And Corey, you're in the business of helping people save money, when we give them good visibility into how much their code costs to run, they make the code more efficient. So we're doing the same thing with carbon, we know there's a cost to run your code, whether it's a function, a container, a query, what have you, every operation has a carbon cost. And we're on a mission to measure that and provide accurate tooling directly in our platform so that along with your debug lines, right, where you've got all these print statements that are spitting up stuff about what's happening there, we can also print out, you know, what did it cost in carbon.And you can set budgets. You can basically say, “Hey, I want my application to consume this much of carbon.” And down the road, we'll have AI and ML models that will help us optimize your code to be able to fit within those carbon budgets. For example. I'm not a big fan of planting—you know, I love planting trees, but don't get me wrong, we live in California and those trees get burned down.And I was reading this heartbreaking story about how we returned back into the atmosphere a giant amount of carbon because the forest reserve that had been planted, you know, that was capturing carbon, you know, essentially got burned down in a forest fire. So, you know, we're trying to just basically say, let's try and reduce the amount of carbon, you know, that we can potentially create by having better tooling.Corey: That would be amazing, and I think it also requires something that I guess acts almost as an exchange where there's a centralized voice that can make sure that, well, one, the provider is being honest, and two, being able to ensure you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison and not just discounting a whole lot of negative externalities. Because, yes, we're talking about carbon released into the environment. Okay, great. What about water effects from what's happening with your data centers are located? That can have significant climate impact as well. It's about trying to avoid the picking and choosing. It's hard, hard problem, but I'm unconvinced that there's anything more critical in the entire ecosystem right now to worry about.Chetan: So as a startup, we care very deeply about starting with the carbon part. And I agree, Corey, it's a multi-dimensional problem; there's lots of tentacles. The hydrocarbon industry goes very deeply into all parts of our lives. I'm a startup, what do I know? I can't solve all of those things, but I wanted to start with the philosophy that if we provide developers with the right tooling, they'll have the right incentives then to write better code. And as we open-source more of what we learn and, you know, our tooling, others will do the same. And I think in ten years, we might have better answers. But someone's got to start somewhere, and this is where we'd like to start.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking as much time as you have for going through what you're up to and how you view the world. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Chetan: Yes, so two things on that front. Go to www.macrometa.com—M-A-C-R-O-M-E-T-A dot com—and that's our website. And you can come and experience the full power of the platform. We've got a playground where you can come, open an account and build anything you want for free, and you can try and learn. You just can't run it in production because we've got a giant network, as I said, of 175 cities around the world. But there are tiers available for you to purchase and build and run apps. Like I think about 80 different customers, some of the biggest ones in the world, some of the biggest telecom customers, retail, E-Tail customers, [unintelligible 00:34:28] tiny startups are building some interesting things on.And the second thing I want to talk about is November 7th through 11th of 2022, just a couple of weeks—or maybe by the time this recording comes out, a week from now—is developer week at Macrometa. And we're going to be announcing some really interesting new capabilities, some new features like real-time complex event processing with low, ultra-low latency, data connectors, a search feature that allows you to build search directly on top of your applications without needing to spin up a giant Elastic Cloud Search cluster, or providing search locally and regionally so that, you know, you can have search running in 25 cities that are instant to search rather than sending all your search requests back in one location. There's all kinds of very cool things happening over there.And we're also announcing a partnership with the original, the OG of the edge, one of the largest, most impressive, interesting CDN players that has become a partner for us as well. And then we're also announcing some very interesting experimental work where you as a developer can build apps directly on the 5G telecom cloud as well. And then you'll hear from some interesting companies that are building apps that are edge-native, that are impossible to build in the cloud because they take advantage of these three things that we talked about: geography, latency, and data protection in some very, very powerful ways. So you'll hear actual customer case studies from real customers in the flesh, not anonymous BS, no marchitecture. It's a week-long of technical talk by developers, for developers. And so, you know, come and join the fun and let's learn all about the edge together, and let's go build something together that's impossible to do today.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:36:06]. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Chetan: My pleasure, Corey. Like I said, you're one of my heroes. I've always loved your work. The Snark-as-a-Service is a trillion-dollar market cap company. If you're ever interested in taking that public, I know some investors that I'd happily put you in touch with. But—Corey: Sadly, so many of those investors lack senses of humor.Chetan: [laugh]. That is true. That is true [laugh].Corey: [laugh]. [sigh].Chetan: Well, thank you. Thanks again for having me.Corey: Thank you. Chetan Venkatesh, CEO and co-founder at Macrometa. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry and insulting comment about why we should build everything on the cloud provider that you work for and then the attempt to challenge Chetan for the title of Edgelord.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused many healthcare providers to rethink how they engage with and treat patients. In response to these changes, the US Army Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) began building a telehealth application on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Deloitte, a professional services company. The National Emergency Tele Critical Care Network (NETCCN) application uses AWS Wickr to create a secure environment that allows patients and clinicians to communicate from virtually anywhere. To learn how NETCCN is making a difference in the healthcare world, the Fix This team sat down with Matt Quinn, science director at US Army TATRC, and Daniel Adams, health technologist from Deloitte.

