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It's Week D, do you know where your preview update is? 23H2 is out - 24H2, not so much! No surprises in the new features list, but are more new features on the way? Windows New text actions in Click to Do - Practice in Reading Coach and Read with Immersive Reader - in Dev and Beta (24H2) Find cloud-based (OneDrive-based) photos using Semantic search - Comes to EEA, Snapdragon X only for now, Dev and Beta Voice access improvements - add words to custom dictionary - Dev and Beta Updated green screen UI - latest Canary build, from today Minor update to the Beta/23H2 channel, no new features Ubuntu 25.04 is out and there's a native Arm64 ISO (!) and BitLocker support Hands-on with WSL (which is stuck at 24.xx) and in Hyper-V on a Copilot+ PC Is dual-boot even possible on Arm? (Yet) Friday night update to identity caused accounts to be marked as leaked for 50,000 partner accounts AI We're in a new wave: Microsoft 365 Copilot updated, new Agent Store and more on the way Copilot Vision is now free for everyone in Microsoft Edge Google is giving Gemini Advanced/Google One AI Premium away for free to US college students Google estimates its Gemini AI chatbot had 35M DAUs and 350M MAUs worldwide as of last month while ChatGPT had 160M DAUs and 600M MAUs (Erin Woo/The Information) Perplexity is coming to Samsung and Motorola phones - and Microsoft is apparently coming to Motorola too Antitrust It's getting real - 20 years after US v. Microsoft, Big Tech is finally getting a reckoning Google has now lost two major US antitrust cases in less than a year US v. Google (search): DOJ wants Judge to break up Google US v. Google (ads): Google found to have another illegal monopoly What's the "right" outcome for Chrome and Google's ad businesses? OpenAI says it would be happy to buy Chrome from Google- hilarious Google just killed Privacy Sandbox, cites regulatory climate Apple, Meta fined by EU for not conforming to the DMA Apple Intelligence is no longer "available now" (Siri: Is it raining?) Xbox/gaming Elder Scrolls IV Remastered lands on Xbox, PC, PS5 and Game Pass Xbox app arrives on LG smart TVs It's (back) on: Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders rescheduled to April 24 with no price change And the demand is higher than expected, Nintendo says Tips and Picks Tip of the week: It's time to look at Google Fi again HARDWARE pick of the week: Microsoft keyboards and mice are back, baby RunAs Radio this week: Agentic AI for IT Pros with Tim Warner Brown liquor pick of the week: Dark Harmony No. 3 Black IPA Cask Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: spaceship.com/twit
It's Week D, do you know where your preview update is? 23H2 is out - 24H2, not so much! No surprises in the new features list, but are more new features on the way? Windows New text actions in Click to Do - Practice in Reading Coach and Read with Immersive Reader - in Dev and Beta (24H2) Find cloud-based (OneDrive-based) photos using Semantic search - Comes to EEA, Snapdragon X only for now, Dev and Beta Voice access improvements - add words to custom dictionary - Dev and Beta Updated green screen UI - latest Canary build, from today Minor update to the Beta/23H2 channel, no new features Ubuntu 25.04 is out and there's a native Arm64 ISO (!) and BitLocker support Hands-on with WSL (which is stuck at 24.xx) and in Hyper-V on a Copilot+ PC Is dual-boot even possible on Arm? (Yet) Friday night update to identity caused accounts to be marked as leaked for 50,000 partner accounts AI We're in a new wave: Microsoft 365 Copilot updated, new Agent Store and more on the way Copilot Vision is now free for everyone in Microsoft Edge Google is giving Gemini Advanced/Google One AI Premium away for free to US college students Google estimates its Gemini AI chatbot had 35M DAUs and 350M MAUs worldwide as of last month while ChatGPT had 160M DAUs and 600M MAUs (Erin Woo/The Information) Perplexity is coming to Samsung and Motorola phones - and Microsoft is apparently coming to Motorola too Antitrust It's getting real - 20 years after US v. Microsoft, Big Tech is finally getting a reckoning Google has now lost two major US antitrust cases in less than a year US v. Google (search): DOJ wants Judge to break up Google US v. Google (ads): Google found to have another illegal monopoly What's the "right" outcome for Chrome and Google's ad businesses? OpenAI says it would be happy to buy Chrome from Google- hilarious Google just killed Privacy Sandbox, cites regulatory climate Apple, Meta fined by EU for not conforming to the DMA Apple Intelligence is no longer "available now" (Siri: Is it raining?) Xbox/gaming Elder Scrolls IV Remastered lands on Xbox, PC, PS5 and Game Pass Xbox app arrives on LG smart TVs It's (back) on: Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders rescheduled to April 24 with no price change And the demand is higher than expected, Nintendo says Tips and Picks Tip of the week: It's time to look at Google Fi again HARDWARE pick of the week: Microsoft keyboards and mice are back, baby RunAs Radio this week: Agentic AI for IT Pros with Tim Warner Brown liquor pick of the week: Dark Harmony No. 3 Black IPA Cask Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: spaceship.com/twit
It's Week D, do you know where your preview update is? 23H2 is out - 24H2, not so much! No surprises in the new features list, but are more new features on the way? Windows New text actions in Click to Do - Practice in Reading Coach and Read with Immersive Reader - in Dev and Beta (24H2) Find cloud-based (OneDrive-based) photos using Semantic search - Comes to EEA, Snapdragon X only for now, Dev and Beta Voice access improvements - add words to custom dictionary - Dev and Beta Updated green screen UI - latest Canary build, from today Minor update to the Beta/23H2 channel, no new features Ubuntu 25.04 is out and there's a native Arm64 ISO (!) and BitLocker support Hands-on with WSL (which is stuck at 24.xx) and in Hyper-V on a Copilot+ PC Is dual-boot even possible on Arm? (Yet) Friday night update to identity caused accounts to be marked as leaked for 50,000 partner accounts AI We're in a new wave: Microsoft 365 Copilot updated, new Agent Store and more on the way Copilot Vision is now free for everyone in Microsoft Edge Google is giving Gemini Advanced/Google One AI Premium away for free to US college students Google estimates its Gemini AI chatbot had 35M DAUs and 350M MAUs worldwide as of last month while ChatGPT had 160M DAUs and 600M MAUs (Erin Woo/The Information) Perplexity is coming to Samsung and Motorola phones - and Microsoft is apparently coming to Motorola too Antitrust It's getting real - 20 years after US v. Microsoft, Big Tech is finally getting a reckoning Google has now lost two major US antitrust cases in less than a year US v. Google (search): DOJ wants Judge to break up Google US v. Google (ads): Google found to have another illegal monopoly What's the "right" outcome for Chrome and Google's ad businesses? OpenAI says it would be happy to buy Chrome from Google- hilarious Google just killed Privacy Sandbox, cites regulatory climate Apple, Meta fined by EU for not conforming to the DMA Apple Intelligence is no longer "available now" (Siri: Is it raining?) Xbox/gaming Elder Scrolls IV Remastered lands on Xbox, PC, PS5 and Game Pass Xbox app arrives on LG smart TVs It's (back) on: Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders rescheduled to April 24 with no price change And the demand is higher than expected, Nintendo says Tips and Picks Tip of the week: It's time to look at Google Fi again HARDWARE pick of the week: Microsoft keyboards and mice are back, baby RunAs Radio this week: Agentic AI for IT Pros with Tim Warner Brown liquor pick of the week: Dark Harmony No. 3 Black IPA Cask Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: spaceship.com/twit
It's Week D, do you know where your preview update is? 23H2 is out - 24H2, not so much! No surprises in the new features list, but are more new features on the way? Windows New text actions in Click to Do - Practice in Reading Coach and Read with Immersive Reader - in Dev and Beta (24H2) Find cloud-based (OneDrive-based) photos using Semantic search - Comes to EEA, Snapdragon X only for now, Dev and Beta Voice access improvements - add words to custom dictionary - Dev and Beta Updated green screen UI - latest Canary build, from today Minor update to the Beta/23H2 channel, no new features Ubuntu 25.04 is out and there's a native Arm64 ISO (!) and BitLocker support Hands-on with WSL (which is stuck at 24.xx) and in Hyper-V on a Copilot+ PC Is dual-boot even possible on Arm? (Yet) Friday night update to identity caused accounts to be marked as leaked for 50,000 partner accounts AI We're in a new wave: Microsoft 365 Copilot updated, new Agent Store and more on the way Copilot Vision is now free for everyone in Microsoft Edge Google is giving Gemini Advanced/Google One AI Premium away for free to US college students Google estimates its Gemini AI chatbot had 35M DAUs and 350M MAUs worldwide as of last month while ChatGPT had 160M DAUs and 600M MAUs (Erin Woo/The Information) Perplexity is coming to Samsung and Motorola phones - and Microsoft is apparently coming to Motorola too Antitrust It's getting real - 20 years after US v. Microsoft, Big Tech is finally getting a reckoning Google has now lost two major US antitrust cases in less than a year US v. Google (search): DOJ wants Judge to break up Google US v. Google (ads): Google found to have another illegal monopoly What's the "right" outcome for Chrome and Google's ad businesses? OpenAI says it would be happy to buy Chrome from Google- hilarious Google just killed Privacy Sandbox, cites regulatory climate Apple, Meta fined by EU for not conforming to the DMA Apple Intelligence is no longer "available now" (Siri: Is it raining?) Xbox/gaming Elder Scrolls IV Remastered lands on Xbox, PC, PS5 and Game Pass Xbox app arrives on LG smart TVs It's (back) on: Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders rescheduled to April 24 with no price change And the demand is higher than expected, Nintendo says Tips and Picks Tip of the week: It's time to look at Google Fi again HARDWARE pick of the week: Microsoft keyboards and mice are back, baby RunAs Radio this week: Agentic AI for IT Pros with Tim Warner Brown liquor pick of the week: Dark Harmony No. 3 Black IPA Cask Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: spaceship.com/twit
It's Week D, do you know where your preview update is? 23H2 is out - 24H2, not so much! No surprises in the new features list, but are more new features on the way? Windows New text actions in Click to Do - Practice in Reading Coach and Read with Immersive Reader - in Dev and Beta (24H2) Find cloud-based (OneDrive-based) photos using Semantic search - Comes to EEA, Snapdragon X only for now, Dev and Beta Voice access improvements - add words to custom dictionary - Dev and Beta Updated green screen UI - latest Canary build, from today Minor update to the Beta/23H2 channel, no new features Ubuntu 25.04 is out and there's a native Arm64 ISO (!) and BitLocker support Hands-on with WSL (which is stuck at 24.xx) and in Hyper-V on a Copilot+ PC Is dual-boot even possible on Arm? (Yet) Friday night update to identity caused accounts to be marked as leaked for 50,000 partner accounts AI We're in a new wave: Microsoft 365 Copilot updated, new Agent Store and more on the way Copilot Vision is now free for everyone in Microsoft Edge Google is giving Gemini Advanced/Google One AI Premium away for free to US college students Google estimates its Gemini AI chatbot had 35M DAUs and 350M MAUs worldwide as of last month while ChatGPT had 160M DAUs and 600M MAUs (Erin Woo/The Information) Perplexity is coming to Samsung and Motorola phones - and Microsoft is apparently coming to Motorola too Antitrust It's getting real - 20 years after US v. Microsoft, Big Tech is finally getting a reckoning Google has now lost two major US antitrust cases in less than a year US v. Google (search): DOJ wants Judge to break up Google US v. Google (ads): Google found to have another illegal monopoly What's the "right" outcome for Chrome and Google's ad businesses? OpenAI says it would be happy to buy Chrome from Google- hilarious Google just killed Privacy Sandbox, cites regulatory climate Apple, Meta fined by EU for not conforming to the DMA Apple Intelligence is no longer "available now" (Siri: Is it raining?) Xbox/gaming Elder Scrolls IV Remastered lands on Xbox, PC, PS5 and Game Pass Xbox app arrives on LG smart TVs It's (back) on: Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders rescheduled to April 24 with no price change And the demand is higher than expected, Nintendo says Tips and Picks Tip of the week: It's time to look at Google Fi again HARDWARE pick of the week: Microsoft keyboards and mice are back, baby RunAs Radio this week: Agentic AI for IT Pros with Tim Warner Brown liquor pick of the week: Dark Harmony No. 3 Black IPA Cask Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: spaceship.com/twit
It's Week D, do you know where your preview update is? 23H2 is out - 24H2, not so much! No surprises in the new features list, but are more new features on the way? Windows New text actions in Click to Do - Practice in Reading Coach and Read with Immersive Reader - in Dev and Beta (24H2) Find cloud-based (OneDrive-based) photos using Semantic search - Comes to EEA, Snapdragon X only for now, Dev and Beta Voice access improvements - add words to custom dictionary - Dev and Beta Updated green screen UI - latest Canary build, from today Minor update to the Beta/23H2 channel, no new features Ubuntu 25.04 is out and there's a native Arm64 ISO (!) and BitLocker support Hands-on with WSL (which is stuck at 24.xx) and in Hyper-V on a Copilot+ PC Is dual-boot even possible on Arm? (Yet) Friday night update to identity caused accounts to be marked as leaked for 50,000 partner accounts AI We're in a new wave: Microsoft 365 Copilot updated, new Agent Store and more on the way Copilot Vision is now free for everyone in Microsoft Edge Google is giving Gemini Advanced/Google One AI Premium away for free to US college students Google estimates its Gemini AI chatbot had 35M DAUs and 350M MAUs worldwide as of last month while ChatGPT had 160M DAUs and 600M MAUs (Erin Woo/The Information) Perplexity is coming to Samsung and Motorola phones - and Microsoft is apparently coming to Motorola too Antitrust It's getting real - 20 years after US v. Microsoft, Big Tech is finally getting a reckoning Google has now lost two major US antitrust cases in less than a year US v. Google (search): DOJ wants Judge to break up Google US v. Google (ads): Google found to have another illegal monopoly What's the "right" outcome for Chrome and Google's ad businesses? OpenAI says it would be happy to buy Chrome from Google- hilarious Google just killed Privacy Sandbox, cites regulatory climate Apple, Meta fined by EU for not conforming to the DMA Apple Intelligence is no longer "available now" (Siri: Is it raining?) Xbox/gaming Elder Scrolls IV Remastered lands on Xbox, PC, PS5 and Game Pass Xbox app arrives on LG smart TVs It's (back) on: Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders rescheduled to April 24 with no price change And the demand is higher than expected, Nintendo says Tips and Picks Tip of the week: It's time to look at Google Fi again HARDWARE pick of the week: Microsoft keyboards and mice are back, baby RunAs Radio this week: Agentic AI for IT Pros with Tim Warner Brown liquor pick of the week: Dark Harmony No. 3 Black IPA Cask Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: spaceship.com/twit
Fedora 42 and Ubuntu 25.04 are here—We break down what's new, what stands out, and what we love most about each release.Sponsored By:Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices! 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. ConfigCat Feature Flags: Manage features and change your software configuration using ConfigCat feature flags, without the need to re-deploy code. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:
Introducing the Windows 11 Feature Tracker "From the 'I should have done this two years ago' files, the 'I have wasted my life' files, and the, 'great, I needed more work to do' files ... There is a need for this. So I made one. But it will evolve. Maybe into a web app/wiki/something else... like a Notion website?" - Paul Patch Tuesday brings a metric ton of new features - And what the tracker showed clearly Two seconds after posting the tracker, Microsoft changed the Copilot app yet again - proving the need for the tracker - And demonstrating why the Insider Program is so screwed up A hidden new Start menu in recent builds presents an interesting conundrum: How to handle something Microsoft has not announced? More Windows 11 Beta build for 23H2: File new tab/new window changes, Explorer context menu regression may be permanent Dev and Beta (24H2): Taskbar icon scaling is a blast from the past we all need desperately Intel is killing Unison app and service Like winter, Build is coming Build session catalog is live - mostly AI as expected. Paul and Richard are going Overview of the Windows Copilot Runtime (one year after it was announced), Windows Actions, standard Kayla Cinnamon talk on Windows productivity, using your own model with WCR, native app experiences(!), Arm64 app perf, etc. AI Final thoughts on Microsoft's 50th: Biggest accomplishment wasn't any tech, it was changing with the times. What it's best at: Democratizing tech for the commoners, an expansion on Jack Tramiel/Commodore's "computers for the masses, not the classes" schtick. And that is exactly what it is doing with AI right now Microsoft hosts a consumer AI event and announces a metric ton of new Copilot features We need a Copilot feature tracker. Copilot = every single feature other AIs have - Copilot Actions on the web, memory and personalization, Copilot Vision on mobile and Windows, AI-generated podcasts and Microsoft releases Copilot Search in Bing Is AI turning us all into Charly from Flowers for Algernon? AI is making us stupider! There are studies!! This is the argument against every single tech advance from the steam train to the ballpoint pen to this Microsoft's AI demo of vibe-coded Quake II highlights the problem nicely Sometimes it's the little things: AI recaps for book series in Kindle GitHub Copilot updated with Agent Mode, Cursor-style code overviews, more Xbox & gaming Microsoft announces new Xbox Games Showcase for June Edge Game Assist gets new features, support for new games GTA V and enhanced version for PC coming to Game Pass on April 15 - In addition to the previous Game Pass titles we discussed last week Good: Nintendo Switch 2 supports ray tracing and DLSS Bad: Nintendo delays Switch 2 to figure out the tariffs mess Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Programmers at Work App pick of the week: Apple Music RunAs Radio this week: Application Risk in Security Copilot with Ari Schorr Brown liquor pick of the week: The Heart Cut #02 These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/927 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell
Introducing the Windows 11 Feature Tracker "From the 'I should have done this two years ago' files, the 'I have wasted my life' files, and the, 'great, I needed more work to do' files ... There is a need for this. So I made one. But it will evolve. Maybe into a web app/wiki/something else... like a Notion website?" - Paul Patch Tuesday brings a metric ton of new features - And what the tracker showed clearly Two seconds after posting the tracker, Microsoft changed the Copilot app yet again - proving the need for the tracker - And demonstrating why the Insider Program is so screwed up A hidden new Start menu in recent builds presents an interesting conundrum: How to handle something Microsoft has not announced? More Windows 11 Beta build for 23H2: File new tab/new window changes, Explorer context menu regression may be permanent Dev and Beta (24H2): Taskbar icon scaling is a blast from the past we all need desperately Intel is killing Unison app and service Like winter, Build is coming Build session catalog is live - mostly AI as expected. Paul and Richard are going Overview of the Windows Copilot Runtime (one year after it was announced), Windows Actions, standard Kayla Cinnamon talk on Windows productivity, using your own model with WCR, native app experiences(!), Arm64 app perf, etc. AI Final thoughts on Microsoft's 50th: Biggest accomplishment wasn't any tech, it was changing with the times. What it's best at: Democratizing tech for the commoners, an expansion on Jack Tramiel/Commodore's "computers for the masses, not the classes" schtick. And that is exactly what it is doing with AI right now Microsoft hosts a consumer AI event and announces a metric ton of new Copilot features We need a Copilot feature tracker. Copilot = every single feature other AIs have - Copilot Actions on the web, memory and personalization, Copilot Vision on mobile and Windows, AI-generated podcasts and Microsoft releases Copilot Search in Bing Is AI turning us all into Charly from Flowers for Algernon? AI is making us stupider! There are studies!! This is the argument against every single tech advance from the steam train to the ballpoint pen to this Microsoft's AI demo of vibe-coded Quake II highlights the problem nicely Sometimes it's the little things: AI recaps for book series in Kindle GitHub Copilot updated with Agent Mode, Cursor-style code overviews, more Xbox & gaming Microsoft announces new Xbox Games Showcase for June Edge Game Assist gets new features, support for new games GTA V and enhanced version for PC coming to Game Pass on April 15 - In addition to the previous Game Pass titles we discussed last week Good: Nintendo Switch 2 supports ray tracing and DLSS Bad: Nintendo delays Switch 2 to figure out the tariffs mess Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Programmers at Work App pick of the week: Apple Music RunAs Radio this week: Application Risk in Security Copilot with Ari Schorr Brown liquor pick of the week: The Heart Cut #02 These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/927 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell
Introducing the Windows 11 Feature Tracker "From the 'I should have done this two years ago' files, the 'I have wasted my life' files, and the, 'great, I needed more work to do' files ... There is a need for this. So I made one. But it will evolve. Maybe into a web app/wiki/something else... like a Notion website?" - Paul Patch Tuesday brings a metric ton of new features - And what the tracker showed clearly Two seconds after posting the tracker, Microsoft changed the Copilot app yet again - proving the need for the tracker - And demonstrating why the Insider Program is so screwed up A hidden new Start menu in recent builds presents an interesting conundrum: How to handle something Microsoft has not announced? More Windows 11 Beta build for 23H2: File new tab/new window changes, Explorer context menu regression may be permanent Dev and Beta (24H2): Taskbar icon scaling is a blast from the past we all need desperately Intel is killing Unison app and service Like winter, Build is coming Build session catalog is live - mostly AI as expected. Paul and Richard are going Overview of the Windows Copilot Runtime (one year after it was announced), Windows Actions, standard Kayla Cinnamon talk on Windows productivity, using your own model with WCR, native app experiences(!), Arm64 app perf, etc. AI Final thoughts on Microsoft's 50th: Biggest accomplishment wasn't any tech, it was changing with the times. What it's best at: Democratizing tech for the commoners, an expansion on Jack Tramiel/Commodore's "computers for the masses, not the classes" schtick. And that is exactly what it is doing with AI right now Microsoft hosts a consumer AI event and announces a metric ton of new Copilot features We need a Copilot feature tracker. Copilot = every single feature other AIs have - Copilot Actions on the web, memory and personalization, Copilot Vision on mobile and Windows, AI-generated podcasts and Microsoft releases Copilot Search in Bing Is AI turning us all into Charly from Flowers for Algernon? AI is making us stupider! There are studies!! This is the argument against every single tech advance from the steam train to the ballpoint pen to this Microsoft's AI demo of vibe-coded Quake II highlights the problem nicely Sometimes it's the little things: AI recaps for book series in Kindle GitHub Copilot updated with Agent Mode, Cursor-style code overviews, more Xbox & gaming Microsoft announces new Xbox Games Showcase for June Edge Game Assist gets new features, support for new games GTA V and enhanced version for PC coming to Game Pass on April 15 - In addition to the previous Game Pass titles we discussed last week Good: Nintendo Switch 2 supports ray tracing and DLSS Bad: Nintendo delays Switch 2 to figure out the tariffs mess Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Programmers at Work App pick of the week: Apple Music RunAs Radio this week: Application Risk in Security Copilot with Ari Schorr Brown liquor pick of the week: The Heart Cut #02 These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/927 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell
Introducing the Windows 11 Feature Tracker "From the 'I should have done this two years ago' files, the 'I have wasted my life' files, and the, 'great, I needed more work to do' files ... There is a need for this. So I made one. But it will evolve. Maybe into a web app/wiki/something else... like a Notion website?" - Paul Patch Tuesday brings a metric ton of new features - And what the tracker showed clearly Two seconds after posting the tracker, Microsoft changed the Copilot app yet again - proving the need for the tracker - And demonstrating why the Insider Program is so screwed up A hidden new Start menu in recent builds presents an interesting conundrum: How to handle something Microsoft has not announced? More Windows 11 Beta build for 23H2: File new tab/new window changes, Explorer context menu regression may be permanent Dev and Beta (24H2): Taskbar icon scaling is a blast from the past we all need desperately Intel is killing Unison app and service Like winter, Build is coming Build session catalog is live - mostly AI as expected. Paul and Richard are going Overview of the Windows Copilot Runtime (one year after it was announced), Windows Actions, standard Kayla Cinnamon talk on Windows productivity, using your own model with WCR, native app experiences(!), Arm64 app perf, etc. AI Final thoughts on Microsoft's 50th: Biggest accomplishment wasn't any tech, it was changing with the times. What it's best at: Democratizing tech for the commoners, an expansion on Jack Tramiel/Commodore's "computers for the masses, not the classes" schtick. And that is exactly what it is doing with AI right now Microsoft hosts a consumer AI event and announces a metric ton of new Copilot features We need a Copilot feature tracker. Copilot = every single feature other AIs have - Copilot Actions on the web, memory and personalization, Copilot Vision on mobile and Windows, AI-generated podcasts and Microsoft releases Copilot Search in Bing Is AI turning us all into Charly from Flowers for Algernon? AI is making us stupider! There are studies!! This is the argument against every single tech advance from the steam train to the ballpoint pen to this Microsoft's AI demo of vibe-coded Quake II highlights the problem nicely Sometimes it's the little things: AI recaps for book series in Kindle GitHub Copilot updated with Agent Mode, Cursor-style code overviews, more Xbox & gaming Microsoft announces new Xbox Games Showcase for June Edge Game Assist gets new features, support for new games GTA V and enhanced version for PC coming to Game Pass on April 15 - In addition to the previous Game Pass titles we discussed last week Good: Nintendo Switch 2 supports ray tracing and DLSS Bad: Nintendo delays Switch 2 to figure out the tariffs mess Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Programmers at Work App pick of the week: Apple Music RunAs Radio this week: Application Risk in Security Copilot with Ari Schorr Brown liquor pick of the week: The Heart Cut #02 These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/927 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell
Introducing the Windows 11 Feature Tracker "From the 'I should have done this two years ago' files, the 'I have wasted my life' files, and the, 'great, I needed more work to do' files ... There is a need for this. So I made one. But it will evolve. Maybe into a web app/wiki/something else... like a Notion website?" - Paul Patch Tuesday brings a metric ton of new features - And what the tracker showed clearly Two seconds after posting the tracker, Microsoft changed the Copilot app yet again - proving the need for the tracker - And demonstrating why the Insider Program is so screwed up A hidden new Start menu in recent builds presents an interesting conundrum: How to handle something Microsoft has not announced? More Windows 11 Beta build for 23H2: File new tab/new window changes, Explorer context menu regression may be permanent Dev and Beta (24H2): Taskbar icon scaling is a blast from the past we all need desperately Intel is killing Unison app and service Like winter, Build is coming Build session catalog is live - mostly AI as expected. Paul and Richard are going Overview of the Windows Copilot Runtime (one year after it was announced), Windows Actions, standard Kayla Cinnamon talk on Windows productivity, using your own model with WCR, native app experiences(!), Arm64 app perf, etc. AI Final thoughts on Microsoft's 50th: Biggest accomplishment wasn't any tech, it was changing with the times. What it's best at: Democratizing tech for the commoners, an expansion on Jack Tramiel/Commodore's "computers for the masses, not the classes" schtick. And that is exactly what it is doing with AI right now Microsoft hosts a consumer AI event and announces a metric ton of new Copilot features We need a Copilot feature tracker. Copilot = every single feature other AIs have - Copilot Actions on the web, memory and personalization, Copilot Vision on mobile and Windows, AI-generated podcasts and Microsoft releases Copilot Search in Bing Is AI turning us all into Charly from Flowers for Algernon? AI is making us stupider! There are studies!! This is the argument against every single tech advance from the steam train to the ballpoint pen to this Microsoft's AI demo of vibe-coded Quake II highlights the problem nicely Sometimes it's the little things: AI recaps for book series in Kindle GitHub Copilot updated with Agent Mode, Cursor-style code overviews, more Xbox & gaming Microsoft announces new Xbox Games Showcase for June Edge Game Assist gets new features, support for new games GTA V and enhanced version for PC coming to Game Pass on April 15 - In addition to the previous Game Pass titles we discussed last week Good: Nintendo Switch 2 supports ray tracing and DLSS Bad: Nintendo delays Switch 2 to figure out the tariffs mess Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Programmers at Work App pick of the week: Apple Music RunAs Radio this week: Application Risk in Security Copilot with Ari Schorr Brown liquor pick of the week: The Heart Cut #02 These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/927 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell
Introducing the Windows 11 Feature Tracker "From the 'I should have done this two years ago' files, the 'I have wasted my life' files, and the, 'great, I needed more work to do' files ... There is a need for this. So I made one. But it will evolve. Maybe into a web app/wiki/something else... like a Notion website?" - Paul Patch Tuesday brings a metric ton of new features - And what the tracker showed clearly Two seconds after posting the tracker, Microsoft changed the Copilot app yet again - proving the need for the tracker - And demonstrating why the Insider Program is so screwed up A hidden new Start menu in recent builds presents an interesting conundrum: How to handle something Microsoft has not announced? More Windows 11 Beta build for 23H2: File new tab/new window changes, Explorer context menu regression may be permanent Dev and Beta (24H2): Taskbar icon scaling is a blast from the past we all need desperately Intel is killing Unison app and service Like winter, Build is coming Build session catalog is live - mostly AI as expected. Paul and Richard are going Overview of the Windows Copilot Runtime (one year after it was announced), Windows Actions, standard Kayla Cinnamon talk on Windows productivity, using your own model with WCR, native app experiences(!), Arm64 app perf, etc. AI Final thoughts on Microsoft's 50th: Biggest accomplishment wasn't any tech, it was changing with the times. What it's best at: Democratizing tech for the commoners, an expansion on Jack Tramiel/Commodore's "computers for the masses, not the classes" schtick. And that is exactly what it is doing with AI right now Microsoft hosts a consumer AI event and announces a metric ton of new Copilot features We need a Copilot feature tracker. Copilot = every single feature other AIs have - Copilot Actions on the web, memory and personalization, Copilot Vision on mobile and Windows, AI-generated podcasts and Microsoft releases Copilot Search in Bing Is AI turning us all into Charly from Flowers for Algernon? AI is making us stupider! There are studies!! This is the argument against every single tech advance from the steam train to the ballpoint pen to this Microsoft's AI demo of vibe-coded Quake II highlights the problem nicely Sometimes it's the little things: AI recaps for book series in Kindle GitHub Copilot updated with Agent Mode, Cursor-style code overviews, more Xbox & gaming Microsoft announces new Xbox Games Showcase for June Edge Game Assist gets new features, support for new games GTA V and enhanced version for PC coming to Game Pass on April 15 - In addition to the previous Game Pass titles we discussed last week Good: Nintendo Switch 2 supports ray tracing and DLSS Bad: Nintendo delays Switch 2 to figure out the tariffs mess Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Programmers at Work App pick of the week: Apple Music RunAs Radio this week: Application Risk in Security Copilot with Ari Schorr Brown liquor pick of the week: The Heart Cut #02 These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/927 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell
Parmi les nombreux systèmes d'exploitation existants, ReactOS fait figure d'exception. Initié en 1996, ce projet ambitieux vise à exécuter nativement les applications Windows, en reproduisant l'architecture et les fonctionnalités de Windows NT. Concrètement, ses développeurs ont recréé une grande partie des interfaces de programmation du système de Microsoft, permettant aux logiciels Windows d'interagir avec ReactOS comme s'ils tournaient sur leur plateforme d'origine.Malgré près de 30 ans de développement, ReactOS est toujours en phase alpha, mais il a prouvé sa compatibilité avec plusieurs logiciels, comme d'anciennes versions de Microsoft Office, des lecteurs multimédias comme VLC ou Winamp, des jeux rétro ou encore des utilitaires comme WinRAR. Son noyau hybride gère les ressources matérielles, la mémoire et les processus, en tentant d'émuler au mieux le comportement du noyau de Windows NT. Pour élargir encore sa compatibilité, il intègre également Wine, un autre projet permettant de faire fonctionner des applications Windows sous Linux.En 2023, l'équipe a surpris en annonçant la compatibilité de ReactOS avec les smartphones Lumia, grâce à la prise en charge de l'UEFI 64-bit (AMD64 et ARM64). Plus récemment, elle a ajouté la stack audio de Windows, même si un bug empêche pour l'instant son bon fonctionnement. Autre avancée : les versions nightly build peuvent désormais être exécutées sur un LiveUSB, sans nécessiter d'installation complète. Une prochaine mise à jour élargira encore cette possibilité, rendant le test du système plus accessible. Si ReactOS reste un projet de niche, il continue de séduire les passionnés de rétrocompatibilité et les adeptes d'alternatives libres à Windows. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.
There are new GPUs that are "available"! Are either NVIDIA or AMD's new offering a good deal for the Linux user? Speaking of AMD, what's up with that AMD Microcode vulnerability? Mono is back, with a dash of Wine, Ubuntu is reverting the O3 optimizations, and we say Goodbye to Skype. For tips we have mesg for controlling console messaging, and virsh for managing and live migrating your virtual machines. You can find the show notes at https://bit.ly/3FfcqkU and we'll see you next week! Host: Jonathan Bennett Co-Host: Jeff Massie Download or subscribe to Untitled Linux Show at https://twit.tv/shows/untitled-linux-show Want access to the ad-free video and exclusive features? Become a member of Club TWiT today! https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.
Bienvenue dans le deux-cent-quatre-vingt-neuvième épisode de CacaoCast! Dans cet épisode, Philippe Casgrain et Philippe Guitard discutent des sujets suivants: Fireside Cocoa - Les impressions de Philippe iPhone 16e - Le moins cher des iPhones? MapleScan - Fait au Canada Alternatives UE - Cherchez-vous une alternative à l'hégémonie américaine? Spices - Créez des vues de débogage en SwiftUI Arm64-to-sim - Pour les frameworks récalcitrants Astuce Finder - Renommer plusieurs fichiers simultanément BusySimulator - Faites semblant d'être occupé Astuce IA - Le mot en F toujours utile Ecoutez cet épisode
En el audio de hoy comentó mi experiencia con la arquitectura arm64 y con mis hábitos de escritura en papel.
This week we're back with Wine 10 and x86 emulation on ARM64, the compute performance of the NVIDIA RTX 5090, and a new Ventoy release. There's more Linux 6.14 news, including support for the copilot key, an impressive win in suspend and resume speeds, and the bcachefs pull request finally lands. For tips we have Ignition for startup management, lsscsi for drive info, vainfo for quering VA-API, adn v4lt-ctl for working with video devices. The show notes are at https://bit.ly/42uSZ1g and we'll see you next time! Host: Jonathan Bennett Co-Hosts: Rob Campbell, Jeff Massie, and Ken McDonald Want access to the video version and exclusive features? Become a member of Club TWiT today! https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.
The hardware industry is surging, driven by AI's demanding workloads, with Arm—a 35-year-old pioneer in processor IP—playing a pivotal role. In an episode ofThe New Stack Makersrecorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, Pranay Bakre, principal solutions engineer at Arm, discussed how Arm is helping organizations migrate and run applications on its technology.Bakre highlighted Arm's partnership with hyperscalers like AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, showcasing processors such as AWS Graviton and Google Axion, built on Arm's power-efficient, cost-effective Neoverse IP. This design ethos has spurred wide adoption, with 90-95% of CNCF projects supporting native Arm binaries.Attendees at Arm's booth frequently inquired about its plans to support AI workloads. Bakre noted the performance advantages of Arm-based infrastructure, delivering up to 60% workload improvements over legacy architectures. The episode also features a demo on migrating x86 applications to ARM64 in both cloud and containerized environments, emphasizing Arm's readiness for the AI era.Learn more from The New Stack about Arm: Arm Eyes AI with Its Latest Neoverse Cores and SubsystemBig Three in Cloud Prompts ARM to Rethink SoftwareJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.
RPCS3 comes to the Raspberry Pi! Lenovo Legion gets a Steam button, Funko pops Itch.io, and Battlemage sells out.
Episode NotesIntroduction to Cargo LambdaInteracts with AWS Lambda ecosystem from the terminalEnables native running, building, and deployment of Lambda functionsNo need for containers or VMsInstallation OptionsHomebrew (recommended for macOS and Linux)Scoop for WindowsDocker and Nix as alternativesBinary release or building from sourceGetting StartedUse cargo lambda new to create a projectDirectory structure includes package management, default code, compiler, and lintercargo lambda watch for immediate code writingcargo lambda invoke for testing with JSON payloadsWeb Framework SupportAbility to expose microservices with HTTP interfacesDeployment Processcargo lambda build --release for building (including ARM64 support)cargo lambda deploy for straightforward deploymentAdditional FeaturesVerbose mode and tracing options availableIntegration with GitHub Actions and AWS CDKAdvantages of Cargo LambdaLeverages the robust Rust ecosystemModern package management with CargoPotentially easier than scripting languages for Lambda developmentKey TakeawaysCargo Lambda offers a superior method for interacting with AWS Lambda compared to scripting languages.The tool provides a streamlined workflow for creating, testing, and deploying Lambda functions.It leverages the Rust ecosystem, offering modern package management and development tools.Cargo Lambda supports both function-based and web framework approaches for Lambda development.The ease of use and integration with AWS services make it an attractive option for Lambda developers.