Jenny Brinkley, Director of AWS Security at Amazon Web Services (AWS), sits down to share her empowering story working through the ranks, and even co-founding her own company. While she did not have a typical upbringing in the industry, she credits her parents for ending up where she is now, as they told her that she could do anything and she decided as she was growing up that she could. She had the opportunity to co-found a small startup before selling it to AWS. She says that working in her position is like a rollercoaster, as no one thing is like the other, saying her highs are high and her lows are low. Being a woman in cybersecurity, she is working to empower more women in the field, Jenny says, "I think that we're living in such an interesting time where empathy, kindness, compassion, honesty, partnership in the security space, I mean, heck for any industry, but really for security and cyber security roles today, it's, it's the life blood and to be underestimated, especially as a female or because, you know, my background doesn't follow a cookie cutter pattern of what individuals think of when they think of individuals in security roles." We thank Jenny for sharing her story.

Jenny Brinkley, Director of AWS Security at Amazon Web Services (AWS), sits down to share her empowering story working through the ranks, and even co-founding her own company. While she did not have a typical upbringing in the industry, she credits her parents for ending up where she is now, as they told her that she could do anything and she decided as she was growing up that she could. She had the opportunity to co-found a small startup before selling it to AWS. She says that working in her position is like a rollercoaster, as no one thing is like the other, saying her highs are high and her lows are low. Being a woman in cybersecurity, she is working to empower more women in the field, Jenny says, "I think that we're living in such an interesting time where empathy, kindness, compassion, honesty, partnership in the security space, I mean, heck for any industry, but really for security and cyber security roles today, it's, it's the life blood and to be underestimated, especially as a female or because, you know, my background doesn't follow a cookie cutter pattern of what individuals think of when they think of individuals in security roles." We thank Jenny for sharing her story.

Sandy Carter is something of a celebrity in Web3, as Senior Vice President at Unstoppable Domains and the creator of Unstoppable Women of Web3. Sandy has over 20 years of experience in innovation in-house for example as the General Manager for Ecosystems and Startups at IBM, and VP of Strategic Partnerships at Amazon Web Services, alongside experience running her own business Silicon-Blitz. We cover how to get more women into Web3, and thinking about intersectionality to bring in more women of colour into the space as well as educate girls about this much needed topic. LINKS: Sandy Carter on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sandy_carter Unstoppable WoW3 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/UnstoppableWoW3 Follow Women of Web3 for the latest job posts, learning resources and events: https://twitter.com/womenofweb3co Women of Web3 website: www.womenofweb3.co JOBS IN WEB3: Get your first job in web3 on the Women of Web3 jobs board, or apply to be in our Talent Collective: www.womenofweb3.co/jobs CREDITS: Host: Lauren Ingram Producer: Alex Lane

About VictorVictor is an Independent Senior Cloud Infrastructure Architect working mainly on Amazon Web Services (AWS), designing: secure, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective cloud architectures, dealing with large-scale and mission-critical distributed systems. He also has a long experience in Cloud Operations, Security Advisory, Security Hardening (DevSecOps), Modern Applications Design, Micro-services and Serverless, Infrastructure Refactoring, Cost Saving (FinOps).Links Referenced: Zoph: https://zoph.io/ unusd.cloud: https://unusd.cloud Twitter: https://twitter.com/zoph LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grenuv/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is brought to us in part by our friends at Datadog. Datadog's SaaS monitoring and security platform that enables full stack observability for developers, IT operations, security, and business teams in the cloud age. Datadog's platform, along with 500 plus vendor integrations, allows you to correlate metrics, traces, logs, and security signals across your applications, infrastructure, and third party services in a single pane of glass.Combine these with drag and drop dashboards and machine learning based alerts to help teams troubleshoot and collaborate more effectively, prevent downtime, and enhance performance and reliability. Try Datadog in your environment today with a free 14 day trial and get a complimentary T-shirt when you install the agent.To learn more, visit datadoghq.com/screaminginthecloud to get. That's www.datadoghq.com/screaminginthecloudCorey: Managing