After a flurry of last-second pre-release activity, Microsoft shipped 24H2 a week earlier than expected! Copilot also gets a major update for individuals too, and Copilot+ PCs get more features. 24H2 is here! Last week's Week D updates did finally go out, first to 22H2/23H2 and then to 24H2 That 22H2/23H2 preview update was apparently a hot mess Now Microsoft has issued a fix Windows 11 version 24H2 is fully available. Arm64 ISOs are coming soon The first LTSC version(s) of Windows 11 is now available - Windows 11 Enterprise Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 24H2 + Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024) New Dev and Beta builds, not much new, but new Snipping Tools spreads further Canary build today Copilot Copilot morphs into an AI companion or something Copilot+ PCs are getting new features, including one with a serious Recall vibe Microsoft is trying a different tact with the new AI features - explaining why they can be trusted. Can they be trusted? Microsoft belatedly explains why you can trust Recall As expected, Microsoft does a song and dance on changes to Recall, but notably never thanks the feedback it got from the security community. Good. But this is still a win-win, if just for opt-in and, now, uninstall Google pushes Gemini more in ChromeOS Microsoft 365, More Microsoft finally kills HoloLens 2 Germany has a plan for regulating all of Microsoft, not just the products that fall under the DMA Office 2024 is here for individuals too Intel rejects buyout offer... from Arm? Xbox Xbox announces new games at Tokyo Game Show First Game Pass titles of October reveal a bonanza of Activision titles, is what I wish we could discuss Starfield expansion arrives on Xbox, PC J Allard joins Amazon for some reason Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get the 24H2, refresh your recovery drivers/setup media App pick of the week: Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2025 are here RunAs Radio this week: Data Security and Governance with Nikki Chapple Brown liquor pick of the week: Russell's Reserve 10 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT 1password.com/windowsweekly flashpoint.io Melissa.com/twit
After a flurry of last-second pre-release activity, Microsoft shipped 24H2 a week earlier than expected! Copilot also gets a major update for individuals too, and Copilot+ PCs get more features. 24H2 is here! Last week's Week D updates did finally go out, first to 22H2/23H2 and then to 24H2 That 22H2/23H2 preview update was apparently a hot mess Now Microsoft has issued a fix Windows 11 version 24H2 is fully available. Arm64 ISOs are coming soon The first LTSC version(s) of Windows 11 is now available - Windows 11 Enterprise Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 24H2 + Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024) New Dev and Beta builds, not much new, but new Snipping Tools spreads further Canary build today Copilot Copilot morphs into an AI companion or something Copilot+ PCs are getting new features, including one with a serious Recall vibe Microsoft is trying a different tact with the new AI features - explaining why they can be trusted. Can they be trusted? Microsoft belatedly explains why you can trust Recall As expected, Microsoft does a song and dance on changes to Recall, but notably never thanks the feedback it got from the security community. Good. But this is still a win-win, if just for opt-in and, now, uninstall Google pushes Gemini more in ChromeOS Microsoft 365, More Microsoft finally kills HoloLens 2 Germany has a plan for regulating all of Microsoft, not just the products that fall under the DMA Office 2024 is here for individuals too Intel rejects buyout offer... from Arm? Xbox Xbox announces new games at Tokyo Game Show First Game Pass titles of October reveal a bonanza of Activision titles, is what I wish we could discuss Starfield expansion arrives on Xbox, PC J Allard joins Amazon for some reason Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get the 24H2, refresh your recovery drivers/setup media App pick of the week: Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2025 are here RunAs Radio this week: Data Security and Governance with Nikki Chapple Brown liquor pick of the week: Russell's Reserve 10 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT 1password.com/windowsweekly flashpoint.io Melissa.com/twit
After a flurry of last-second pre-release activity, Microsoft shipped 24H2 a week earlier than expected! Copilot also gets a major update for individuals too, and Copilot+ PCs get more features. 24H2 is here! Last week's Week D updates did finally go out, first to 22H2/23H2 and then to 24H2 That 22H2/23H2 preview update was apparently a hot mess Now Microsoft has issued a fix Windows 11 version 24H2 is fully available. Arm64 ISOs are coming soon The first LTSC version(s) of Windows 11 is now available - Windows 11 Enterprise Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 24H2 + Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024) New Dev and Beta builds, not much new, but new Snipping Tools spreads further Canary build today Copilot Copilot morphs into an AI companion or something Copilot+ PCs are getting new features, including one with a serious Recall vibe Microsoft is trying a different tact with the new AI features - explaining why they can be trusted. Can they be trusted? Microsoft belatedly explains why you can trust Recall As expected, Microsoft does a song and dance on changes to Recall, but notably never thanks the feedback it got from the security community. Good. But this is still a win-win, if just for opt-in and, now, uninstall Google pushes Gemini more in ChromeOS Microsoft 365, More Microsoft finally kills HoloLens 2 Germany has a plan for regulating all of Microsoft, not just the products that fall under the DMA Office 2024 is here for individuals too Intel rejects buyout offer... from Arm? Xbox Xbox announces new games at Tokyo Game Show First Game Pass titles of October reveal a bonanza of Activision titles, is what I wish we could discuss Starfield expansion arrives on Xbox, PC J Allard joins Amazon for some reason Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get the 24H2, refresh your recovery drivers/setup media App pick of the week: Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2025 are here RunAs Radio this week: Data Security and Governance with Nikki Chapple Brown liquor pick of the week: Russell's Reserve 10 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT 1password.com/windowsweekly flashpoint.io Melissa.com/twit
After a flurry of last-second pre-release activity, Microsoft shipped 24H2 a week earlier than expected! Copilot also gets a major update for individuals too, and Copilot+ PCs get more features. 24H2 is here! Last week's Week D updates did finally go out, first to 22H2/23H2 and then to 24H2 That 22H2/23H2 preview update was apparently a hot mess Now Microsoft has issued a fix Windows 11 version 24H2 is fully available. Arm64 ISOs are coming soon The first LTSC version(s) of Windows 11 is now available - Windows 11 Enterprise Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 24H2 + Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024) New Dev and Beta builds, not much new, but new Snipping Tools spreads further Canary build today Copilot Copilot morphs into an AI companion or something Copilot+ PCs are getting new features, including one with a serious Recall vibe Microsoft is trying a different tact with the new AI features - explaining why they can be trusted. Can they be trusted? Microsoft belatedly explains why you can trust Recall As expected, Microsoft does a song and dance on changes to Recall, but notably never thanks the feedback it got from the security community. Good. But this is still a win-win, if just for opt-in and, now, uninstall Google pushes Gemini more in ChromeOS Microsoft 365, More Microsoft finally kills HoloLens 2 Germany has a plan for regulating all of Microsoft, not just the products that fall under the DMA Office 2024 is here for individuals too Intel rejects buyout offer... from Arm? Xbox Xbox announces new games at Tokyo Game Show First Game Pass titles of October reveal a bonanza of Activision titles, is what I wish we could discuss Starfield expansion arrives on Xbox, PC J Allard joins Amazon for some reason Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get the 24H2, refresh your recovery drivers/setup media App pick of the week: Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2025 are here RunAs Radio this week: Data Security and Governance with Nikki Chapple Brown liquor pick of the week: Russell's Reserve 10 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT 1password.com/windowsweekly flashpoint.io Melissa.com/twit
After a flurry of last-second pre-release activity, Microsoft shipped 24H2 a week earlier than expected! Copilot also gets a major update for individuals too, and Copilot+ PCs get more features. 24H2 is here! Last week's Week D updates did finally go out, first to 22H2/23H2 and then to 24H2 That 22H2/23H2 preview update was apparently a hot mess Now Microsoft has issued a fix Windows 11 version 24H2 is fully available. Arm64 ISOs are coming soon The first LTSC version(s) of Windows 11 is now available - Windows 11 Enterprise Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 24H2 + Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024) New Dev and Beta builds, not much new, but new Snipping Tools spreads further Canary build today Copilot Copilot morphs into an AI companion or something Copilot+ PCs are getting new features, including one with a serious Recall vibe Microsoft is trying a different tact with the new AI features - explaining why they can be trusted. Can they be trusted? Microsoft belatedly explains why you can trust Recall As expected, Microsoft does a song and dance on changes to Recall, but notably never thanks the feedback it got from the security community. Good. But this is still a win-win, if just for opt-in and, now, uninstall Google pushes Gemini more in ChromeOS Microsoft 365, More Microsoft finally kills HoloLens 2 Germany has a plan for regulating all of Microsoft, not just the products that fall under the DMA Office 2024 is here for individuals too Intel rejects buyout offer... from Arm? Xbox Xbox announces new games at Tokyo Game Show First Game Pass titles of October reveal a bonanza of Activision titles, is what I wish we could discuss Starfield expansion arrives on Xbox, PC J Allard joins Amazon for some reason Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get the 24H2, refresh your recovery drivers/setup media App pick of the week: Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2025 are here RunAs Radio this week: Data Security and Governance with Nikki Chapple Brown liquor pick of the week: Russell's Reserve 10 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT 1password.com/windowsweekly flashpoint.io Melissa.com/twit
After a flurry of last-second pre-release activity, Microsoft shipped 24H2 a week earlier than expected! Copilot also gets a major update for individuals too, and Copilot+ PCs get more features. 24H2 is here! Last week's Week D updates did finally go out, first to 22H2/23H2 and then to 24H2 That 22H2/23H2 preview update was apparently a hot mess Now Microsoft has issued a fix Windows 11 version 24H2 is fully available. Arm64 ISOs are coming soon The first LTSC version(s) of Windows 11 is now available - Windows 11 Enterprise Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 24H2 + Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024) New Dev and Beta builds, not much new, but new Snipping Tools spreads further Canary build today Copilot Copilot morphs into an AI companion or something Copilot+ PCs are getting new features, including one with a serious Recall vibe Microsoft is trying a different tact with the new AI features - explaining why they can be trusted. Can they be trusted? Microsoft belatedly explains why you can trust Recall As expected, Microsoft does a song and dance on changes to Recall, but notably never thanks the feedback it got from the security community. Good. But this is still a win-win, if just for opt-in and, now, uninstall Google pushes Gemini more in ChromeOS Microsoft 365, More Microsoft finally kills HoloLens 2 Germany has a plan for regulating all of Microsoft, not just the products that fall under the DMA Office 2024 is here for individuals too Intel rejects buyout offer... from Arm? Xbox Xbox announces new games at Tokyo Game Show First Game Pass titles of October reveal a bonanza of Activision titles, is what I wish we could discuss Starfield expansion arrives on Xbox, PC J Allard joins Amazon for some reason Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get the 24H2, refresh your recovery drivers/setup media App pick of the week: Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements 2025 are here RunAs Radio this week: Data Security and Governance with Nikki Chapple Brown liquor pick of the week: Russell's Reserve 10 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT 1password.com/windowsweekly flashpoint.io Melissa.com/twit
It's another week of big Linux news, starting with a new Ardour release, that one of our hosts had a tiny part in. The Winamp source release has been a trainwreck, Cloudflare spills the tea on their newest servers, and Valve is shaking things up. Proton may be adding support for Arm64 gaming, Valve engineers are laying down a challenge to Wayland, and a new DXVK is out with a bunch of fixes. And don't forget, we have in-depth coverage of the big "9.9" Linux vulnerability that turned out to be not quite that severe. For tips we have weather on the command line, protontricks for fixing Steam games, and xxd for generating some random hex. You can find the show notes at https://bit.ly/4epi7to and we'll see you next time! Host: Jonathan Bennett Co-Hosts: Jeff Massie and Rob Campbell Want access to the video version and exclusive features? Become a member of Club TWiT today! https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.
We're diving into the weeds this week, talking about tapeouts, PCI-E specifications, and kernel scheduling on today's oddball systems. There are releases to check out, like the latest OpenShot, Pipewire, and Raspberry Pi Connect. And finally we look to the future of Ubuntu, Gnome, and X11. For tips we have umask, shebang, and archiemount. Find the show notes at https://bit.ly/4eH3zFZ and enjoy! Host: Jonathan Bennett Co-Hosts: Jeff Massie and David Ruggles Want access to the video version and exclusive features? Become a member of Club TWiT today! https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.
Consulting firms like Boston Consulting Group and IBM are thriving due to the high demand for generative AI expertise. These firms are experiencing growth in sales and hiring as businesses seek guidance on implementing generative AI technologies. The episode also discussed how AI is impacting freelancers, with some benefiting in fields like data science while others face job security risks in tasks that can be automated. The potential risks of hollowing out the workforce with generative AI automation were also emphasized.Secondly, the episode delved into the Windows on ARM experience, noting improvements in app compatibility but challenges in gaming and device issues. The discussion highlighted the importance of real-world performance for businesses, especially in SMBs, and the promising future for Windows on ARM with more ARM64 native apps expected. The rapid pace of improvement in app compatibility was seen as a positive sign for the platform's adoption.The episode then shifted focus to the IT Leadership Diversity Report, revealing persistent gender and racial gaps in IT leadership roles. The data showed a lack of diversity, with a high percentage of white and male IT leaders. Despite some small improvements in representation, there was a call for companies to foster inclusive and equitable workspaces that reflect diverse communities. The importance of diversity and inclusion in driving business success was emphasized.Lastly, the episode discussed public support for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in companies, contrasting with the political backlash and scaling back of such programs. While support for specific initiatives like internships for underrepresented groups was high, financial incentives for achieving diversity goals were unpopular. The episode underscored the need for companies to embed diversity and inclusion into their core values and practices, focusing on results rather than high-profile branding. Three things to know today 00:00 Consulting Firms Thrive as Demand for Generative AI Expertise Soars05:17 Windows on Arm: Native App Support Expands, but Gaming and Device Issues Persist06:23 The IT Leadership Diversity Report Reveals Persistent Gender and Racial Gaps Supported by: https://www.huntress.com/mspradio/https://getinsync.ca/mspradio/ All our Sponsors: https://businessof.tech/sponsors/ Looking for a link from the stories? The entire script of the show, with links to articles, are posted in each story on https://www.businessof.tech/ Do you want the show on your podcast app or the written versions of the stories? Subscribe to the Business of Tech: https://www.businessof.tech/subscribe/ Support the show on Patreon: https://patreon.com/mspradio/ Want our stuff? Cool Merch? Wear “Why Do We Care?” - Visit https://mspradio.myspreadshop.com Follow us on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28908079/YouTube: https://youtube.com/mspradio/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mspradionews/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mspradio/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@businessoftechBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/businessoftech.bsky.social
Home Automation, The Internet of things. This is the first episode in a new series called Home Automation. The series is open to anyone and I encourage everyone to contribute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_automation From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Home automation or domotics is building automation for a home. A home automation system will monitor and/or control home attributes such as lighting, climate, entertainment systems, and appliances. It may also include home security such as access control and alarm systems. The phrase smart home refers to home automation devices that have internet access. Home automation, a broader category, includes any device that can be monitored or controlled via wireless radio signals, not just those having internet access. When connected with the Internet, home sensors and activation devices are an important constituent of the Internet of Things ("IoT"). A home automation system typically connects controlled devices to a central smart home hub (sometimes called a "gateway"). The user interface for control of the system uses either wall-mounted terminals, tablet or desktop computers, a mobile phone application, or a Web interface that may also be accessible off-site through the Internet. Now is the time I tried this out a few years ago, but after a lot of frustration with configuration of esp32 arduinos, and raspberry pi's I left it be. Recently inspired by colleagues in work, I decided to get back into it and my initial tests show that the scene has much improved over the years. Youtube Playlist The Hook Up, RSS Home Automation Guy, RSS Everything Smart Home, RSS Smart Solutions for Home, RSS Smart Home Circle, RSS Smart Home Junkie, RSS Home Assistant The first thing we'll need is something to control it all. Something will allow us to control our homes without requiring the cloud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Assistant From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Home Assistant is free and open-source software for home automation, designed to be an Internet of things (IoT) ecosystem-independent integration platform and central control system for smart home devices, with a focus on local control and privacy. It can be accessed through a web-based user interface, by using companion apps for Android and iOS, or by voice commands via a supported virtual assistant, such as Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, and their own "Assist" (built-in local voice assistant). The Home Assistant software application is installed as a computer appliance. After installation, it will act as a central control system for home automation (commonly called a smart home hub), that has the purpose of controlling IoT connectivity technology devices, software, applications and services from third-parties via modular integration components, including native integration components for common wireless communication protocols such as Bluetooth, Thread, Zigbee, and Z-Wave (used to create local personal area networks with small low-power digital radios). Home Assistant as such supports controlling devices and services connected via either open and proprietary ecosystems as long they provide public access via some kind of Open API or MQTT for third-party integrations over the local area network or the Internet. Information from all devices and their attributes (entities) that the application sees can be used and controlled from within scripts trigger automation using scheduling and "blueprint" subroutines, e.g. for controlling lighting, climate, entertainment systems and home appliances. Summary Original author(s): Paulus Schoutsen Developer(s): Home Assistant Core Team and Community Initial release: 17 September 2013 Repository: https://github.com/home-assistant Written in: Python (Python 3.11) Operating system: Software appliance / Virtual appliance (Linux) Platform: ARM, ARM64, IA-32 (x86), and x64 (x86-64) Type: Home automation, smart home technology, Internet of things, task automator License: Apache License (free and open-source) Website: https://www.home-assistant.io The following is taken from the Concepts and terminology on the Home Assistant website. It is reproduced here under the creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License Integrations Integrations are pieces of software that allow Home Assistant to connect to other software and platforms. For example, a product by Philips called Hue would use the Philips Hue term integration and allow Home Assistant to talk to the hardware controller Hue Bridge. Any Home Assistant compatible term devices connected to the Hue Bridge would appear in Home Assistant as devices. For a full list of compatible term integrations, refer to the integrations documentation. Once an term integration has been added, the hardware and/or data are represented in Home Assistant as devices and entities. Entities Entities are the basic building blocks to hold data in Home Assistant. An term entity represents a term sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other term entities. An term entity is usually part of a term device or a term service. Entities have term states. Devices Devices are a logical grouping for one or more term entities. A term device may represent a physical term device, which can have one or more sensors. The sensors appear as entities associated with the term device. For example, a motion sensor is represented as a term device. It may provide motion detection, temperature, and light levels as term entities. Entities have states such as detected when motion is detected and clear when there is no motion. Devices and entities are used throughout Home Assistant. To name a few examples: Dashboards can show a state of an term entity. For example, if a light is on or off. An automation can be triggered from a state change on an term entity. For example, a motion sensor entity detects motion and triggers a light to turn on. A predefined color and brightness setting for a light saved as a scene. Areas An area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of term devices and term entities that are meant to match areas (or rooms) in the physical world: your home. For example, the living room area groups devices and entities in your living room. Areas allow you to target service calls at an entire group of devices. For example, turning off all the lights in the living room. Locations within your home such as living room, dance floor, etc. Areas can be assigned to term floors. Areas can also be used for automatically generated cards, such as the Area card. Automations A set of repeatable term actions that can be set up to run automatically. Automations are made of three key components: Triggers - events that start an term automation. For example, when the sun sets or a motion sensor is activated. Conditions - optional tests that must be met before an term action can be run. For example, if someone is home. Actions - interact with term devices such as turn on a light. To learn the basics about term automations, refer to the automation basics page or try creating an automation yourself. Scripts Similar to term automations, scripts are repeatable term actions that can be run. The difference between term scripts and term automations is that term scripts do not have triggers. This means that term scripts cannot automatically run unless they are used in an term automations. Scripts are particularly useful if you perform the same term actions in different term automations or trigger them from a dashboard. For information on how to create term scripts, refer to the scripts documentation. Scenes Scenes allow you to create predefined settings for your term devices. Similar to a driving mode on phones, or driver profiles in cars, it can change an environment to suit you. For example, your watching films term scene may dim the lighting, switch on the TV and increase its volume. This can be saved as a term scene and used without having to set individual term devices every time. To learn how to use term scenes, refer to the scene documentation. Add-ons Depending on your installation type, you can install third party add-ons. Add-ons are usually apps that can be run with Home Assistant but provide a quick and easy way to install, configure, and run within Home Assistant. Add-ons provide additional functionality whereas term integrations connect Home Assistant to other apps.
FreeBSD Foundation Statement on the European Union Cyber Resiliency Act, DragonFly BSD on a Thinkpad T480s, How FreeBSD Employs Ampere Arm64 Servers in the Data Center, FreeBSD Yubikey authentication, that time I almost added Tetris to htop, and more NOTES This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines FreeBSD Foundation Statement on the European Union Cyber Resiliency Act (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/freebsd-foundation-statement-on-the-european-union-cyber-resiliency-act/?utm_source=bsdweekly) DragonFly BSD on a Thinkpad T480s (https://git.sr.ht/~tomh/dragonflybsd-on-a-laptop/tree/master/item/README.md) News Roundup Ampere in the Wild: How FreeBSD Employs Ampere Arm64 Servers in the Data Center (https://amperecomputing.com/blogs/ampere-in-the-wild) FreeBSD Yubikey authentication (https://gist.github.com/daemonhorn/bdd77a7bc0ff5842e5a31d999b96e1f1) That time I almost added Tetris to htop (https://hisham.hm/2024/02/12/that-time-i-almost-added-tetris-to-htop/) Beastie Bits Mail Software Projects for You (https://mwl.io/archives/23419) At long last: the MWL Title Index (https://mwl.io/archives/23401) FreeBSD on a RPi (https://linux.slashdot.org/story/24/01/07/0327229/how-does-freebsd-compare-to-linux-on-a-raspberry-pi) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Feedback/Questions Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv) Join us and other BSD Fans in our BSD Now Telegram channel (https://t.me/bsdnow)
On this week's episode of the Window's Central Podcast, Dan and Zac discuss why we're not getting Windows 12 this year at least, Microsoft being the world's most valuable company for the next five years, Google finally bringing native Arm64 support to Chrome on Windows, the latest Windows Insider updates, initial Apple Vision Pro reviews, how Apple's malicious compliance with new EU rules is ruffling feathers, and more! Links: Windows 12 might not arrive in 2024 -Windows Central 13 market analysts unanimously vote that Microsoft will be the world's most valuable company in the next five years - Windows Central Google Chrome for Windows on Arm is FINALLY happening - Windows Central Microsoft's new Windows OS installation UI is actually 10 years old - Windows Central 'Apple's new policy is a step in the wrong direction.' - Windows Central Follow us on Twitter: @Daniel_Rubino @ZacBowden
Apple will start allowing users to download apps from alternative app stores in March, Google is testing an ARM64 version of Chrome, and George Carlin's estate has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the producers of a fake AI-generated comedy special. MP3 Please SUBSCRIBE HERE. You can get an ad-free feed of Daily Tech HeadlinesContinue reading "Apple To Allow Alternative App Stores On iOS In The EU – DTH"
Join Jez and Rand for the latest Xbox Two Podcast! This week, we discuss the latest rumors around the Xbox Developer_Direct, talk Indiana Jones rumors and Prince of Persia gameplay, we also get into more Xbox "third-party" drama, and other newsy bits from the week. PATREON: This week, we also talked to MVG all about Xbox and gaming, exclusively on Patreon.com/XB2! SPONSOR: Grab free breakfasts FOR LIFE with our HelloFresh.com/xboxtwofree checkout code "XboxTwoFree."