shards. Maintenance windows. Overprovisioning. ElastiCache bills. I know, I know. It's a spooky season and you're already shaking. It's time for caching to be simpler. Momento Serverless Cache lets you forget the backend to focus on good code and great user experiences. With true autoscaling and a pay-per-use pricing model, it makes caching easy. No matter your cloud provider, get going for free at gomomento.co/screaming That's GO M-O-M-E-N-T-O dot co slash screamingCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. One of the best parts about running a podcast like this and trolling the internet of AWS things is every once in a while, I get to learn something radically different than what I expected. For a long time, there's been this sort of persona or brand in the AWS space, specifically the security side of it, going by Zoph—that's Z-O-P-H—and I just assumed it was a collective or a whole bunch of people working on things, and it turns out that nope, it is just one person. And that one person is my guest today. Victor Grenu is an independent AWS architect. Victor, thank you for joining me.Victor: Hey, Corey, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.Corey: So, I want to start by diving into the thing that first really put you on my radar, though I didn't realize it was you at the time. You have what can only be described as an army of Twitter bots around the AWS ecosystem. And I don't even know that I'm necessarily following all of them, but what are these bots and what do they do?Victor: Yeah. I have a few bots on Twitter that I push some notification, some tweets, when things happen on AWS security space, especially when the AWS managed policies are updated from AWS. And it comes from an initial project from Scott Piper. He was running a Git command on his own laptop to push the history of AWS managed policy. And it told me that I can automate this thing using a deployment pipeline and so on, and to tweet every time a new change is detected from AWS. So, the idea is to monitor every change on these policies.Corey: It's kind of wild because I built a number of somewhat similar Twitter bots, only instead of trying to make them into something useful, I'd make them into something more than a little bit horrifying and extraordinarily obnoxious. Like there's a Cloud Boomer Twitter account that winds up tweeting every time Azure tweets something only it quote-tweets them in all caps and says something insulting. I have an AWS releases bot called AWS Cwoud—so that's C-W-O-U-D—and that winds up converting it to OwO speak. It's like, “Yay a new auto-scawowing growp.” That sort of thing is obnoxious and offensive, but it makes me laugh.Yours, on the other hand, are things that I have notifications turned on for just because when they announce something, it's generally fairly important. The first one that I discovered was your IAM changes bot. And I found some terrifying things coming out of that from time to time. What's the data source for that? Because I'm just grabbing other people's Twitter feeds or RSS feeds; you're clearly going deeper than that.Victor: Yeah, the data source is the official AWS managed policy. In fact, I run AWS CLI in the background and I'm doing just a list policy, the list policy command, and with this list I'm doing git of each policy that is returned, so I can enter it in a git repository to get the full history of the time. And I also craft a list of deprecated policy, and I also run, like, a dog-food initiative, the policy analysis, validation analysis from AWS tools to validate the consistency and the accuracy of the own policies. So, there is a policy validation with their own tool. [laugh].Corey: You would think that wouldn't turn up anything because their policy validator effectively acts as a linter, so if it throws an error, of course, you wouldn't wind up pushing that. And yet, somehow the fact that you have bothered to hook that up and have findings from it indicates that that's not how the real world works.Victor: Yeah, there is some, let's say, some false positive because we are running the policy validation with their own linter then own policies, but this is something that is documented from AWS. So, there is an official page where you can find why the linter is not working on each policy and why. There is a an explanation for each findings. I thinking of [unintelligible 00:05:05] managed policy, which is too long, and policy analyzer is crashing because the policy is too long.Corey: Excellent. It's odd to me that you have gone down this path because it's easy enough to look at this and assume that, oh, this must just be something you do for fun or as an aspect of your day job. So, I did a little digging into what your day job is, and this rings very familiar to me: you are an independent AWS consultant, only you're based out of Paris, whereas I was doing this from San Francisco, due to an escalatingly poor series of life choices on my part. What do you focus on in the AWS consulting world?Victor: Yeah. I'm running an AWS consulting boutique in Paris and I'm working for a large customer in France. And I'm doing mostly infrastructure stuff, infrastructure design for cloud-native application, and I'm also doing some security audits and [unintelligible 00:06:07] mediation for my customer.Corey: It seems to me that there's a definite divide as far as how people find the AWS consulting experience to be. And I'm not trying to cast judgment here, but the stories that I hear tend to fall into one of two categories. One of them is the story that you have, where you're doing this independently, you've been on your own for a while working specifically on this, and then there's the stories of, “Oh, yeah, I work for a 500 person consultancy and we do everything as long as they'll pay us money. If they've got money, we'll do it. Why not?”And it always seems to me—not to be overly judgy—but the independent consultants just seem happier about it because for better or worse, we get to choose what we focus on in a way that I don't think you do at a larger company.Victor: Yeah. It's the same in France or in Europe; there is a lot of consulting firms. But with the pandemic and with the market where we are working, in the cloud, in the cloud-native solution and so on, that there is a lot of demands. And the natural path is to start by working for a consulting firm and then when you are ready, when you have many AWS certification, when you have the experience of the customer, when you have a network of well-known customer, and you gain trust from your customer, I think it's natural to go by yourself, to be independent and to choose your own project and your own customer.Corey: I'm curious to get your take on what your perception of being an AWS consultant is when you're based in Paris versus, in my case, being based in the West Coast of the United States. And I know that's a bit of a strange question, but even when I travel, for example, over to the East Coast, suddenly, my own newsletter sends out three hours later in the day than I expect it to and that throws me for a loop. The AWS announcements don't come out at two or three in the afternoon; they come out at dinnertime. And for you, it must be in the middle of the night when a lot of those things wind up dropping. The AWS stuff, not my newsletter. I imagine you're not excitedly waiting on tenterhooks to see what this week's issue of Last Week in AWS talks about like I am.But I'm curious is that even beyond that, how do you experience the market? From what you're perceiving people in the United States talking about as AWS consultants versus what you see in Paris?Victor: It's difficult, but in fact, I don't have so much information about the independent in the US. I know that there is a lot, but I think it's more common in Europe. And yeah, it's an advantage to whoever ten-hour time [unintelligible 00:08:56] from the US because a lot of stuff happen on the Pacific time, on the Seattle timezone, on San Francisco timezone. So, for example, for this podcast, my Monday is over right now, so, so yeah, I have some advantage in time, but yeah.Corey: This is potentially an odd question for you. But I find an awful lot of the AWS documentation to be challenging, we'll call it. I don't always understand exactly what it's trying to tell me, and it's not at all clear that the person writing the documentation about a service in some cases has ever used the service. And in everything I just said, there is no language barrier. This documentation was written—theoretically—in English and I, most days, can stumble through a sentence in English and almost no other language. You obviously speak French as a first language. Given that you live in Paris, it seems to be a relatively common affliction. How do you find interacting with AWS in French goes? Or is it just a complete nonstarter, and it all has to happen in English for you?Victor: No, in fact, the consultants in Europe, I think—in fact, in my part, I'm using my laptop in English, I'm using my phone in English, I'm using the AWS console in English, and so on. So, the documentation for me is a switch on English first because for the other language, there is sometimes some automated translation that is very dangerous sometimes, so we all keep the documentation and the materials in English.Corey: It's wild to me just looking at how challenging so much of the stuff is. Having to then work in a second language on top of that, it just seems almost insurmountable to me. It's good they have automated translation for a lot of this stuff, but that falls down in often hilariously disastrous ways, sometimes. It's wild to me that even taking most programming languages that folks have ever heard of, even if you program and speak no English, which happens in a large part of the world, you're still using if statements even if the term ‘if' doesn't mean anything to you localized in your language. It really is, in many respects, an English-centric industry.Victor: Yeah. Completely. Even in French for our large French customer, I'm writing the PowerPoint presentation in English, some emails are in English, even if all the