The Daily Gwei Refuel gives you a recap every week day on everything that happened in the Ethereum and crypto ecosystems over the previous 24 hours - hosted by Anthony Sassano. Timestamps and links to topics discussed: https://daily-gwei-links.vercel.app/recent 00:00 Introductory song 00:39 Goerli shadow fork for Deneb and Cancun https://twitter.com/terencechain/status/1737131517066010810 02:06 Obol's DV Cluster Squad Staking goes Mainnet Beta https://twitter.com/ObolNetwork/status/1737094101160640706 10:56 EF showcases projects funded in Q3 https://twitter.com/EF_ESP/status/1737075138024399115 11:39 $189 ARM64 running two L1+L2 synced nodes concurrently https://twitter.com/EthereumOnARM/status/1737409687358718304 15:25 Optimism's path towards a "collaborative Superchain" https://twitter.com/Optimism/status/1737219639346606252 16:41 Next Stylus testnet cuts fees another 2.5x https://twitter.com/CryptoIsCute/status/1737180148070560248 19:25 Based Booster Rollups and how they solve fragmentation https://twitter.com/arixoneth/status/1737171628939776319 21:58 Examples of devs ignoring noise and just building https://twitter.com/jessepollak/status/1737289727227883946 26:20 EigenLayer about to hit $1B in TVL in just ~24h of cap raise https://twitter.com/13yearoldvc/status/1737168422235222255 26:56 A case for referring to Ethereum as “the Ether" in mainstream https://twitter.com/jwmeyer/status/1737240199829012912 27:30 Anthony's modest bull case for Ethereum in 2024 https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1737121095042646032 This episode is also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/eQGxglb-Gko Subscribe to the newsletter: https://thedailygwei.substack.com/ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvCp6vKY5jDr87htKH6hgDA/ Follow Anthony on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sassal0x Follow The Daily Gwei on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedailygwei Join the Discord Channel: https://discord.gg/4pfUJsENcg DISCLAIMER: All information presented across all of The Daily Gwei's communication channels is strictly for educational purposes and should not be taken as investment advice.
A binary summer-recap episode, looking at some vulnerabilities and research put out over the summer. Talking about what TPM really offers when it comes to full-disk encryption, some thoughts on AI in the fuzzing loop. Then into some cool bugs, kicking off with some ARM Memory Tagging Extension vulnerabilities, a `-fstack-protector` implementation failure and bypass, and then a look at a Android exploit that was found in-the-wild. Links and vulnerability summaries for this episode are available at: https://dayzerosec.com/podcast/216.html [00:00:00] Introduction [00:01:50] Spot the Vuln - Only One Domain [00:04:46] AI-Powered Fuzzing: Breaking the Bug Hunting Barrier [00:15:00] Summary: MTE As Implemented [00:38:21] TPM provides zero practical security [00:47:30] CVE-2023-4039: GCC's -fstack-protector fails to guard dynamic stack allocations on ARM64 [00:55:30] Analyzing a Modern In-the-wild Android Exploit [01:07:31] Various Vulnerabilities in Huawei Trustlets The DAY[0] Podcast episodes are streamed live on Twitch twice a week: -- Mondays at 3:00pm Eastern (Boston) we focus on web and more bug bounty style vulnerabilities -- Tuesdays at 7:00pm Eastern (Boston) we focus on lower-level vulnerabilities and exploits. We are also available on the usual podcast platforms: -- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1484046063 -- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4NKCxk8aPEuEFuHsEQ9Tdt -- Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy9hMTIxYTI0L3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz -- Other audio platforms can be found at https://anchor.fm/dayzerosec You can also join our discord: https://discord.gg/daTxTK9
This week's EYE ON NPI will "Speak Friend and Enter" your wireless connectivity toolbox, it's TE's LEMBAS LTE/GNSS USB Modem (https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/t/te-connectivity-amp/lembas-lte-gnss-usb-modem) an easy-to-use full powered cellular and GPS modem designed specifically to be used with single-board Linux computers (SBCs) to add networking and location tracking with a simple plug-and-play USB connection. We bought one and popped it open - not recommended because it will void your warranty - and found inside is a Quectel EC25-AFXD module (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/quectel/EC25AFXGA-128-SGAS/13278280) - an LTE Cat 4 data-only module with high speed uplink and downlink when LTE is available, and GSM/GPRS backward-compatibility for remote areas. Quectel EC25 is a series of LTE Cat 4 modules optimized specially for M2M and IoT applications. Adopting the 3GPP Rel-11 LTE technology, it delivers maximum data rates up to 150 Mbps downlink and 50 Mbps uplink. Designed in the compact and in a unified form factor, the EC25 series is compatible with Quectel multi-mode LTE Standard EC21 series/EC20-CE/EG25-G/EG21-G modules and UMTS/HSPA+ UC200A-GL module, which allows for flexible migration among them in design and manufacturing... backward-compatible with existing EDGE and GSM/GPRS networks, ensuring that it can be connected even in remote areas devoid of 4G or 3G coverage. EC25 series supports Qualcomm® IZat™ location technology Gen8C Lite (GPS, GLONASS, BDS, Galileo and QZSS). The integrated GNSS greatly simplifies product design, and provides quicker, more accurate and more dependable positioning. The LEMBAS has a lot of little details that shows the design team focused on a high quality build and removing any obstacles to use. For example, instead of a 'USB stick' style modem that blocks all of the USB ports on your raspi, the modem uses any USB Type C cable - this also allows the user to place the LEMBAS wherever the antenna will get best reception. When we opened it up, we noticed that the board was conformal coated (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/coating-grease-repair/642), so it will handle being exposed to humid air, although please note it's not rated for outdoor use. The SIM card is pre-installed but can be removed / replaced easily if a particular data service is desired. We also thought the status LEDs that appear as part of the TE logo showed a cute designer touch. One handy design decision that makes the LEMBAS easy to get started with: inside is a 2-port USB hub (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/TUSB4020BIPHP/5724124) so that, when plugged into USB, it shows up as both the modem interface and a small USB storage key. On that storage are all the files you need to run to install the modem interface on an Arm32 or Arm64 computer like the Raspberry Pi. This definitely solves the "to get on the internet I have to install my wireless drivers but I can't get onto the internet because I haven't installed my wireless drivers" problem. And of course, there's a GNSS inside as well, which makes this perfect for asset tracking or geo-locating projects where you need to know where the code is running from. It's ready to go in an instant and with native Linux support for cellular modems, you don't need to do any AT command noodling - use Python or node.js or whatever language your application is and open secure sockets like normal. If you've got a hankerin' for a piece of Elvish-quality technology that will let you communicate anywhere in the world, even on the top of Mt. Doom, you can pick up a TE LEMBAS LTE/GNSS USB Modem (https://www.digikey.com/short/4172bndv) from DigiKey today and it will ship to you as fast as a gigantic eagle so that you can get started tomorrow morning... right after second breakfast!
We daily drive Asahi Linux on a MacBook, chat about how the team beat Apple to a major GPU milestone, and an easy way to self-host open-source ChatGPT alternatives. Special Guest: Neal Gompa.
Waldemar Hummer, Co-Founder & CTO of LocalStack, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how LocalStack changed Corey's mind on the futility of mocking clouds locally. Waldemar reveals why LocalStack appeals to both enterprise companies and digital nomads, and explains how both see improvements in their cost predictability as a result. Waldemar also discusses how LocalStack is an open-source company first and foremost, and how they're working with their community to evolve their licensing model. Corey and Waldemar chat about the rising demand for esoteric services, and Waldemar explains how accommodating that has led to an increase of adoption from the big data space. About WaldemarWaldemar is Co-Founder and CTO of LocalStack, where he and his team are building the world-leading platform for local cloud development, based on the hugely popular open source framework with 45k+ stars on Github. Prior to founding LocalStack, Waldemar has held several engineering and management roles at startups as well as large international companies, including Atlassian (Sydney), IBM (New York), and Zurich Insurance. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from TU Vienna.Links Referenced: LocalStack website: https://localstack.cloud/ LocalStack Slack channel: https://slack.localstack.cloud LocalStack Discourse forum: https://discuss.localstack.cloud LocalStack GitHub repository: https://github.com/localstack/localstack 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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Until a bit over a year ago or so, I had a loud and some would say fairly obnoxious opinion around the futility of mocking cloud services locally. This is not to be confused with mocking cloud services on the internet, which is what I do in lieu of having a real personality. And then one day I stopped espousing that opinion, or frankly, any opinion at all. And I'm glad to be able to talk at long last about why that is. My guest today is Waldemar Hummer, CTO and co-founder at LocalStack. Waldemar, it is great to talk to you.Waldemar: Hey, Corey. It's so great to be on the show. Thank you so much for having me. We're big fans of what you do at The Duckbill Group and Last Week in AWS. So really, you know, glad to be here with you today and have this conversation.Corey: It is not uncommon for me to have strong opinions that I espouse—politely to be clear; I'll make fun of companies and not people as a general rule—but sometimes I find that I've not seen the full picture and I no longer stand by an opinion I once held. And you're one of my favorite examples of this because, over the course of a 45-minute call with you and one of your business partners, I went from, “What you're doing is a hilarious misstep and will never work,” to, “Okay, and do you have room for another investor?” And in the interest of full disclosure, the answer to that was yes, and I became one of your angel investors. It's not exactly common for me to do that kind of a hard pivot. And I kind of suspect I'm not the only person who currently holds the opinion that I used to hold, so let's talk a little bit about that. At the very beginning, what is LocalStack and what does it you would say that you folks do?Waldemar: So LocalStack, in a nutshell, is a cloud emulator that runs on your local machine. It's basically like a sandbox environment where you can develop your applications locally. We have currently a range of around 60, 70 services that we provide, things like Lambda Functions, DynamoDB, SQS, like, all the major AWS services. And to your point, it is indeed a pretty large undertaking to actually implement the cloud and run it locally, but with the right approach, it actually turns out that it is feasible and possible, and we've demonstrated this with LocalStack. And I'm glad that we've convinced you to think of it that way as well.Corey: A couple of points that you made during that early conversation really stuck with me. The first is, “Yeah, AWS has two, no three no four-hundred different service offerings. But look at your customer base. How many of those services are customers using in any real depth? And of those services, yeah, the APIs are vast, and very much a sprawling pile of nonsense, but how many of those esoteric features are those folks actually using?” That was half of the argument that won me over.The other half was, “Imagine that you're an enormous company that's an insurance company or a bank. And this year, you're hiring 5000 brand new developers, fresh out of school. Two to 3000 of those developers will still be working here in about a year as they wind up either progressing in other directions, not winding up completing internships, or going back to school after internships, or for a variety of reasons. So, you have that many people that you need to teach how to use cloud in the context that we use cloud, combined with the question of how do you make sure that one of them doesn't make a fun mistake that winds up bankrupting the entire company with a surprise AWS bill?” And those two things combined turned me from, “What you're doing is ridiculous,” to, “Oh, my God. You're absolutely right.”And since then, I've encountered you in a number of my client environments. You were absolutely right. This is something that resonates deeply and profoundly with larger enterprise customers in particular, but also folks who just don't want to wind up being beholden to every time they do a deploy to anything to test something out, yay, I get to spend more money on AWS services.Waldemar: Yeah, totally. That's spot on. So, to your first point, so definitely we have a core set of services that most people are using. So, things like Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, like, the core serverless, kind of, APIs. And then there's kind of a long tail of more exotic services that we support these days, things like, even like QLDB, the quantum ledger database, or, you know, managed streaming for Kafka.But like, certainly, like, the core 15, 20 services are the ones that are really most used by the majority of people. And then we also, you know, pro offering have some very, sort of, advanced services for different use cases. So, that's to your first point.And second point is, yeah, totally spot on. So LocalStack, like, really enables you to experiment in the sandbox. So, we both see it as an experimentation, also development environment, where you don't need to think about cloud costs. And this, I guess, will be very close to your heart in the work that you're doing, the costs are becoming really predictable as well, right? Because in the cloud, you know, work to different companies before doing LocalStack where we were using AWS resources, and you can end up in a situation where overnight, you accumulate, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of AWS bill because you've turned on a certain feature, or some, you know, connectivity into some VPC or networking configuration that just turns out to be costly.Also, one more thing that is worth mentioning, like, we want to encourage, like, frequent testing, and a lot of the cloud's billing and cost structure is focused around, for example, hourly billing of resources, right? And if you have a test that just spins up resources that run for a couple of minutes, you still end up paying the entire hour. And we LocalStack, really, that brings down the cloud builds significantly because you can really test frequently, the cycles become much faster, and it's also again, more efficient, more cost-effective.Corey: There's something useful to be said for, “Well, how do I make sure that I turn off resources when I'm done?” In cloud, it's a bit of a game of guess-and-check. And you turn off things you think are there and you wait a few days and you check the bill again, and you go and turn more things off, and the cycle repeats. Or alternately, wait for the end of the month and wonder in perpetuity why you're being billed 48 cents a month, and not be clear on why. Restarting the laptop is a lot more straightforward.I also want to call out some of my own bias on this where I used to be a big believer in being able to build and deploy and iterate on things locally because well, what happens when I'm in a plane with terrible WiFi? Well, in the before times, I flew an awful lot and was writing a fair bit of, well, cloudy nonsense and I still never found that to be a particular blocker on most of what I was doing. So, it always felt a little bit precious to me when people were talking about, well, what if I can't access the internet to wind up building and deploying these things? It's now 2023. How often does that really happen? But is that a use case that you see a lot of?Waldemar: It's definitely a fair point. And probably, like, 95% of cloud development these days is done in a high internet bandwidth environment, maybe some corporate network where you have really fast internet access. But that's only a subset, I guess, of the world out there, right? So, there might be situations where, you know, you may have bad connectivity. Also, maybe you live in a region—or maybe you're traveling even, right? So, there's a lot more and more people who are just, “Digital nomads,” quote-unquote, right, who just like to work in remote places.Corey: You're absolutely right. My bias is that I live in San Francisco. I have symmetric gigabit internet at home. There's not a lot of scenarios in my day-to-day life—except when I'm, you know, on the train or the bus traveling through the city—because thank you, Verizon—where I have impeded connectivity.Waldemar: Right. Yeah, totally. And I think the other aspect of this is kind of the developers just like to have things locally, right, because it gives them the feeling of you know, better control over the code, like, being able to integrate into their IDEs, setting breakpoints, having these quick cycles of iterations. And again, this is something that there's more and more tooling coming up in the cloud ecosystem, but it's still inherently a remote execution that just, you know, takes the round trip of uploading your code, deploying, and so on, and that's just basically the pain point that we're addressing with LocalStack.Corey: One thing that did surprise me as well was discovering that there was a lot more appetite for this sort of thing in enterprise-scale environments. I mean, some of the reference customers that you have on your website include divisions of the UK Government and 3M—you know, the Post-It note people—as well as a number of other very large environments. And at first, that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but then it suddenly made an awful lot of sense because it seems—and please correct me if I'm wrong—that in order to use something like this at scale and use it in a way that isn't, more or less getting it into a point where the administration of it is more trouble than it's worth, you need to progress past a certain point of scale. An individual developer on their side project is likely just going to iterate against AWS itself, whereas a team of thousands of developers might not want to be doing that because they almost certainly have their own workflows that make that process high friction.Waldemar: Yeah, totally. So, what we see a lot is, especially in larger enterprises, dedicated teams, like, developer experience teams, whose main job is to really set up a workflow and environment where developers can be productive, most productive, and this can be, you know, on one side, like, setting up automated pipelines, provisioning maybe AWS sandbox and test accounts. And like some of these teams, when we introduce LocalStack, it's really a game-changer because it becomes much more decoupled and like, you know, distributed. You can basically configure your CI pipeline, just, you know, spin up the container, run your tests, tear down again afterwards. So, you know, it's less dependencies.And also, one aspect to consider is the aspect of cloud approvals. A lot of companies that we work with have, you know, very stringent processes around, even getting access to the clouds. Some SRE team needs to enable their IAM permissions and so on. With LocalStack, you can just get started from day one and just get productive and start testing from the local machine. So, I think those are patterns that we see a lot, in especially larger enterprise environments as well, where, you know, there might be some regulatory barriers and just, you know, process-wise steps as well.Corey: When I started playing with LocalStack myself, one of the things that I found disturbingly irritating is, there's a lot that AWS gets largely right with its AWS command-line utility. You can stuff a whole bunch of different options into the config for different profiles, and all the other tools that I use mostly wind up respecting that config. The few that extend it add custom lines to it, but everything else is mostly well-behaved and ignores the things it doesn't understand. But there is no facility that lets you say, “For this particular profile, use this endpoint for AWS service calls instead of the normal ones in public regions.” In fact, to do that, you effectively