folks in the thread are French. So yeah.Corey: One other area that I wanted to explore with you a bit is that you are very clearly focused on security as a primary area of interest. Does that manifest in the work that you do as well? Do you find that your consulting engagements tend to have a high degree of focus on security?Victor: Yeah. In my design, when I'm doing some AWS architecture, my main objective is to design some security architecture and security patterns that apply best practices and least privilege. But often, I'm working for engagement on security audits, for startups, for internal customer, for diverse company, and then doing some accommodation after all. And to run my audit, I'm using some open-source tooling, some custom scripts, and so on. I have a methodology that I'm running for each customer. And the goal is to sometime to prepare some certification, PCI DSS or so on, or maybe to ensure that the best practice are correctly applied on a workload or before go-live or, yeah.Corey: One of the weird things about this to me is that I've said for a long time that cost and security tend to be inextricably linked, as far as being a sort of trailing reactive afterthought for an awful lot of companies. They care about both of those things right after they failed to adequately care about those things. At least in the cloud economic space, it's only money as opposed to, “Oops, we accidentally lost our customers' data.” So, I always found that I find myself drifting in a security direction if I don't stop myself, just based upon a lot of the cost work I do. Conversely, it seems that you have come from the security side and you find yourself drifting in a costing direction.Your side project is a SaaS offering called unusd.cloud, that's U-N-U-S-D dot cloud. And when you first mentioned this to me, my immediate reaction was, “Oh, great. Another SaaS platform for costing. Let's tear this one apart, too.” Except I actually like what you're building. Tell me about it.Victor: Yeah, and unusd.cloud is a side project for me and I was working since, let's say one year. It was a project that I've deployed for some of my customer on their local account, and it was very useful. And so, I was thinking that it could be a SaaS project. So, I've worked at [unintelligible 00:14:21] so yeah, a few months on shifting the product to assess [unintelligible 00:14:27].The product aim to detect the worst on AWS account on all AWS region, and it scan all your AWS accounts and all your region, and you try to detect and use the EC2, LDS, Glue [unintelligible 00:14:45], SageMaker, and so on, and attach a EBS and so on. I don't craft a new dashboard, a new Cost Explorer, and so on. It's it just cost awareness, it's just a notification on email or Slack or Microsoft Teams. And you just add your AWS account on the project and you schedule, let's say, once a day, and it scan, and it send you a cost of wellness, a [unintelligible 00:15:17] detection, and you can act by turning off what is not used.Corey: What I like about this is it cuts at the number one rule of cloud economics, which is turn that shit off if you're not using it. You wouldn't think that I would need to say that except that everyone seems to be missing that, on some level. And it's easy to do. When you need to spin something up and it's not there, you're very highly incentivized to spin that thing up. When you're not using it, you have to remember that thing exists, otherwise it just sort of sits there forever and doesn't do anything.It just costs money and doesn't generate any value in return for that. What you got right is you've also eviscerated my most common complaint about tools that claim to do this, which is you build in either a explicit rule of ignore this resource or ignore resources with the following tags. The benefit there is that you're not constantly giving me useless advice, like, “Oh, yeah, turn off this idle thing.” It's, yeah, that's there for a reason, maybe it's my dev box, maybe it's my backup site, maybe it's the entire DR environment that I'm going to need at little notice. It solves for that problem beautifully. And though a lot of tools out there claim to do stuff like this, most of them really failed to deliver on that promise.Victor: Yeah, I just want to keep it simple. I don't want to add an additional console and so on. And you are correct. You can apply a simple tag on your asset, let's say an EC2 instances, you apply the tag in use and the value of, and then the alerting is disabled for this asset. And the detection is based on the CPU [unintelligible 00:17:01] and the network health metrics, so when the instances is not used in the last seven days, with a low CPU every [unintelligible 00:17:10] and low network out, it comes as a suspect. [laugh].