have to pass specific endpoint URLs to arguments, and I believe the syntax on that is not globally consistent between different services.It just feels like a living nightmare. At first, I was annoyed that you folks wound up having to ship your own command-line utility to wind up interfacing with this. Like, why don't you just add a profile? And then I tried it myself and, oh, I'm not the only person who knows how this stuff works that has ever looked at this and had that idea. No, it's because AWS is just unfortunate in that respect.Waldemar: That is a very good point. And you're touching upon one of the major pain points that we have, frankly, with the ecosystem. So, there are some pull requests against the AWS open-source repositories for the SDKs and various other tools, where folks—not only LocalStack, but other folks in the community have asked for introducing, for example, an AWS endpoint URL environment variable. These [protocols 00:12:32], unfortunately, were never merged. So, it would definitely make our lives a whole lot easier, but so far, we basically have to maintain these, you know, these wrapper scripts, basically, AWS local, CDK local, which basically just, you know, points the client to local endpoints. It's a good workaround for now, but I would assume and hope that the world's going to change in the upcoming years.Corey: I really hope so because everything else I can think of is just bad. The idea of building a custom wrapper around the AWS command-line utility that winds up checking the profile section, and oh, if this profile is that one, call out to this tool, otherwise it just becomes a pass-through. That has security implications that aren't necessarily terrific, you know, in large enterprise companies that care a lot about security. Yeah, pretend to be a binary you're not is usually the kind of thing that makes people sad when security politely kicks their door in.Waldemar: Yeah, we actually have pretty, like, big hopes for the v3 wave of the SDKs, AWS, because there is some restructuring happening with the endpoint resolution. And also, you can, in your profile, by now have, you know, special resolvers for endpoints. But still the case of just pointing all the SDKs and CLI to a custom endpoint is just not yet resolved. And this is, frankly, quite disappointing, actually.Corey: While we're complaining about the CLI, I'll throw one of my recurring issues with it in. I would love for it to adopt the Linux slash Unix paradigm of having a config.d directory that you can reference from within the primary config file, and then any file within that directory in the proper syntax winds up getting adopted into what becomes a giant composable config file, generated dynamically. The reason being is, I can have entire lists of profiles in separate files that I could then wind up dropping in and out on a client-by-client basis. So, I don't inadvertently expose who some of my clients are, in the event that winds up being part of the way that they have named their AWS accounts.That is one of those things I would love but it feels like it's not a common enough use case for there to be a whole lot of traction around it. And I guess some people would make a fair point if they were to say that the AWS CLI is the most widely deployed AWS open-source project, even though all it does is give money to AWS more efficiently.Waldemar: Yeah. Great point. Yeah, I think, like, how and some way to customize and, like, mingle or mangle your configurations in a more easy fashion would be super useful. I guess it might be a slippery slope to getting, you know, into something like I don't know, Helm for EKS and, like, really, you know, having to maintain a whole templating language for these configs. But certainly agree with you, to just you know, at least having [plug 00:15:18] points for being able to customize the behavior of the SDKs and CLIs would be extremely helpful and valuable.Corey: This is not—unfortunately—my first outing with the idea of trying to have AWS APIs done locally. In fact, almost a decade ago now, I did a build-out at a very large company of a… well, I would say that the build-out was not itself very large—it was about 300 nodes—that were all running Eucalyptus, which before it died on the vine, was imagined as a way of just emulating AWS APIs locally—done in Java, as I recall—and exposing local resources in ways that comported with how AWS did things. So, the idea being that you could write configuration to deploy any infrastructure you wanted in AWS, but also treat your local data center the same way. That idea unfortunately did not survive in the marketplace, which is kind of a shame, on some level. What was it that inspired you folks to wind up building this with an eye towards local development rather than run this as a private cloud in your data center instead?Waldemar: Yeah, very interesting. And I do also have some experience [unintelligible 00:16:29] from my past university days with Eucalyptus and OpenStack also, you know, running some workloads in an on-prem cluster. I think the main difference, first of all, these systems were extremely hard, notoriously hard to set up and maintain, right? So, lots of moving parts: you had your image server, your compute system, and then your messaging subsystems. Lots of moving parts, and wanting to have everything basically much more monolithic and in a single container.And Docker really sort of provides a great platform for us, which is create everything in a single container, spin up locally, make it very lightweight and easy to use. But I think really the first days of LocalStack, the idea was really, was actually with the use case of somebody from our team. Back then, I was working at Atlassian in the data engineering team and we had folks in the team were commuting to work on the train. And it was literally this use case that you mentioned before about being able to work basically offline on your commute. And this is kind of were the first lines of code were written and then kind of the idea evolves from there.We put it into the open-source, and then, kind of, it was growing over the years. But it really started as not having it as an on-prem, like, heavyweight server, but really as a lightweight system that you can easily—that is easily portable across different systems as well.Corey: That is a good question. Very often, when I'm using various tools that are aimed at development use cases, it is very clear that one particular operating system is invariably going to be the first-class citizen and everything else is a best effort. Ehh, it might work; it might not. Does LocalStack feel that way? And if so, what's the operating system that you want to be on?Waldemar: I would say we definitely work best on Mac OS and Linux. It also works really well on Windows, but I think given that some of our tooling in the ecosystem also pretty much geared towards Unix systems, I think those are the platforms it will work well with. Again, on the other hand, Docker is really a platform that helps us a lot being compatible across operating systems and also CPU architectures. We have a multi-arch build now for AMD and ARM64. So, I think in that sense, we're pretty broad in terms of the compatibility spectrum.Corey: I do not have any insight into how the experience goes on Windows, given that I don't use that operating system in anger for, wow, 15 years now, but I will say that it's been top-flight on Mac OS, which is what I spend most of my time. Depressed that I'm using, but for desktop experiences, it seems to work out fairly well. That said, having a focus on Windows seems like it would absolutely be a hard requirement, given that so many developer workstations in very large enterprises tend to skew very Windows-heavy. My hat is off to people who work with Linux and Linux-like systems in environments like that where even line endings becomes psychotically challenging. I don't envy them their problems. And I have nothing but respect for people who can power through it. I never had the patience.Waldemar: Yeah. Same here and definitely, I think everybody has their favorite operating system. For me, it's also been mostly Linux and Mac in the last couple of years. But certainly, we definitely want to be broad in terms of the adoption, and working with large enterprises often you have—you know, we want to fit into the existing landscape and environment that people work in. And we solve this by platform abstractions like Docker, for example, as I mentioned, and also, for example, Python, which is some more toolings within Python is also pretty nicely supported across platforms. But I do feel the same way as you, like, having been working with Windows for quite some time, especially for development purposes.Corey: What have you noticed that your customer usage patterns slash requests has been saying about AWS service adoption? I have to imagine that everyone cares whether you can mock S3 effectively. EC2, DynamoDB, probably. SQS, of course. But beyond the very small baseline level of offering, what have you seen surprising demand for, as I guess, customer implementation of more esoteric services continues to climb?Waldemar: Mm-hm. Yeah, so these days it's actually pretty [laugh] pretty insane the level of coverage we already have for different services, including some very exotic ones, like QLDB as I mentioned, Kafka. We even have Managed Airflow, for example. I mean, a lot of these services are essentially mostly, like, wrappers around the API. This is essentially also what AWS is doing, right? So, they're providing an API that basically provisions some underlying resources, some infrastructure.Some of the more interesting parts, I guess, we've seen is the data or big data ecosystem. So, things like Athena, Glue, we've invested quite a lot of time in, you know, making that available also in LocalStack so you can have your maybe CSV files or JSON files in an S3 bucket and you can query them from Athena with a SQL language, basically, right? And that makes it very—especially these big data-heavy jobs that are very heavyweight on AWS, you can iterate very quickly in LocalStack. So, this is where we're seeing a lot of adoption recently. And then also, obviously, things like, you know, Lambda and ECS, like, all the serverless and containerized applications, but I guess those are the more mainstream ones.Corey: I imagine you probably get your fair share of requests for things like CloudFormation or CloudFront, where, this is great, but can you go ahead and add a very lengthy sleep right here, just because it returns way too fast and we don't want people to get their hopes up when they use the real thing. On some level, it feels like exact replication of the AWS customer experience isn't quite in line with what makes sense from a developer productivity point of view.Waldemar: Yeah, that's a great point. And I'm sure that, like, a lot of code out there is probably littered with sleep statements that is just tailored to the specific timing in AWS. In fact, we recently opened an issue in the AWS Terraform provider repository to add a configuration option to configure the timings that Terraform is using for the resource deployment. So, just as an example, an S3 bucket creation takes 60 seconds, like, more than a minute against [unintelligible 00:22:37] AWS. I guess LocalStack, it's a second basically, right?And AWS Terraform provider has these, like, relatively slow cycles of checking whether the packet has already been created. And we want to get that configurable to actually reduce the time it takes for local development, right? So, we have an open, sort of, feature request, and we're probably going to contribute to a Terraform repository. But definitely, I share the sentiment that a lot of the tooling ecosystem is built and tailored and optimized towards the experience against the cloud, which often is just slow and, you know, that's what it is, right?Corey: One thing that I didn't expect, though, in hindsight, is blindingly obvious, is your support for a variety of different frameworks and deployment methodologies. I've found that it's relatively straightforward to get up and running with the CDK deploying to LocalStack, for instance. And in hindsight, of course; that's obvious. When you start out down that path, though it's well, you tend to think—at least I don't tend to think in that particular way. It's, “Well, yeah, it's just going to be a console-like experience, or I wind up doing CloudFormation or Terraform.” But yeah, that the world is advancing relatively quickly and it's nice to see that you are very comfortably keeping pace with that advancement.Waldemar: Yeah, true. And I guess for us, it's really, like, the level of abstraction is sort of increasing, so you know, once you have a solid foundation, with, you know, CloudFormation implementation, you can leverage a lot of tools that are sitting on top of it, CDK, serverless frameworks. So, CloudFormation is almost becoming, like, the assembly language of the AWS cloud, right, and if you have very solid support for that, a lot of, sort of, tools in the ecosystem will natively be supported on LocalStack. And then, you know, you have things like Terraform, and in the Terraform CDK, you know, some of these derived versions of Terraform which also are very straightforward because you just need to point, you know, the target endpoint to localhost and then the rest of the deployment loop just works out of the box, essentially.So, I guess for us, it's really mostly being able to focus on, like, the core emulation, making sure that we have very high parity with the real services. We spend a lot of time and effort into what we call parity testing and snapshot testing. We make sure that our API responses are identical and really the same as they are in AWS. And this really gives us, you know, a very strong confidence that a lot of tools in the ecosystem are working out-of-the-box against LocalStack as well.Corey: I would also like to point out that I'm also a proud LocalStack contributor at this point because at the start of this year, I noticed, ah, in one of the pages, the copyright year was still saying 2022 and not 2023. So, a single-character pull request? Oh, yes, I am on the board now because that is how you ingratiate yourself with an open-source project.Waldemar: Yeah. Eternal fame to you and kudos for your contribution. But, [laugh] you know, in all seriousness, we do have a quite an active community of contributors. We are an open-source first project; like, we were born in the open-source. We actually—maybe just touching upon this for a second, we use GitHub for our repository, we use a lot of automation around, you know, doing pull requests, and you know, service owners.We also participate in things like the Hacktoberfest, which we participated in last year to really encourage contributions from the community, and also host regular meetups with folks in the community to really make sure that there's an active ecosystem where people can contribute and make contributions like the one that you did with documentation and all that, but also, like, actual features, testing and you know, contributions of different levels. So really, kudos and shout out to the entire community out there.Corey: Do you feel that there's an inherent tension between being an open-source product as well as being a commercial product that is available for sale? I find that a lot of companies feel vaguely uncomfortable with the various trade-offs that they make going down that particular path, but I haven't seen anyone in the community upset with you folks, and it certainly hasn't seemed to act as a brake on your enterprise adoption, either.Waldemar: That is a very good point. So, we certainly are—so we're following an open-source-first model that we—you know, the core of the codebase is available in the community version. And then we have pro extensions, which are commercial and you basically, you know, setup—you sign up for a license. We are certainly having a lot of discussions on how to evolve this licensing model going forward, you know, which part to feed back into the community version of LocalStack. And it's certainly an ongoing evolving model as well, but certainly, so far, the support from the community has been great.And we definitely focus to, kind of, get a lot of the innovation that we're doing back into our open-source repo and make sure that it's, like, really not only open-source but also open contribution for folks to contribute their contributions. We also integrate with other third-party libraries. We're built on the shoulders of giants, if I may say so, other open-source projects that are doing great work with emulators. To name just a few, it's like, [unintelligible 00:27:33] which is a great project that we sort of use and depend upon. We have certain mocks and emulations, for Kinesis, for example, Kinesis mock and a bunch of other tools that we've been leveraging over the years, which are really great community efforts out there. And it's great to see such an active community that's really making this vision possible have a truly local emulated clouds that gives the best experience to developers out there.Corey: So, as of, well, now, when people are listening to this and the episode gets released, v2 of LocalStack is coming out. What are the big differences between LocalStack and now LocalStack 2: Electric Boogaloo, or whatever it is you're calling the release?Waldemar: Right. So, we're super excited to release our v2 version of LocalStack. Planned release date is end of March 2023, so hopefully, we will make that timeline. We did release our first version of OpenStack in July 2022, so it's been roughly seven months since then and we try to have a cadence of roughly six to nine months for the major releases. And what you can expect is we've invested a lot of time and effort in last couple of months and in last year to really make it a very rock-solid experience with enhancements in the current services, a lot of performance optimizations, we've invested a lot in parity testing.So, as I mentioned before, parity is really important for us to make sure that we have a high coverage of the different services and how they behave the same way as AWS. And we're also putting out an enhanced version and a completely polished version of our Cloud Pods experience. So, Cloud Pods is a state management mechanism in LocalStack. So, by default, the state in LocalStack is ephemeral, so when you restart the instance, you basically have a fresh state. But with Cloud Pods, we enable our users to take persistent snapshot of the states, save it to disk or to a server and easily share it with team members.And we have very polished experience with Community Cloud Pods that makes it very easy to share the state among team members and with the community. So, those are just some of the highlights of things that we're going to be putting out in the tool. And we're super excited to have it done by, you know, end of March. So, stay tuned for the v2 release.Corey: I am looking forward to seeing how the experience shifts and evolves. I really want to thank you for taking time out of your day to wind up basically humoring me and effectively re-covering ground that you and I covered about a year and a half ago now. If people want to learn more, where should they go?Waldemar: Yeah. So definitely, our Slack channel is a great way to get in touch with the community, also with the LocalStack team, if you have any technical questions. So, you can find it on our website, I think it's slack.localstack.cloud.We also host a Discourse forum. It's discuss.localstack.cloud, where you can just, you know, make feature requests and participate in the general conversation.And we do host monthly community meetups. Those are also available on our website. If you sign up, for example, for a newsletter, you will be notified where we have, you know, these webinars. Take about an hour or so where we often have guest speakers from different companies, people who are using, you know, cloud development, local cloud development, and just sharing the experiences of how the space is evolving. And we're always super happy to accept contributions from the community in these meetups as well. And last but not least, our GitHub repository is a great way to file any issues you may have, feature requests, and just getting involved with the project itself.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:31:09]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I appreciate it.Waldemar: Thank you so much, Corey. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.Corey: Waldemar Hummer, CTO and co-founder at LocalStack. 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 comment, presumably because your compensation structure requires people to spend ever-increasing amounts of money on AWS services.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.
Microsoft's new goodies for Linux users, the Ubuntu Summit wraps up, and our takeaways from the recent fireside chat with Linus Torvalds.
About ScottWith more than 28 years of successful leadership in building high technology companies and delivering advanced products to market, Scott provides the overall strategic leadership and visionary direction for Azul Systems.Scott has a consistent proven track record of vision, leadership, and success in enterprise, consumer and scientific markets. Prior to co-founding Azul Systems, Scott founded 3dfx Interactive, a graphics processor company that pioneered the 3D graphics market for personal computers and game consoles. Scott served at 3dfx as Vice President of Engineering, CTO and as a member of the board of directors and delivered 7 award-winning products and developed 14 different graphics processors. After a successful initial public offering, 3dfx was later acquired by NVIDIA Corporation.Prior to 3dfx, Scott was a CPU systems architect at Pellucid, later acquired by MediaVision. Before Pellucid, Scott was a member of the technical staff at Silicon Graphics where he designed high-performance workstations.Scott graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor of science, earning magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors. Scott has been granted 8 patents in high performance graphics and computing and is a regularly invited keynote speaker at industry conferences.Links Referenced:Azul: https://www.azul.com/ 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: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at AWS AppConfig. Engineers love to solve, and occasionally create, problems. But not when it's an on-call fire-drill at 4 in the morning. Software problems should drive innovation and collaboration, NOT stress, and sleeplessness, and threats of violence. That's why so many developers are realizing the value of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. Feature Flags let developers push code to production, but hide that that feature from customers so that the developers can release their feature when it's ready. This practice allows for safe, fast, and convenient software development. You can seamlessly incorporate AppConfig Feature Flags into your AWS or cloud environment and ship your Features with excitement, not trepidation and fear. To get started, go to snark.cloud/appconfig. That's snark.cloud/appconfig.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest on this promoted episode today is Scott Sellers, CEO and co-founder of Azul. Scott, thank you for joining me.Scott: Thank you, Corey. I appreciate the opportunity in talking to you today.Corey: So, let's start with what you're doing these days. What is Azul? What do you folks do over there?Scott: Azul is an enterprise software and SaaS company that is focused on delivering more efficient Java solutions for our customers around the globe. We've been around for 20-plus years, and as an entrepreneur, we've really gone through various stages of different growth and different dynamics in the market. But at the end of the day, Azul is all about adding value for Java-based enterprises, Java-based applications, and really endearing ourselves to the Java community.Corey: This feels like the sort of space where there are an awful lot of great business cases to explore. When you look at what's needed in that market, there are a lot of things that pop up. The surprising part to me is that this is the direction that you personally went in. You started your career as a CPU architect, to my understanding. You were then one of the co-founders of 3dfx before it got acquired by Nvidia.You feel like you've spent your career more as a hardware guy than working on the SaaS side of the world. Is that a misunderstanding of your path, or have things changed, or is this just a new direction? Help me understand how you got here from where you were.Scott: I'm not exactly sure what the math would say because I continue to—can't figure out a way to stop time. But you're correct that my academic background, I was an electrical engineer at Princeton and started my career at Silicon Graphics. And that was when I did a lot of fantastic and fascinating work building workstations and high-end graphics systems, you know, back in the day when Silicon Graphics really was the who's who here in Silicon Valley. And so, a lot of my career began in the context of hardware. As you mentioned, I was one of the founders of graphics company called 3dfx that was one of, I think, arguably the pioneer in terms of bringing 3d graphics to the masses, if you will.And we had a great run of that. That was a really fun business to be a part of just because of what was going on in the 3d world. And we took that public and eventually sold that to Nvidia. And at that point, my itch, if you will, was really learning more about the enterprise segment. I'd been involved with professional graphics with SGI, I had been involved with consumer graphics with 3dfx.And I was fascinated just to learn about the enterprise segment. And met a couple people through a mutual friend around the 2001 timeframe, and they started talking about this thing called Java. And you know, I had of course heard about Java, but as a consumer graphics guy, didn't have a lot of knowledge about it or experience with it. And the more I learned about it, recognized that what was going on in the Java world—and credit to Sun for really creating, obviously, not only language, but building a community around Java—and recognized that new evolutions of developer paradigms really only come around once a decade if then, and was convinced and really got excited about the opportunity to ride the wave of Java and build a company around that.Corey: One of the blind spots that I have throughout the entire world of technology—and to be fair, I have many of them, but the one most relevant to this conversation, I suppose, is the Java ecosystem as a whole. I come from a background of being a grumpy Unix sysadmin—because I've never met a happy one of those in my entire career—and as a result, scripting languages is where everything that I worked with started off. And on the rare occasions, I worked in Java shops, it was, “Great. We're going to go—here's a WAR file. Go ahead and deploy this with Tomcat,” or whatever else people are going to use. But basically, “Don't worry your pretty little head about that.”At most, I have to worry about how to configure a heap or whatnot. But it's from the outside looking in, not having to deal with that entire ecosystem as a whole. And what I've seen from that particular perspective is that every time I start as a technologist, or even as a consumer trying to install some random software package in the depths of the internet, and I have to start thinking about Java, it always feels like I'm about to wind up in a confusing world. There are a number of software packages that I installed back in, I want to say the early-2010s or whatnot. “Oh, you need to have a Java runtime installed on your Mac,” for example.And okay, going through Oracle site, do I need the JRE? Do I need the JDK? Oh, there's OpenJDK, which kind of works, kind of doesn't. Amazon got into the space with Corretto, which because that sounds nothing whatsoever, like Java, but strange names coming from Amazon is basically par for the course for those folks. What is the current state of the Java ecosystem, for those of us who have—basically the closest we've ever gotten is JavaScript, which is nothing alike except for the name.Scott: And you know, frankly, given the protection around the name Java—and you know, that is a trademark that's owned by Oracle—it's amazing to me that JavaScript has been allowed to continue to be called JavaScript because as you point out, JavaScript has nothing to do with Java per se.Corey: Well, one thing they do have in common I found out somewhat recently is that Oracle also owns the trademark for JavaScript.Scott: Ah, there you go. Maybe that's why it continues.Corey: They're basically a law firm—three law firms in a trench coat, masquerading as a tech company some days.Scott: Right. But anyway, it is a confusing thing because you know, I think, arguably, JavaScript, by the numbers, probably has more programmers than any other language in the world, just given its popularity as a web language. But to your question about Java specifically, it's had an evolving life, and I think the state where it is today, I think it's in the most exciting place it's ever been. And I'll walk you through kind of why I believe that to be the case.But Java has evolved over time from its inception back in the days when it was called, I think it was Oak when it was originally conceived, and Sun had eventually branded it as Java. And at the time, it truly was owned by Sun, meaning it was proprietary code; it had to be licensed. And even though Sun gave it away, in most cases, it still at the end of the day, it was a commercially licensed product, if you will, and platform. And if you think about today's world, it would not be conceivable to create something that became so popular with programmers that was a commercially licensed product today. It almost would be mandated that it would be open-source to be able to really gain the type of traction that Java has gained.And so, even though Java was really garnering interest, you know, not only within the developer community, but also amongst commercial entities, right, everyone—and the era now I'm talking about is around the 2000 era—all of the major software vendors, whether it was obviously Sun, but then you had Oracle, you had IBM, companies like BEA, were really starting to blossom at that point. It was a—you know, you could almost not find a commercial software entity that was not backing Java. But it was still all controlled by Sun. And all that success ultimately led to a strong outcry from the community saying this has to be open-source; this is too important to be beholden to a single vendor. And that decision was made by Sun prior to the Oracle acquisition, they actually open-sourced the Java runtime code and they created an open-source project called OpenJDK.And to Oracle's credit, when they bought Sun—which I think at the time when you really look back, Oracle really did not have a lot of track record, if you will, of being involved with an open-source community—and I think when Oracle acquired Sun, there was a lot of skepticism as to what's going to happen to Java. Is Oracle going to make this thing, you know, back to the old days, proprietary Oracle, et cetera? And really—Corey: I was too busy being heartbroken over Solaris at that point to pay much attention to the Java stuff, but it felt like it was this—sort of the same pattern, repeated across multiple ecosystems.Scott: Absolutely. And even though Sun had also open-sourced Solaris, with the OpenSolaris project, that was one of the kinds of things that it was still developed very much in a closed environment, and then they would kind of throw some code out into the open world. And no one really ran OpenSolaris because it wasn't fully compatible with Solaris. And so, that was a faint attempt, if you will.But Java was quite different. It was truly all open-sourced, and the big difference that—and again, I give Oracle a lot of credit for this because this was a very important time in the evolution of Java—that Oracle, maintained Sun's commitment to not only continue to open-source Java but most importantly, develop it in the open community. And so, you know, again, back and this is the 2008, ‘09, ‘10 timeframe, the evolution of Java, the decisions, the standards, you know, what goes in the platform, what doesn't, decisions about updates and those types of things, that truly became a community-led world and all done in the open-source. And credit to Oracle for continuing to do that. And that really began the transition away from proprietary implementations of Java to one that, very similar to Linux, has really thrived because of the true open-source nature of what Java is today.And that's enabled more and more companies to get involved with the evolution of Java. If you go to the OpenJDK page, you'll see all of the not only, you know, incredibly talented individuals that are involved with the evolution of Java, but again, a who's who in pretty much every major commercial entities in the enterprise software world is also somehow involved in the OpenJDK community. And so, it really is a very vibrant, evolving standard. And some of the tactical things that have happened along the way in terms of changing how versions of Java are released still also very much in the context of maintaining compatibility and finding that careful balance of evolving the platform, but at the same time, recognizing that there is a lot of Java applications out there, so you can't just take a right-hand turn and forget about the compatibility side of things. But we as a community overall, I think, have addressed that very effectively, and the result has been now I think Java is more popular than ever and continues to—we liken it kind of to the mortar and the brick walls of the enterprise. It's a given that it's going to be used, certainly by most of the enterprises worldwide today.Corey: There's a certain subset of folk who are convinced the Java, “Oh, it's this a legacy programming language, and nothing modern or forward-looking is going to be built in it.” Yeah, those people generally don't know what the internal language stack looks like at places like oh, I don't know, AWS, Google, and a few others, it is very much everywhere. But it also feels, on some level, like, it's a bit below the surface-level of awareness for the modern full-stack developer in some respects, right up until suddenly it's very much not. How is Java evolving in a cloud these days?Scott: Well, what we see happening—you know, this is true for—you know, I'm a techie, so I can talk about other techies. I mean as techies, we all like the new thing, right? I mean, it's not that exciting to talk about a language that's been around for 20-plus years. But that doesn't take away from the fact that we still all use keyboards. I mean, no one really talks about what keyboard they use anymore—unless you're really into keyboards—but at the end of the day, it's still a fundamental tool that you use every single day.And Java is kind of in the same situation. The reason that Java continues to be so fundamental is that it really comes back to kind of reinventing the wheel problem. Are there are other languages that are more efficient to code in? Absolutely. Are there other languages that, you know, have some capabilities that the Java doesn't have? Absolutely.But if you have the ability to reinvent everything from scratch, sure, go for it. And you also don't have to worry about well, can I find enough programmers in this, you know, new hot language, okay, good luck with that. You might be able to find dozens, but when you need to really scale a company into thousands or tens of thousands of developers, good luck finding, you know, everyone that knows, whatever your favorite hot language of the day is.Corey: It requires six years experience in a four-year-old language. Yeah, it's hard to find that, sometimes.Scott: Right. And you know, the reality is, is that really no application ever is developed from scratch, right? Even when an application is, quote, new, immediately, what you're using is frameworks and other things that have written long ago and proven to be very successful.Corey: And disturbing amounts of code copied and pasted from Stack Overflow.Scott: Absolutely.Corey: But that's one of those impolite things we don't say out loud very often.Scott: That's exactly right. So, nothing really is created from scratch anymore. And so, it's all about building blocks. And this is really where this snowball of Java is difficult to stop because there is so much third-party code out there—and by that, I mean, you know, open-source, commercial code, et cetera—that is just so leveraged and so useful to very quickly be able to take advantage of and, you know, allow developers to focus on truly new things, not reinventing the wheel for the hundredth time. And that's what's kind of hard about all these other languages is catching up to Java with all of the things that are immediately available for developers to use freely, right, because most of its open-source. That's a pretty fundamental Catch-22 about when you start talking about the evolution of new languages.Corey: I'm with you so far. The counterpoint though is that so much of what we're talking about in the world of Java is open-source; it is freely available. The OpenJDK, for example, says that right on the tin. You have built a company and you've been in business for 20 years. I have to imagine that this is not one of those stories where, “Oh, all the things we do, we give away for free. But that's okay. We make it up in volume.” Even the venture capitalist mindset tends to run out of patience on those kinds of timescales. What is it you actually do as a business that clearly, obviously delivers value for customers but also results in, you know, being able to meet payroll every week?Scott: Right? Absolutely. And I think what time has shown is that, with one very notable exception and very successful example being Red Hat, there are very, very few pure open-source companies whose business is only selling support services for free software. Most successful businesses that are based on open-source are in one-way shape or form adding value-added elements. And that's our strategy as well.The heart of everything we do is based on free code from OpenJDK, and we have a tremendous amount of business that we are following the Red Hat business model where we are selling support and long-term access and a huge variety of different operating system configurations, older Java versions. Still all free software, though, right, but we're selling support services for that. And that is, in essence, the classic Red Hat business model. And that business for us is incredibly high growth, very fast-moving, a lot of that business is because enterprises are tired of paying the very high price to Oracle for Java support and they're looking for an open-source alternative that is exactly the same thing, but comes in pure open-source form and with a vendor that is as reputable as Oracle. So, a lot of our businesses based on that.However, on top of that, we also have value-added elements. And so, our product that is called Azul Platform Prime is rooted in OpenJDK—it is OpenJDK—but then we've added value-added elements to that. And what those value-added elements create is, in essence, a better Java platform. And better in this context means faster, quicker to warm up, elimination of some of the inconsistencies of the Java runtime in terms of this nasty problem called garbage collection which causes applications to kind of bounce around in terms of performance limitations. And so, creating a better Java is another way that we have monetized our company is value-added elements that are built on top of OpenJDK. And I'd say that part of the business is very typical for the majority of enterprise software companies that are rooted in open-source. They're typically adding value-added components on top of the open-source technology, and that's our similar strategy as well.And then the third evolution for us, which again is very tried-and-true, is evolving the business also to add SaaS offerings. So today, the majority of our customers, even though they deploy in the cloud, they're stuck customer-managed and so they're responsible for where do I want to put my Java runtime on building out my stack and cetera, et cetera. And of course, that could be on-prem, but like I mentioned, the majority are in the cloud. We're evolving our product offerings also to have truly SaaS-based solutions so that customers don't even need to manage those types of stacks on their own anymore.Corey: On some level, it feels like we're talking about two different things when we talk about cloud and when we talk about programming languages, but increasingly, I'm starting to see across almost the entire ecosystem that different languages and different cloud providers are in many ways converging. How do you see Java changing as cloud-native becomes the default rather than the new thing?Scott: Great question. And I think the thing to recognize about, really, most popular programming languages today—I can think of very few exceptions—these languages were created, envisioned, implemented if you will, in a day when cloud was not top-of-mind, and in many cases, certainly in the case of Java, cloud didn't even exist when Java was originally conceived, nor was that the case when you know, other languages, such as Python, or JavaScript, or on and on. So, rethinking how these languages should evolve in very much the context of a cloud-native mentality is a really important initiative that we certainly are doing and I think the Java community is doing overall. And how you architect not only the application, but even the Java runtime itself can be fundamentally different if you know that the application is going to be deployed in the cloud.And I'll give you an example. Specifically, in the world of any type of runtime-based language—and JavaScript is an example of that; Python is an example of that; Java is an example of that—in all of those runtime-based environments, what that basically means is that when the application is run, there's a piece of software that's called the runtime that actually is running that application code. And so, you can think about it as a middleware piece of software that sits between the operating system and the application itself. And so, that runtime layer is common across those languages and those platforms that I mentioned. That runtime layer is evolving, and it's evolving in a way that is becoming more and more cloud-native in it's thinking.The process itself of actually taking the application, compiling it into whatever underlying architecture it may be running on—it could be an x86 instance running on Amazon; it could be, you know, for example, an ARM64, which Amazon has compute instances now that are based on an ARM64 processor that they call Graviton, which is really also kind of altering the price-performance of the compute instances on the AWS platform—that runtime layer magically takes an application that doesn't have to be aware of the underlying hardware and transforms that into a way that can be run. And that's a very expensive process; it's called just-in-time compiling, and that just-in-time compilation, in today's world—which wasn't really based on cloud thinking—every instance, every compute instance that you deploy, that same JIT compilation process is happening over and over again. And even if you deploy 100 instances for scalability, every one of those 100 instances is doing that same work. And so, it's very inefficient and very redundant. Contrast that to a cloud-native thinking: that compilation process should be a service; that service should be done once.The application—you know, one instance of the application is actually run and there are the other ninety-nine should just reuse that compilation process. And that shared compiler service should be scalable and should be able to scale up when applications are launched and you need more compilation resources, and then scaled right back down when you're through the compilation process and the application is more moving into the—you know, to the runtime phase of the application lifecycle. And so, these types of things are areas that we and others are working on in terms of evolving the Java runtime specifically to be more cloud-native.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig secures your cloud from source to run. They believe, as do I, that DevOps and security are inextricably linked. If you wanna learn more about how they view this, check out their blog, it's definitely worth the read. To learn more about how they are absolutely getting it right from where I sit, visit Sysdig.com and tell them that I sent you. That's S Y S D I G.com. And my thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: This feels like it gets even more critical when we're talking about things like serverless functions across basically all the cloud providers these days, where there's the whole setup, everything in the stack, get it running, get it listening, ready to go, to receive a single request and then shut itself down. It feels like there are a lot of operational efficiencies possible once you start optimizing from a starting point of yeah, this is what that environment looks like, rather than us big metal servers sitting in a rack 15 years ago.Scott: Yeah. I think the evolution of serverless appears to be headed more towards serverless containers as opposed to serverless functions. Serverless functions have a bunch of limitations in terms of when you think about it in the context of a complex, you know, microservices-based deployment framework. It's just not very efficient, to spin up and spin down instances of a function if that actually is being—it is any sort of performance or latency-sensitive type of applications. If you're doing something very rarely, sure, it's fine; it's efficient, it's elegant, et cetera.But any sort of thing that has real girth to it—and girth probably means that's what's driving your application infrastructure costs, that's what's driving your Amazon bill every month—those types of things typically are not going to be great for starting and stopping functional instances. And so, serverless is evolving more towards thinking about the container itself not having to worry about the underlying operating system or the instance on Amazon that it's running on. And that's where, you know, we see more and more of the evolution of serverless is thinking about it at a container-level as opposed to a functional level. And that appears to be a really healthy steady state, so it gets the benefits of not having to worry about all the underlying stuff, but at the same time, doesn't have the downside of trying to start and stop functional influences at a given point in time.Corey: It seems to me that there are really two ways of thinking about cloud. The first is what I think a lot of companies do their first outing when they're going into something like AWS. “Okay, we're going to get a bunch of virtual machines that they call instances in AWS, we're going to run things just like it's our data center except now data transfer to the internet is terrifyingly expensive.” The more quote-unquote, “Cloud-native” way of thinking about this is what you're alluding to where there's, “Here's some code that I wrote. I want to throw it to my cloud provider and just don't tell me about any of the infrastructure parts. Execute this code when these conditions are met and leave me alone.”Containers these days seem to be one of our best ways of getting there with a minimum of fuss and friction. What are you seeing in the enterprise space as far as adoption of those patterns go? Or are we seeing cloud repatriation showing up as a real thing and I'm just not in the right place to see it?Scott: Well, I think as a cloud journey evolves, there's no question that—and in fact it's even silly to say that cloud is here to stay because I think that became a reality many, many years ago. So really, the question is, what are the challenges now with cloud deployments? Cloud is absolutely a given. And I think you stated earlier, it's rare that, whether it's a new company or a new application, at least in most businesses that don't have specific regulatory requirements, that application is highly, highly likely to be envisioned to be initially and only deployed in the cloud. That's a great thing because you have so many advantages of not having to purchase infrastructure in advance, being able to tap into all of the various services that are available through the cloud providers. No one builds databases anymore; you're just tapping into the service that's provided by Azure or AWS, or what have you.And, you know, just that specific example is a huge amount of savings in terms of just overhead, and license costs, and those types of stuff, and there's countless examples of that. And so, the services that are available in the cloud are unquestioned. So, there's countless advantages of why you want to be in the cloud. The downside, however, the cloud that is, if at the end of the day, AWS, Microsoft with Azure, Google with GCP, they are making 30% margin on that cloud infrastructure. And in the days of hardware, when companies would actually buy their servers from Dell, or HP, et cetera, those businesses are 5% margin.And so, where's that 25% going? Well, the 25% is being paid for by the users of cloud, and as a result of that, when you look at it purely from an operational cost perspective, it is more expensive to run in the cloud than it is back in the legacy days, right? And that's not to say that the industry has made the wrong choice because there's so many advantages of being in cloud, there's no doubt about it. And there should be—you know, and the cloud providers deserve to take some amount of margin to provide the services that they provide; there's no doubt about that. The question is, how do you do the best of all worlds?And you know, there is a great blog by a couple of the partners in Andreessen Horowitz, they called this the Cloud Paradox. And the Cloud Paradox really talks about the challenges. It's really a Catch-22; how do you get all the benefits of cloud but do that in a way that is not overly taxing from a cost perspective? And a lot of it comes down to good practices and making sure that you have the right monitoring and culture within an enterprise to make sure that cloud cost is a primary thing that is discussed and metric, but then there's also technologies that can help so that you don't have to even think about what you really don't ever want to do: repatriating, which is about the concept of actually moving off the cloud back to the old way of doing things. So certainly, I don't believe repatriation is a practical solution for ongoing and increasing cloud costs. I believe technology is a solution to that.And there are technologies such as our product, Azul Platform Prime, that in essence, allows you to do more with less, right, get all the benefits of cloud, deploy in your Amazon environment, deploy in your Azure environment, et cetera, but imagine if instead of needing a hundred instances to handle your given workload, you could do that with 50 or 60. Tomorrow, that means that you can start savings and being able to do that simply by changing your JVM from a standard OpenJDK or Oracle JVM to something like Platform Prime, you can immediately start to start seeing the benefits from that. And so, a lot of our business now and our growth is coming from companies that are screaming under the ongoing cloud costs and trying to keep them in line, and using technology like Azul Platform Prime to help mitigate those costs.Corey: I think that there is a somewhat foolish approach that I'm seeing taken by a lot of folks where there are some companies that are existentially anti-cloud, if for no other reason than because if the cloud wins, then they don't really have a business anymore. The problem I see with that is that it seems that their solution across the board is to turn back the clock where if I'm going to build a startup, it's time for me to go buy some servers and a rack somewhere and start negotiating with bandwidth providers. I don't see that that is necessarily viable for almost anyone. We aren't living in 1995 anymore, despite how much some people like to pretend we are. It seems like if there are workloads—for which I agree, cloud is not necessarily an economic fit, first, I feel like the market will fix that in the fullness of time, but secondly, on an individual workload belonging in a certain place is radically different than, “Oh, none of our stuff should live on cloud. Everything belongs in a data center.” And I just think that companies lose all credibility when they start pretending that it's any other way.Scott: Right. I'd love to see the reaction of the venture capitalists' face when an entrepreneur walks in and talks about how their strategy for deploying their SaaS service is going to be buying hardware and renting some space in the local data center.Corey: Well, there is a good cost control method, if you think about it. I mean very few engineers are going to accidentally spin up an $8 million cluster in a data center a second time, just because there's no space left for it.Scott: And you're right; it does happen in the cloud as well. It's just, I agree with you completely that as part of the evolution of cloud, in general, is an ever-improving aspect of cost and awareness of cost and building in technologies that help mitigate that cost. So, I think that will continue to evolve. I think, you know, if you really think about the cloud journey, cost, I would say, is still in early phases of really technologies and practices and processes of allowing enterprises to really get their head around cost. I'd still say it's a fairly immature industry that is evolving quickly, just given the importance of it.And so, I think in the coming years, you're going to see a radical improvement in terms of cost awareness and technologies to help with costs, that again allows you to the best of all worlds. Because, you know, if you go back to the Dark Ages and you start thinking about buying servers and infrastructure, then you are really getting back to a mentality of, “I've got to deploy everything. I've got to buy software for my database. I've got to deploy it. What am I going to do about my authentication service? So, I got to buy this vendor's, you know, solution, et cetera.” And so, all that stuff just goes away in the world of cloud, so it's just not practical, in this day and age I think, to think about really building a business that's not cloud-native from the beginning.Corey: I really want to thank you for spending so much time talking to me about how you view the industry, the evolution we've seen in the Java ecosystem, and what you've been up to. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Scott: Well, there's a thing called a website that you may not have heard of, it's really cool.Corey: Can I build it in Java?Scott: W-W-dot—[laugh]. Yeah. Azul website obviously has an awful lot of information about that, Azul is spelled A-Z-U-L, and we sometimes get the question, “How in the world did you name a company—why did you name it Azul?”And it's kind of a funny story because back in the days of Azul when we thought about, hey, we want to be big and successful, and at the time, IBM was the gold standard in terms of success in the enterprise world. And you know, they were Big Blue, so we said, “Hey, we're going to be a little blue. Let's be Azul.” So, that's where we began. So obviously, go check out our site.We're very present, also, in the Java community. We're, you know, many developer conferences and talks. We sponsor and run many of what's called the Java User Groups, which are very popular 10-, 20-person meetups that happen around the globe on a regular basis. And so, you know, come check us out. And I appreciate everyone's time in listening to the podcast today.Corey: No, thank you very much for spending as much time with me as you have. It's appreciated.Scott: Thanks, Corey.Corey: Scott Sellers, CEO and co-founder of Azul. 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 entire copy of the terms and conditions from Oracle's version of the JDK.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.