[midroll 00:17:17]Corey: One thing that I like about what you've done, but also have some reservations about it is that you have not done with so many of these tools do which is, “Oh, just give us all the access in your account. It'll be fine. You can trust us. Don't you want to save money?” And yeah, but I also still want to have a company left when all sudden done.You are very specific on what it is that you're allowed to access, and it's great. I would argue, on some level, it's almost too restrictive. For example, you have the ability to look at EC2, Glue, IAM—just to look at account aliases, great—RDS, Redshift, and SageMaker. And all of these are simply list and describe. There's no gets in there other than in Cost Explorer, which makes sense. You're not able to go rummaging through my data and see what's there. But that also bounds you, on some level, to being able to look only at particular types of resources. Is that accurate or are you using a lot of the CloudWatch stuff and Cost Explorer stuff to see other areas?Victor: In fact, it's the least privilege and read-only permission because I don't want too much question for the security team. So, it's full read-only permission. And I've only added the detection that I'm currently supports. Then if in some weeks, in some months, I'm adding a new detection, let's say for Snapshot, for example, I will need to update, so I will ask my customer to update their template. There is a mechanisms inside the project to tell them that the template is obsolete, but it's not a breaking change.So, the detection will continue, but without the new detection, the new snapshot detection, let's say. So yeah, it's least privilege, and all I need is the get-metric-statistics from CloudWatch to detect unused assets. And also checking [unintelligible 00:19:16] Elastic IP or [unintelligible 00:19:19] EBS volume. So, there is no CloudWatching in this detection.Corey: Also, to be clear, I am not suggesting that what you have done is at all a mistake, even if you bound it to those resources right now. But just because everyone loves to talk about these exciting, amazing, high-level services that AWS has put up there, for example, oh, what about DocumentDB or all these other—you know, Amazon Basics MongoDB; same thing—or all of these other things that they wind up offering, but you take a look at where customers are spending money and where they're surprised to be spending money, it's EC2, it's a bit of RDS, occasionally it's S3, but that's a lot harder to detect automatically whether that data is unused. It's, “You haven't been using this data very much.” It's, “Well, you see how the bucket is labeled ‘Archive Backups' or ‘Regulatory Logs?'” imagine that. What a ridiculous concept.Yeah. Whereas an idle EC2 instance sort of can wind up being useful on this. I am curious whether you encounter in the wild in your customer base, folks who are having idle-looking EC2 instances, but are in fact, for example, using a whole bunch of RAM, which you can't tell from the outside without custom CloudWatch agents.Victor: Yeah, I'm not detecting this behavior for larger usage of RAM, for example, or for maybe there is some custom application that is low in CPU and don't talk to any other services using the network, but with this detection, with the current state of the detection, I'm covering large majority of waste because what I see from my customer is that there is some teams, some data scientists or data teams who are experimenting a lot with SageMaker with Glue, with Endpoint and so on. And this is very expensive at the end of the day because they don't turn off the light at the end of the day, on Friday evening. So, what I'm trying to solve here is to notify the team—so on Slack—when they forgot to turn off the most common waste on AWS, so EC2, LTS, Redshift.Corey: I just now wound up installing it while we've been talking on my dedicated shitposting account, and sure enough, it already spat out a single instance it found, which yeah was running an EC2 instance on the East Coast when I was just there, so that I had a DNS server that was a little bit more local. Okay, great. And it's a T4g.micro, so it's not exactly a whole lot of money, but it does exactly what it says on the tin. It didn't wind up nailing the other instances I have in that account that I'm using for a variety of different things, which is good.And it further didn't wind up falling into the trap that so many things do, which is the, “Oh, it's costing you zero and your spend this month is zero because this account is where I dump all of my AWS credit codes.” So, many things say, “Oh, well, it's not costing you anything, so what's the problem?” And then that's how you accidentally lose $100,000 in activate credits because someone left something running way too long. It does a lot of the right things that I would hope and expect it to do, and the fact that you don't do that is kind of amazing.Victor: Yeah. It was a need from my customer and an opportunity. It's a small bet for me because I'm trying to do some small bets, you know, the small bets approach, so the idea is to try a new thing. It's also an excuse for me to learn something new because building a SaaS is a challenging.Corey: One thing that I am curious about, in this account, I'm also running the controller for my home WiFi environment. And that's not