Windows 11 Last week, Build 25197 came to the Dev channel and brings back the tablet-optimized Taskbar This week, we got build 25201 with an expanded widgets view that's almost full-screen and ISOs. Separately, Dev channel Insiders got two updates: the Calculator app is now ARM64 native, and the Media Player app got a new shortcut so you can edit the current video in Clipchamp. Builds 22621.598 and 22622.598 headed to the Beta channel earlier this week, removing the ability to uninstall apps with dependencies. Surface Google kills Pixelbook as part of a cost-cutting measure. Should Microsoft kill Surface? Consider: Google needed to establish Chromebook as a viable laptop alternative. Microsoft did not. Microsoft Ignite You can now register for Microsoft Ignite, which is happening October 12-14. Dev You can now install .NET runtimes and SDKs using the Windows Package Manager Xbox The head of 343 Industries abruptly steps down. Coincidence? Sony chief: Microsoft lied about Activision Blizzard and Call of Duty Microsoft is experimenting with the Xbox Dashboard Discord voice chat is now available on Xbox consoles Goldeneye 007, the original console first-person shooter, is coming to Xbox Game Pass Tips and picks Tip of the week: Remix your Teams ringtone App pick of the week: Voxel Doom Enterprise pick of the week: Azure Space: The family is expanding Enterprise pick No. 2 of the week: PatchTuesday.com Beer pick of the week: Grimm Festooning Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: infrascale.com/TWIT CDW.com/LenovoClient ClickUp.com use code WINDOWS
Windows 11 Last week, Build 25197 came to the Dev channel and brings back the tablet-optimized Taskbar This week, we got build 25201 with an expanded widgets view that's almost full-screen and ISOs. Separately, Dev channel Insiders got two updates: the Calculator app is now ARM64 native, and the Media Player app got a new shortcut so you can edit the current video in Clipchamp. Builds 22621.598 and 22622.598 headed to the Beta channel earlier this week, removing the ability to uninstall apps with dependencies. Surface Google kills Pixelbook as part of a cost-cutting measure. Should Microsoft kill Surface? Consider: Google needed to establish Chromebook as a viable laptop alternative. Microsoft did not. Microsoft Ignite You can now register for Microsoft Ignite, which is happening October 12-14. Dev You can now install .NET runtimes and SDKs using the Windows Package Manager Xbox The head of 343 Industries abruptly steps down. Coincidence? Sony chief: Microsoft lied about Activision Blizzard and Call of Duty Microsoft is experimenting with the Xbox Dashboard Discord voice chat is now available on Xbox consoles Goldeneye 007, the original console first-person shooter, is coming to Xbox Game Pass Tips and picks Tip of the week: Remix your Teams ringtone App pick of the week: Voxel Doom Enterprise pick of the week: Azure Space: The family is expanding Enterprise pick No. 2 of the week: PatchTuesday.com Beer pick of the week: Grimm Festooning Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: infrascale.com/TWIT CDW.com/LenovoClient ClickUp.com use code WINDOWS
Windows 11 Last week, Build 25197 came to the Dev channel and brings back the tablet-optimized Taskbar This week, we got build 25201 with an expanded widgets view that's almost full-screen and ISOs. Separately, Dev channel Insiders got two updates: the Calculator app is now ARM64 native, and the Media Player app got a new shortcut so you can edit the current video in Clipchamp. Builds 22621.598 and 22622.598 headed to the Beta channel earlier this week, removing the ability to uninstall apps with dependencies. Surface Google kills Pixelbook as part of a cost-cutting measure. Should Microsoft kill Surface? Consider: Google needed to establish Chromebook as a viable laptop alternative. Microsoft did not. Microsoft Ignite You can now register for Microsoft Ignite, which is happening October 12-14. Dev You can now install .NET runtimes and SDKs using the Windows Package Manager Xbox The head of 343 Industries abruptly steps down. Coincidence? Sony chief: Microsoft lied about Activision Blizzard and Call of Duty Microsoft is experimenting with the Xbox Dashboard Discord voice chat is now available on Xbox consoles Goldeneye 007, the original console first-person shooter, is coming to Xbox Game Pass Tips and picks Tip of the week: Remix your Teams ringtone App pick of the week: Voxel Doom Enterprise pick of the week: Azure Space: The family is expanding Enterprise pick No. 2 of the week: PatchTuesday.com Beer pick of the week: Grimm Festooning Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: infrascale.com/TWIT CDW.com/LenovoClient ClickUp.com use code WINDOWS
Windows 11 Last week, Build 25197 came to the Dev channel and brings back the tablet-optimized Taskbar This week, we got build 25201 with an expanded widgets view that's almost full-screen and ISOs. Separately, Dev channel Insiders got two updates: the Calculator app is now ARM64 native, and the Media Player app got a new shortcut so you can edit the current video in Clipchamp. Builds 22621.598 and 22622.598 headed to the Beta channel earlier this week, removing the ability to uninstall apps with dependencies. Surface Google kills Pixelbook as part of a cost-cutting measure. Should Microsoft kill Surface? Consider: Google needed to establish Chromebook as a viable laptop alternative. Microsoft did not. Microsoft Ignite You can now register for Microsoft Ignite, which is happening October 12-14. Dev You can now install .NET runtimes and SDKs using the Windows Package Manager Xbox The head of 343 Industries abruptly steps down. Coincidence? Sony chief: Microsoft lied about Activision Blizzard and Call of Duty Microsoft is experimenting with the Xbox Dashboard Discord voice chat is now available on Xbox consoles Goldeneye 007, the original console first-person shooter, is coming to Xbox Game Pass Tips and picks Tip of the week: Remix your Teams ringtone App pick of the week: Voxel Doom Enterprise pick of the week: Azure Space: The family is expanding Enterprise pick No. 2 of the week: PatchTuesday.com Beer pick of the week: Grimm Festooning Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: infrascale.com/TWIT CDW.com/LenovoClient ClickUp.com use code WINDOWS
Advocating for FreeBSD in 2022 and Beyond, NetBSD 9.3 released, OPNsense 22.7 available, CHERI-based computer runs KDE for the first time, Run FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE for ARM64 in QEMU on Apple Silicon Mac, and more Notes This episode of BSDNow is brought to you by Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/bsdnow) and the BSDNow Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/bsdnow) Headlines Advocating for FreeBSD in 2022 and Beyond (https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/advocating-for-freebsd-in-2022-and-beyond/) NetBSD 9.3 released (http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_9_3_released) News Roundup OPNsense 22.7 released (https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=29507.0) CHERI-based computer runs KDE for the first time (https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/26/cheri_computer_runs_kde/) Guide: Run FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE for ARM64 in QEMU on Apple Silicon Mac (https://gist.github.com/ctsrc/a1f57933a2cde9abc0f07be12889f97f) Beastie Bits • [In -current, dhclient(8) now just logs warnings and executes ifconfig(8)](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20220703114819) • [Freshly installed #NetBSD 4.0.1 booting on a 80386 DX40 with 8MB of RAM in 2022](https://twitter.com/lefinnois/status/1553246084675375104) • [nerdctl](https://twitter.com/woodsb02/status/1554481441060560898?s=28&t=8K7_A1RiWnCDU_Mme4_Yqw) • [Even more Randomness](https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20220731110742) Tarsnap This weeks episode of BSDNow was sponsored by our friends at Tarsnap, the only secure online backup you can trust your data to. Even paranoids need backups. Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv (mailto:feedback@bsdnow.tv)
The real story behind the "Massive GitHub Malware attack," significant updates for the Steam Deck, and the inside scoop on Lenovo's big Linux ambitions.
About ChrisChris Short has been a proponent of open source solutions throughout his over two decades in various IT disciplines, including systems, security, networks, DevOps management, and cloud native advocacy across the public and private sectors. He currently works on the Kubernetes team at Amazon Web Services and is an active Kubernetes contributor and Co-chair of OpenGitOps. Chris is a disabled US Air Force veteran living with his wife and son in Greater Metro Detroit. Chris writes about Cloud Native, DevOps, and other topics at ChrisShort.net. He also runs the Cloud Native, DevOps, GitOps, Open Source, industry news, and culture focused newsletter DevOps'ish.Links Referenced: DevOps'ish: https://devopsish.com/ EKS News: https://eks.news/ Containers from the Couch: https://containersfromthecouch.com opengitops.dev: https://opengitops.dev ChrisShort.net: https://chrisshort.net Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisShort 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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Coming back to us since episode two—it's always nice to go back and see the where are they now type of approach—I am joined by Senior Developer Advocate at AWS Chris Short. Chris, been a few years. How has it been?Chris: Ha. Corey, we have talked outside of the podcast. But it's been good. For those that have been listening, I think when we recorded I wasn't even—like, when was season two, what year was that? [laugh].Corey: Episode two was first pre-pandemic and the rest. I believe—Chris: Oh. So, yeah. I was at Red Hat, maybe, when I—yeah.Corey: Yeah. You were doing Red Hat stuff, back when you got to work on open-source stuff, as opposed to now, where you're not within 1000 miles of that stuff, right?Chris: Actually well, no. So, to be clear, I'm on the EKS team, the Kubernetes team here at AWS. So, when I joined AWS in October, they were like, “Hey, you do open-source stuff. We like that. Do more.” And I was like, “Oh, wait, do more?” And they were like, “Yes, do more.” “Okay.”So, since joining AWS, I've probably done more open-source work than the three years at Red Hat that I did. So, that's kind of—you know, like, it's an interesting point when I talk to people about it because the first couple months are, like—you know, my friends are like, “So, are you liking it? Are you enjoying it? What's going on?” And—Corey: Do they beat you with reeds? Like, all the questions people have about companies? Because—Chris: Right. Like, I get a lot of random questions about Amazon and AWS that I don't know the answer to.Corey: Oh, when I started telling people, I fixed Amazon bills, I had to quickly pivot that to AWS bills because people started asking me, “Well, can you save me money on underpants?” It's I—Chris: Yeah.Corey: How do you—fine. Get the prime credit card. It docks 5% off the bill, so there you go. But other than that, no, I can't.Chris: No.Corey: It's—Chris: Like, I had to call my bank this morning about a transaction that I didn't recognize, and it was from Amazon. And I was like, that's weird. Why would that—Corey: Money just flows one direction, and that's the wrong direction from my employer.Chris: Yeah. Like, what is going on here? It shouldn't have been on that card kind of thing. And I had to explain to the person on the phone that I do work at Amazon but under the Web Services team. And he was like, “Oh, so you're in IT?”And I'm like, “No.” [laugh]. “It's actually this big company. That—it's a cloud company.” And they're like, “Oh, okay, okay. Yeah. The cloud. Got it.” [laugh]. So, it's interesting talking to people about, “I work at Amazon.” “Oh, my son works at Amazon distribution center,” blah, blah, blah. It's like, cool. “I know about that, but very little. I do this.”Corey: Your son works in Amazon distribution center. Is he a robot? Is normally my next question on that? Yeah. That's neither here nor there.So, you and I started talking a while back. We both write newsletters that go to a somewhat similar audience. You write DevOps'ish. I write Last Week in AWS. And recently, you also have started EKS News because, yeah, the one thing I look at when I'm doing these newsletters every week is, you know what I want to do? That's right. Write more newsletters.Chris: [laugh].Corey: So, you are just a glutton for punishment? And, yeah, welcome to the addiction, I suppose. How's it been going for you?Chris: It's actually been pretty interesting, right? Like, we haven't pushed it very hard. We're now starting to include it in things. Like we did Container Day; we made sure that EKS news was on the landing page for Container Day at KubeCon EU. And you know, it's kind of just grown organically since then.But it was one of those things where it's like, internally—this happened at Red Hat, right—when I started live streaming at Red Hat, the ultimate goal was to do our product management—like, here's what's new in the next version thing—do those live so anybody can see that at any point in time anywhere on Earth, the second it's available. Similar situation to here. This newsletter actually is generated as part of a report my boss puts together to brief our other DAs—or developer advocates—you know, our solutions architects, the whole nine yards about new EKS features. So, I was like, why can't we just flip that into a weekly newsletter, you know? Like, I can pull from the same sources you can.And what's interesting is, he only does the meeting bi-weekly. So, there's some weeks where it's just all me doing it and he ends up just kind of copying and pasting the newsletter into his document, [laugh] and then adds on for the week. But that report meeting for that team is now getting disseminated to essentially anyone that subscribes to eks.news. Just go to the site, there's a subscribe thing right there. And we've gotten 20 issues in and it's gotten rave reviews, right?Corey: I have been a subscriber for a while. I will say that it has less Chris Short personality—Chris: Mm-hm.Corey: —to it than DevOps'ish does, which I have to assume is by design. A lot of The Duckbill Group's marketing these days is no longer in my voice, rather intentionally, because it turns out that being a sarcastic jackass and doing half-billion dollar AWS contracts can not to be the most congruent thing in the world. So okay, we're slowly ameliorating that. It's professional voice versus snarky voice.Chris: Well, and here's the thing, right? Like, I realized this year with DevOps'ish that, like, if I want to take a week off, I have to do, like, what you did when your child was born. You hired folks to like, do the newsletter for you, or I actually don't do the newsletter, right? It's binary: hire someone else to do it, or don't do it. So, the way I structured this newsletter was that any developer advocate on my team could jump in and take over the newsletter so that, you know, if I'm off that week, or whatever may be happening, I, Chris Short, am not the voice. It is now the entire developer advocate team.Corey: I will challenge you on that a bit. Because it's not Chris Short voice, that's for sure, but it's also not official AWS brand voice either.Chris: No.Corey: It is clearly written by a human being who is used to communicating with the audience for whom it is written. And that is no small thing. Normally, when oh, there's a corporate newsletter; that's just a lot of words to say it's bad. This one is good. I want to be very clear on that.Chris: Yeah, I mean, we have just, like, DevOps'ish, we have sections, just like your newsletter, there's certain sections, so any new, what's new announcements, those go in automatically. So, like, that can get delivered to your inbox every Friday. Same thing with new blog posts about anything containers related to EKS, those will be in there, then Containers from the Couch, our streaming platform, essentially, for all things Kubernetes. Those videos go in.And then there's some ecosystem news as well that I collect and put in the newsletter to give people a broader sense of what's going on out there in Kubernetes-land because let's face it, there's upstream and then there's downstream, and sometimes those aren't in sync, and that's normal. That's how Kubernetes kind of works sometimes. If you're running upstream Kubernetes, you are awesome. I appreciate you, but I feel like that would cause more problems and it's worse sometimes.Corey: Thank you for being the trailblazers. The rest of us can learn from your misfortune.Chris: [laugh]. Yeah, exactly. Right? Like, please file your bugs accordingly. [laugh].Corey: EKS is interesting to me because I don't see a lot of it, which is, probably, going to get a whole lot of, “Wait, what?” Moments because wait, don't you deal with very large AWS bills? And I do. But what I mean by that is that EKS, until you're using its Fargate expression, charges for the control plane, which rounds to no money, and the rest is running on EC2 instances running in a company's account. From the billing perspective, there is no difference between, “We're running massive fleets of EKS nodes.” And, “We're managing a whole bunch of EC2 instances by hand.”And that feels like an interesting allegory for how Kubernetes winds up expressing itself to cloud providers. Because from a billing perspective, it just looks like one big single-tenant application that has some really strange behaviors internally. It gets very chatty across AZs when there's no reason to, and whatnot. And it becomes a very interesting study in how to expose aspects of what's going on inside of those containers and inside of the Kubernetes environment to the cloud provider in a way that becomes actionable. There are no good answers for this yet, but it's something I've been seeing a lot of. Like, “Oh, I thought you'd be running Kubernetes. Oh, wait, you are and I just keep forgetting what I'm looking at sometimes.”Chris: So, that's an interesting point. The billing is kind of like, yeah, it's just compute, right? So—Corey: And my insight into AWS and the way I start thinking about it is always from a billing perspective. That's great. It's because that means the more expensive the services, the more I know about it. It's like, “IAM. What is that?” Like, “Oh, I have no idea. It's free. How important could it be?” Professional advice: do not take that philosophy, ever.Chris: [laugh]. No. Ever. No.Corey: Security: it matters. Oh, my God. It's like you're all stars. Your IAM policy should not be. I digress.Chris: Right. Yeah. Anyways, so two points I want to make real quick on that is, one, we've recently released an open-source project called Carpenter, which is really cool in my purview because it looks at your Kubernetes file and says, “Oh, you want this to run on ARM instance.” And you can even go so far as to say, right, here's my limits, and it'll find an instance that fits those limits and add that to your cluster automatically. Run your pod on that compute as long as it needs to run and then if it's done, it'll downsize—eventually, kind of thing—your cluster.So, you can basically just throw a bunch of workloads at it, and it'll auto-detect what kind of compute you will need and then provision it for you, run it, and then be done. So, that is one-way folks are probably starting to save money running EKS is to adopt Carpenter as your autoscaler as opposed to the inbuilt Kubernetes autoscaler. Because this is instance-aware, essentially, so it can say, like, “Oh, your massive ARM application can run here,” because you know, thank you, Graviton. We have those processors in-house. And you know, you can run your ARM64 instances, you can run all the Intel workloads you want, and it'll right size the compute for your workloads.And I'll look at one container or all your containers, however you want to configure it. Secondly, the good folks over at Kubecost have opencost, which is the open-source version of Kubecost, basically. So, they have a service that you can run in your clusters that will help you say, “Hey, maybe this one notes too heavy; maybe this one notes too light,” and you know, give you some insights into Kubernetes spend that are a little bit more granular as far as usage and things like that go. So, those two projects right there, I feel like, will give folks an optimal savings experience when it comes to Kubernetes. But to your point, it's just compute, right? And that's really how we treat it, kind of, here internally is that it's a way to run… compute, Kubernetes, or ECS, or any of those tools.Corey: A fairly expensive one because ignoring entirely for a second the actual raw cost of compute, you also have the other side of it, which is in every environment, unless you are doing something very strange or pre-funding as a one-person startup in your spare time, your payroll costs will it—should—exceed your AWS bill by a fairly healthy amount. And engineering time is always more expensive than services time. So, for example, looking at EKS, I would absolutely recommend people use that rather than rolling their own because—Chris: Rolling their own? Yeah.Corey: —get out of that engineering space where your time is free. I assure you from a business context, it is not. So, there's always that question of what you can do to make things easier for people and do more of the heavy lifting.Chris: Yeah, and to your rather cheeky point that there's 17 ways to run a container on AWS, it is answering that question, right? Like those 17 ways, like, how much of this do you want to run yourself, you could run EKS distro on EC2 instances if you want full control over your environment.Corey: And then run IoT Greengrass core on top within that cluster—Chris: Right.Corey: So, I can run my own Lambda function runtime, so I'm not locked in. Also, DynamoDB local so I'm not locked into AWS. At which point I have gone so far around the bend, no one can help me.Chris: Well—Corey: Pro tip, don't do that. Just don't do that.Chris: But to your point, we have all these options for compute, and specifically containers because there's a lot of people that want to granularly say, “This is where my engineering team gets involved. Everything else you handle.” If I want EKS on Spot Instances only, you can do that. If you want EKS to use Carpenter and say only run ARM workloads, you can do that. If you want to say Fargate and not have anything to manage other than the container file, you can do that.It's how much does your team want to manage? That's the customer obsession part of AWS coming through when it comes to containers is because there's so many different ways to run those workloads, but there's so many different ways to make sure that your team is right-sized, based off the services you're using.Corey: I do want to change gears a bit here because you are mostly known for a couple of things: the DevOps'ish newsletter because that is the oldest and longest thing you've been doing the time that I've known you; EKS, obviously. But when prepping for this show, I discovered you are now co-chair of the OpenGitOps project.Chris: Yes.Corey: So, I have heard of GitOps in the context of, “Oh, it's just basically your CI/CD stuff is triggered by Git events and whatnot.” And I'm sitting here going, “Okay, so from where you're sitting, the two best user interfaces in the world that you have discovered are YAML and Git.” And I just have to start with the question, “Who hurt you?”Chris: [laugh]. Yeah, I share your sentiment when it comes to Git. Not so much with YAML, but I think it's because I'm so used to it. Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome, maybe the whole YAML thing. I don't know.Corey: Well, it's no XML. We'll put it that way.Chris: Thankfully, yes because if it was, I would have way more, like, just template files laying around to build things. But the—Corey: And rage. Don't forget rage.Chris: And rage, yeah. So, GitOps is a little bit more than just Git in IaC—infrastructure as Code. It's more like Justin Garrison, who's also on my team, he calls it infrastructure software because there's four main principles to GitOps, and if you go to opengitops.dev, you can see them. It's version one.So, we put them on the website, right there on the page. You have to have a declared state and that state has to live somewhere. Now, it's called GitOps because Git is probably the most full-featured thing to put your state in, but you could use an S3 bucket and just version it, for example. And make it private so no one else can get to it.Corey: Or you could use local files: copy-of-copy-of-this-thing-restored-parentheses-use-this-one-dot-final-dot-doc-dot-zip. You know, my preferred naming convention.Chris: Ah, yeah. Wow. Okay. [laugh]. Yeah.Corey: Everything I touch is terrifying.Chris: Yes. Geez, I'm sorry. So first, it's declarative. You declare your state. You store it somewhere. It's versioned and immutable, like I said. And then pulled automatically—don't focus so much on pull—but basically, software agents are applying the desired state from source. So, what does that mean? When it's—you know, the fourth principle is implemented, continuously reconciled. That means those software agents that are checking your desired state are actually putting it back into the desired state if it's out of whack, right? So—Corey: You're talking about agents running it persistently on instances, validating—Chris: Yes.Corey: —a checkpoint on a cron. How is this meaningfully different than a Puppet agent running in years past? Having spent I learned to speak publicly by being a traveling trainer for Puppet; same type of model, and in fact, when I was at Pinterest, we wound up having a fair bit—like, that was their entire model, where they would have—the Puppet's code would live in an S3 bucket that was then copied down, I believe, via Git, and then applied to the instance on a schedule. Like, that sounds like this was sort of a early days GitOps.Chris: Yeah, exactly. Right? Like so it's, I like to think of that as a component of GitOps, right? DevOps, when you talk about DevOps in general, there's a lot of stuff out there. There's a lot of things labeled DevOps that maybe are, or maybe aren't sticking to some of those DevOps core things that make you great.Like the stuff that Nicole Forsgren writes about in books, you know? Accelerate is on my desk for a reason because there's things that good, well-managed DevOps practices do. I see GitOps as an actual implementation of DevOps in an open-source manner because all the tooling for GitOps these days is open-source and it all started as open-source. Now, you can get, like, Flux or Argo—Argo, specifically—there's managed services out there for it, you can have Flux and not maintain it, through an add-on, on EKS for example, and it will reconcile that state for you automatically. And the other thing I like to say about GitOps, specifically, is that it moves at the speed of the Kubernetes Audit Log.If you've ever looked at a Kubernetes audit log, you know it's rather noisy with all these groups and versions and kinds getting thrown out there. So, GitOps will say, “Oh, there's an event for said thing that I'm supposed to be watching. Do I need to change anything? Yes or no? Yes? Okay, go.”And the change gets applied, or, “Hey, there's a new Git thing. Pull it in. A change has happened inGit I need to update it.” You can set it to reconcile on events on time. It's like a cron or it's like an event-driven architecture, but it's combined.Corey: How does it survive the stake through the heart of configuration management? Because before I was doing all this, I wasn't even a T-shaped engineer: you're broad across a bunch of things, but deep in one or two areas, and one of mine was configuration management. I wrote part of SaltStack, once upon a time—Chris: Oh.Corey: —due to a bunch of very strange coincidences all hitting it once, like, I taught people how to use Puppet. But containers ultimately arose and the idea of immutable infrastructure became a thing. And these days when we were doing full-on serverless, well, great, I just wind up deploying a new code bundle to the Lambdas function that I wind up caring about, and that is a immutable version replacement. There is no drift because there is no way to log in and change those things other than through a clear deployment of this as the new version that goes out there. Where does GitOps fit into that imagined pattern?Chris: So, configuration management becomes part of your approval process, right? So, you now are generating an audit log, essentially, of all changes to your system through the approval process that you set up as part of your, how you get things into source and then promote that out to production. That's kind of the beauty of it, right? Like, that's why we suggest using Git because it has functions, like, requests and issues and things like that you can say, “Hey, yes, I approve this,” or, “Hey, no, I don't approve that. We need changes.” So, that's kind of natively happening with Git and, you know, GitLab, GitHub, whatever implementation of Git. There's always, kind of—Corey: Uh, JIF-ub is, I believe, the pronunciation.Chris: JIF-ub? Oh.Corey: Yeah. That's what I'm—Chris: Today, I learned. Okay.Corey: Exactly. And that's one of the things that I do for my lasttweetinaws.com Twitter client that I build—because I needed it, and if other people want to use it, that's great—that is now deployed to 20 different AWS commercial regions, simultaneously. And that is done via—because it turns out that that's a very long to execute for loop if you start down that path—Chris: Well, yeah.Corey: I wound up building out a GitHub Actions matrix—sorry a JIF-ub—actions matrix job that winds up instantiating 20 parallel builds of the CDK deploy that goes out to each region as expected. And because that gets really expensive with native GitHub Actions runners for, like, 36 cents per deploy, and I don't know how to test my own code, so every time I have a typo, that's another quarter in the jar. Cool, but that was annoying for me so I built my own custom runner system that uses Lambda functions as runners running containers pulled from ECR that, oh, it just runs in parallel, less than three minutes. Every time I commit something between I press the push button and it is out and running in the wild across all regions. Which is awesome and also terrifying because, as previously mentioned, I don't know how to test my code.Chris: Yeah. So, you don't know what you're deploying to 20 regions sometime, right?Corey: But it also means I have a pristine, re-composable build environment because I can—Chris: Right.Corey: Just automatically have that go out and the fact that I am making a—either merging a pull request or doing a direct push because I consider main to be my feature branch as whenever something hits that, all the automation kicks off. That was something that I found to be transformative as far as a way of thinking about this because I was very tired of having to tweak my local laptop environment to, “Oh, you didn't assume the proper role and everything failed again and you broke it. Good job.” It wound up being something where I could start developing on more and more disparate platforms. And it finally is what got me away from my old development model of everything I build is on an EC2 instance, and that means that my editor of choice was Vim. I use the VS Code now for these things, and I'm pretty happy with it.Chris: Yeah. So, you know, I'm glad you brought up CDK. CDK gives you a lot of the capabilities to implement GitOps in a way that you could say, like, “Hey, use CDK to declare I need four Amazon EKS clusters with this size, shape, and configuration. Go.” Or even further, connect to these EKS clusters to RDS instances and load balancers and everything else.But you put that state into Git and then you have something that deploys that automatically upon changes. That is infrastructure as code. Now, when you say, “Okay, main is your feature branch,” you know, things happen on main, if this were running in Kubernetes across a fleet of clusters or the globe-wide in 20 regions, something like Flux or Argo would kick in and say, “There's been a change to source, main, and we need to roll this out.” And it'll start applying those changes. Now, what do you get with GitOps that you don't get with your configuration?I mean, can you rollback if you ever have, like, a bad commit that's just awful? I mean, that's really part of the process with GitOps is to make sure that you can, A, roll back to the previous good state, B, roll forward to a known good state, or C, promote that state up through various environments. And then having that all done declaratively, automatically, and immutably, and versioned with an audit log, that I think is the real power of GitOps in the sense that, like, oh, so-and-so approve this change to security policy XYZ on this date at this time. And that to an auditor, you just hand them a log file on, like, “Here's everything we've ever done to our system. Done.” Right?Like, you could get to that state, if you want to, which I think is kind of the idea of DevOps, which says, “Take all these disparate tools and processes and procedures and culture changes”—culture being the hardest part to adopt in DevOps; GitOps kind of forces a culture change where, like, you can't do a CAB with GitOps. Like, those two things don't fly. You don't have a configuration management database unless you absolutely—Corey: Oh, you CAB now but they're all the comments of the pull request.Chris: Right. Exactly. Like, don't push this change out until Thursday after this other thing has happened, kind of thing. Yeah, like, that all happens in GitHub. But it's very democratizing in the sense that people don't have to waste time in an hour-long meeting to get their five minutes in, right?Corey: DoorDash had a problem. As their cloud-native environment scaled and developers delivered new features, their monitoring system kept breaking down. In an organization where data is used to make better decisions about technology and about the business, losing observability means the entire company loses their competitive edge. With Chronosphere, DoorDash is no longer losing visibility into their applications suite. The key? Chronosphere is an open-source compatible, scalable, and reliable observability solution that gives the observability lead at DoorDash business, confidence, and peace of mind. Read the full success story at snark.cloud/chronosphere. That's snark.cloud slash C-H-R-O-N-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.Corey: So, would it be overwhelmingly cynical to suggest that GitOps is the means to implement what we've all been pretending to have implemented for the last decade when giving talks at conferences?Chris: Ehh, I wouldn't go that far. I would say that GitOps is an excellent way to implement the things you've been talking about at all these conferences for all these years. But keep in mind, the technology has changed a lot in the, what 11, 12 years of the existence of DevOps, now. I mean, we've gone from, let's try to manage whole servers immutably to, “Oh, now we just need to maintain an orchestration platform and run containers.” That whole compute interface, you go from SSH to a Docker file, that's a big leap, right?Like, you don't have bespoke sysadmins; you have, like, a platform team. You don't have DevOps engineers; they're part of that platform team, or DevOps teams, right? Like, which was kind of antithetical to the whole idea of DevOps to have a DevOps team. You know, everybody's kind of in the same boat now, where we see skill sets kind of changing. And GitOps and Kubernetes-land is, like, a platform team that manages the cluster, and its state, and health and, you know, production essentially.And then you have your developers deploying what they want to deploy in when whatever namespace they've been given access to and whatever rights they have. So, now you have the potential for one set of people—the platform team—to use one set of GitOps tooling, and your applications teams might not like that, and that's fine. They can have their own namespaces with their own tooling in it. Like, Argo, for example, is preferred by a lot of developers because it has a nice UI with green and red dots and they can show people and it looks nice, Flux, it's command line based. And there are some projects out there that kind of take the UI of Argo and try to run Flux underneath that, and those are cool kind of projects, I think, in my mind, but in general, right, I think GitOps gives you the choice that we missed somewhat in DevOps implementations of the past because it was, “Oh, we need to go get cloud.” “Well, you can only use this cloud.” “Oh, we need to go get this thing.” “Well, you can only use this thing in-house.”And you know, there's a lot of restrictions sometimes placed on what you can use in your environment. Well, if your environment is Kubernetes, how do you restrict what you can run, right? Like you can't have an easily configured say, no open-source policy if you're running Kubernetes. [laugh] so it becomes, you know—Corey: Well, that doesn't stop some companies from trying.Chris: Yeah, that's true. But the idea of, like, enabling your developers to deploy at will and then promote their changes as they see fit is really the dream of DevOps, right? Like, same with production and platform teams, right? I want to push my changes out to a larger system that is across the globe. How do I do that? How do I manage that? How do I make sure everything's consistent?GitOps gives you those ways, with Kubernetes native things like customizations, to make consistent environments that are robust and actually going to be reconciled automatically if someone breaks the glass and says, “Oh, I need to run this container immediately.” Well, that's going to create problems because it's deviated from state and it's just that one region, so we'll put it back into state.Corey: It'll be dueling banjos, at some point. You'll try and doing something manually, it gets reverted automatically. I love that pattern. You'll get bored before the computer does, always.Chris: Yeah. And GitOps is very new, right? When you think about the lifetime of GitOps, I think it was coined in, like, 2018. So, it's only four years old, right? When—Corey: I prefer it to ChatOps, at least, as far as—Chris: Well, I mean—Corey: —implementation and expression of the thing.Chris: —ChatOps was a way to do DevOps. I think GitOps—Corey: Well, ChatOps is also a way to wind up giving whoever gets access to your Slack workspace root in production.Chris: Mmm.Corey: But that's neither here nor there.Chris: Mm-hm.Corey: It's yeah, we all like to pretend that's not a giant security issue in our industry, but that's a topic for another time.Chris: Yeah. And that's why, like, GitOps also depends upon you having good security, you know, and good authorization and approval processes. It enforces that upon—Corey: Yeah, who doesn't have one of those?Chris: Yeah. If it's a sole operation kind of deal, like in your setup, your case, I think you kind of got it doing right, right? Like, as far as GitOps goes—Corey: Oh, to be clear, we are 11 people and we do have dueling pull requests and all the rest.Chris: Right, right, right.Corey: But most of the stuff I talk about publicly is not our production stuff, so it really is just me. Just as a point of clarity there. I've n—the 11 people here do not all—the rest of you don't just sit there and clap as I do all the work.Chris: Right.Corey: Most days.Chris: No, I'm sure they don't. I'm almost certain they don't clap… for you. I mean, they would—Corey: No. No, they try and talk me out of it in almost every case.Chris: Yeah, exactly. So, the setup that you, Corey Quinn, have implemented to deploy these 20 regions is kind of very GitOps-y, in the sense that when main changes, it gets updated. Where it's not GitOps-y is what if the endpoint changes? Does it get reconciled? That's the piece you're probably missing is that continuous reconciliation component, where it's constantly checking and saying, “This thing out there is deployed in the way I want it. You know, the way I declared it to be in my source of truth.”Corey: Yeah, when you start having other people getting involved, there can—yeah, that's where regressions enter. And it's like, “Well, I know where things are so why would I change the endpoint?” Yeah, it turns out, not everyone has the state of the entire application in their head. Ideally it should live in—Chris: Yeah. Right. And, you know—Corey: —you know, Git or S3.Chris: —when I—yeah, exactly. When I think about interactions of the past coming out as a new DevOps engineer to work with developers, it's always been, will developers have access to prod or they don't? And if you're in that environment with—you're trying to run a multi-billion dollar operation, and your devs have direct—or one Dev has direct access to prod because prod is in his brain, that's where it's like, well, now wait a minute. Prod doesn't have to be only in your brain. You can put that in the codebase and now we know what is in your brain, right?Like, you can almost do—if you document your code, well, you can have your full lifecycle right there in one place, including documentation, which I think is the best part, too. So, you know, it encourages approval processes and automation over this one person has an entire state of the system in their head; they have to go in and fix it. And what if they're not on call, or in Jamaica, or on a cruise ship somewhere kind of thing? Things get difficult. Like, for example, I just got back from vacation. We were so far off the grid, we had satellite internet. And let me tell you, it was hard to write an email newsletter where I usually open 50 to 100 tabs.Corey: There's a little bit of internet out Californ-ie way.Chris: [laugh].Corey: Yeah it's… it's always weird going from, like, especially after pandemic; I have gigabit symmetric here and going even to re:Invent where I'm trying to upload a bunch of video and whatnot.Chris: Yeah. Oh wow.Corey: And the conference WiFi was doing its thing, and well, Verizon 5G was there but spotty. And well, yeah. Usual stuff.Chris: Yeah. It's amazing to me how connectivity has become so ubiquitous.Corey: To the point where when it's not there anymore, it's what do I do with myself? Same story about people pushing back against remote development of, “Oh, I'm just going to do it all on my laptop because what happens if I'm on a plane?” It's, yeah, the year before the pandemic, I flew 140,000 miles domestically and I was almost never hamstrung by my ability to do work. And my only local computer is an iPad for those things. So, it turns out that is less of a real world concern for most folks.Chris: Yeah I actually ordered the components to upgrade an old Nook that I have here and turn it into my, like, this is my remote code server, that's going to be all attached to GitHub and everything else. That's where I want to be: have Tailscale and just VPN into this box.Corey: Tailscale is transformative.Chris: Yes. Tailscale will change your life. That's just my personal opinion.Corey: Yep.Chris: That's not an AWS opinion or anything. But yeah, when you start thinking about your network as it could be anywhere, that's where Tailscale, like, really shines. So—Corey: Tailscale makes the internet work like we all wanted to believe that it worked.Chris: Yeah. And Wireguard is an excellent open-source project. And Tailscale consumes that and puts an amazingly easy-to-use UI, and troubleshooting tools, and routing, and all kinds of forwarding capabilities, and makes it kind of easy, which is really, really, really kind of awesome. And Tailscale and Kubernetes—Corey: Yeah, ‘network' and ‘easy' don't belong in the same sentence, but in this case, they do.Chris: Yeah. And trust me, the Kubernetes story in Tailscale, there is a lot of there. I understand you might want to not open ports in your VPC, maybe, but if you use Tailscale, that node is just another thing on your network. You can connect to that and see what's going on. Your management cluster is just another thing on the network where you can watch the state.But it's all—you're connected to it continuously through Tailscale. Or, you know, it's a much lighter weight, kind of meshy VPN, I would say, if I had to sum it up in one sentence. That was not on our agenda to talk about at all. Anyways. [laugh]Corey: No, no. I love how many different topics we talk about on these things. We'll have to have you back soon to talk again. I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more about what you're up to and how you view these things, where can they find you?Chris: Go to ChrisShort.net. So, Chris Short—I'm six-four so remember, it's Short—dot net, and you will find all the places that I write, you can go to devopsish.com to subscribe to my newsletter, which goes out every week. This year. Next year, there'll be breaks. And then finally, if you want to follow me on Twitter, Chris Short: at @ChrisShort on Twitter. All one word so you see two s's. Like, it's okay, there's two s's there.Corey: Links to all of that will of course be in the show notes. It's easier for people to do the clicky-clicky thing as a general rule.Chris: Clicky things are easier than the wordy things, yes.Corey: Says the Kubernetes guy.Chris: Yeah. Says the Kubernetes guy. Yeah, you like that, huh? Like I said, Argo gives you a UI. [laugh].Corey: Thank you [laugh] so much for your time. I really do appreciate it.Chris: Thank you. This has been fun. If folks have questions, feel free to reach out. Like, I am not one of those people that hides behind a screen all day and doesn't respond. I will respond to you eventually.Corey: I'm right here, Chris. Come on, come on. You're calling me out in front of myself. My God.Chris: Egh. It might take a day or two, but I will respond. I promise.Corey: Thanks again for your time. This has been Chris Short, senior developer advocate at AWS. 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 and if it's YouTube, click the thumbs-up button. Whereas if you've hated this podcast, same thing, smash the buttons five-star review and leave an insulting comment that is written in syntactically correct YAML because it's just so easy to do.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 one shared secret behind some of the world's most powerful open-source projects. Brent's Node (not ready yet... Still syncing!): 03cf7e9b79a3230749db642ad690889065ec35b9ded184266d4fce424ab75470fc