huge. It's T3.small, but it is still something out there that it sits there because I need it to exist. But it's relatively bored.If I go back and look over the last week of CloudWatch metrics, for example, it doesn't look like it's usually busy. I'm sure there's some network traffic in and out as it updates itself and whatnot, but the CPU peeks out at a little under 2% used. It didn't warn on this and it got it right. I'm just curious as to how you did that. What is it looking for to determine whether this instance is unused or not?Victor: It's the magic [laugh]. There is some intelligence artif—no, I'm just kidding. It just statistics. And I'm getting two metrics, the superior average from the last seven days and the network out. And I'm getting the average on those metrics and I'm doing some assumption that this EC2, this specific EC2 is not used because of these metrics, this server average.Corey: Yeah, it is wild to me just that this is working as well as it is. It's just… like, it does exactly what I would expect it to do. It's clear that—and this is going to sound weird, but I'm going to say it anyway—that this was built from someone who was looking to answer the question themselves and not from the perspective of, “Well, we need to build a product and we have access to all of this data from the API. How can we slice and dice it and add some value as we go?” I really liked the approach that you've taken on this. I don't say that often or lightly, particularly when it comes to cloud costing stuff, but this is something I'll be using in some of my own nonsense.Victor: Thanks. I appreciate it.Corey: So, I really want to thank you for taking as much time as you have to talk about who you are and what you're up to. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?Victor: Mainly on Twitter, my handle is @zoph [laugh]. And, you know, on LinkedIn or on my company website, as zoph.io.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:25:23]. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.Victor: Thank you, Corey, for having me. It was a pleasure to chat with you.Corey: Victor Grenu, independent AWS architect. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment that is going to cost you an absolute arm and a leg because invariably, you're going to forget to turn it off when you're done.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

About Today's GuestJaime Chapman is one of the original Co-Founders and Chief Operating Officer of the Military Spouse Chamber of Commerce. Her professional background is as a Sr. Military Talent Program Manager for Amazon Web Services and as a human capital entrepreneur where she successfully placed over 1,600 jobseekers in careers, creating an economic impact totaling over $112 million. Jaime has achieved recognition for:·      #1 Military Spouse Owned Business Overall Award by Military and Veterans Choice in September 2019 at the Military Influencer Conference in DC.·      2020-2021 Armed Forces Insurance US Army Garrison Wiesbaden Military Spouse of the Year Award.·      2022 Fort Hood Local Business Person of the Year, Alignable·      Scholar, George W. Bush Stand-To Veteran Leadership Program, Class of 2021.Jaime served in the Army Reserves for 6-years, and is currently an active duty Army spouse with her family stationed in Texas. She is a proud advocate for the military community, actively working to reduce military spouse unemployment and underemployement. In addition to her work at the Military Spouse Chamber, Jaime provides professional speaking and consulting services for organizations who are looking to hire, retain, and promote military spouse and veteran talent.Links Mentioned In This EpisodeMilitary Spouse Chamber of Commerce Web SitePsychArmor Resource of the WeekThe PsychArmor Resource of the Week is the PsychArmor course Supporting Veteran-Owned Businesses: Supplier Diversity In this course, you will learn strategies and best practices to implement veteran supplier diversity in your business or organization. You can find a link to the resource here: https://learn.psycharmor.org/courses/Supporting-Veteran-Owned-BusinessesThis Episode Sponsored By: This episode is sponsored by PsychArmor, the premier education and learning ecosystem specializing in military culture content. PsychArmor offers an online e-learning laboratory with custom training options for organizations.Contact Us and Join Us on Social Media Email PsychArmorPsychArmor on TwitterPsychArmor on FacebookPsychArmor on YouTubePsychArmor on LinkedInPsychArmor on InstagramTheme MusicOur theme music Don't Kill the Messenger was written and performed by Navy Veteran Jerry Maniscalco, in cooperation with Operation Encore, a non profit committed to supporting singer/songwriter and musicians across the military and Veteran communities.Producer and Host Duane France is a retired Army Noncommissioned Officer, combat veteran, and clinical mental health counselor for service members, veterans, and their families.  You can find more about the work that he is doing at www.veteranmentalhealth.com