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Lili Hellriegel is head of enterprise solutions at Cherry Servers, a Lithuania-based bare metal cloud provider that pitches itself as a sovereign, Web3-friendly alternative to the US hyperscalers. Before joining Cherry, Lili was head of infrastructure at staking firm Blockdaemon, where she built out data center partnerships, network architecture and the server specs behind validation workloads — work that left her unusually fluent in what crypto teams actually need from their infrastructure. Why you should listen The pitch for European infrastructure has rarely been louder, and Lili makes the case with the confidence of someone who has lived on both sides of it. Every major hyperscaler — AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, even Oracle — is a US company, and for a growing cohort of Web3 teams that is no longer a neutral fact. Cherry Servers sits under European jurisdiction, runs its own facility in Lithuania, and operates data centers across Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Chicago, Singapore and a newly opened site in Tokyo. Some of Cherry's customers come for hard compliance reasons; others, Lili says, come for ideological ones, wanting the chains they help secure to live beyond the reach of any single government. The conversation lands at a moment when data sovereignty and distrust of concentrated American cloud power have moved from fringe concern to boardroom agenda. The sharper argument is about economics, and here Lili thinks the industry is approaching an inflection point. She describes a shift from "cloud-first" to "workload-first" thinking: instead of defaulting to a hyperscaler and accepting whatever T-shirt-sized instance you're sold, teams running archival nodes, validators or other niche workloads are discovering they pay more and perform worse than they would on dedicated hardware tuned to the job. Cherry's answer is granular customization — choose your disks, your storage, your RAM, and pay only for what the workload demands — backed by account managers who architect the build rather than just sell a box, with human support that answers in well under a minute. For staking-heavy customers, the model is almost self-funding: a large share pay in crypto, drawing on staking rewards to cover their infrastructure across some thirty different chains. Her forecast for the next eighteen to twenty-four months is the part worth sitting with. Lili argues the era of free cloud credits is ending — she doubts AWS will keep handing startups six-figure credit grants for signing up to an accelerator — and that founders, newly disciplined about runway, will increasingly treat optimized bare metal as a way to extend it. In the closing hot-take round she plants her flag as a multi-chain "Solana maxi," names Bitcoin as the enduring store of value while backing the smaller chains' upside, and offers a builder's creed: the market ultimately rewards people who make useful things on-chain, not those treating tokens purely as speculation — which, she adds, is also why she thinks people should run nodes with smaller providers. The desert-island sci-fi pick, naturally, is Star Wars. https://www.cherryservers.com/
Join us as Dave walks through what it actually takes to build custom AI agents from scratch - not theory, but real projects he has shipped for his family, his work, and his community. Dave shares how he used Kiro and Claude to solve real problems: normalizing flood-damaged library inventory data, automating AWS well-architected review collateral, building a room-cleaning task agent for his 12-year-old, planning family menus with Apple Calendar integration, and post-processing live concert recordings. You will learn how agents reason and take action, when to reach for a Kiro power versus a simpler automation, how MCP servers connect agents to real-world tools, and practical strategies for keeping agents accurate without burning through tokens. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome & Introduction 7:57 Dave's Background and How He Got Started with Agents 13:00 The Library Flood Story - First Real-World Agent Use Case 16:00 AWS Well-Architected Review Automation 17:09 What Are Kiro Powers and MCP Servers? 22:13 Kiro Pricing and Bedrock Integration 28:13 Live Demo - Room Cleaning Agent with AWS Rekognition 41:24 Family Meal Planning and Apple Calendar Integration 44:27 Automating Live Concert Recording Post-Processing 52:31 Getting Started - Dave's Recommendations for Beginners How to find Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-stauffacher/ Links from the show: https://kiro.dev/
Subscribe to our Newsletter:https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ https://youtu.be/j0TuosYDQe4?si=7mzUwBe4PrQ-eB2E In this insightful session from the Ultimate Partner Live event in Bellevue, Washington, Vince Menzione sits down with Stephen Boyle, Corporate Vice President for Enterprise Partners at Microsoft, to pull back the curtain on the tectonic shifts redefining the tech ecosystem. Boyle details Microsoft's massive organizational pivot into enterprise and SME/channel divisions , explaining how artificial intelligence acts as the foundational thread unifying systems integrators, software vendors, and digital natives. Moving past market noise surrounding competing foundational models , he highlights Microsoft's strategy to become the ultimate “platform of platforms” by prioritizing user choice, security, and trust. Emphasizing a shift away from infrastructure technicalities and toward practical business outcomes , Boyle delivers an urgent mandate for partners to scale technical talent, eliminate traditional operational silos, and brace for the incoming consumption-driven, agent-based future of enterprise computing. Key Takeaways Microsoft has restructured its global sales divisions into distinct Enterprise and SME/Channel organizations to better target its massive total addressable markets. Artificial intelligence is fundamentally altering the partner ecosystem by dismantling traditional software and systems integrator silos to build interconnected, multi-party solutions. Rather than forcing alignment to a singular model, Microsoft aims to be the definitive platform of platforms by offering extensive choice across over 1,100 language models. The enterprise landscape is rapidly moving past experimental AI pilot phases and entering production setups completely focused on transforming core business outcomes. Tomorrow's service organizations are aggressively evolving into software-minded operations that deploy repeatable, highly specialized internal autonomous agents. Managing tokens and monitoring usage metrics represents the emerging operational baseline for balancing efficiency against the scaling expenses of large language models. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags AI frontier, platform of platforms, enterprise partners, global systems integrators, digital natives, language models, token consumption, agent sprawl, citizen developers, shadow IT, business outcomes, technical enablement, marketplace growth, hyper-scalers, processing fluency, sovereign AI, industry ecosystems, data governance. Transcript [00:00:00] Stephen Boyle: This is the biggest, most transformative, iterative change in technology we’ve ever seen, where, if you wanna call it a paradigm shift or whatever word comes after paradigm shift. [00:00:12] Vince Menzione: We just came back from Ultimate Partner live in Bellevue, Washington, where we hosted incredible leaders for two amazing days. Come join us for this next session where we explore the tectonic shifts we’ve all been seeing. Uh, I am thrilled to invite our next guest up on stage. I’ve known this gentleman for several years back in my days at Microsoft, and, um, we’ve been friends, actually Microsoft, and then we both went and did different things, came he’s come back to Microsoft in a big way. [00:00:46] Vince Menzione: Uh, Steven Boyle, for those of you don’t know, is recently a named the C. We will talk about it in a second, but I, I need to announce you properly. Is the corporate vice president, which by the way in Microsoft is a big deal for enterprise partners. He and Nicole De and I would say are the two Microsoft leaders in the organization. [00:01:06] Vince Menzione: Nicole is the channel chief. Steven has a, a big remit and we’ll talk about that up on stage. But I’m just so delightful for his support and for making the time in a very busy week at Microsoft ’cause this is CEO summit this week to make some time to come with us and be on stage with me. Please welcome my good friend Steven Boyle. [00:01:29] Vince Menzione: Good to see you, sir. To see. So I’m gonna put you on this side. [00:01:33] Stephen Boyle: Okay. [00:01:35] Vince Menzione: The hot seat. So I’m gonna, I, I didn’t do a justice and I, I wanted you to explain your role. I, I think I know, but I think for the, for the people in the room, uh, talk to us what Enterprise Partners means at Microsoft and what that role remit and remit looks like. [00:01:50] Stephen Boyle: Um, CVPs may or may not be important, but one thing they don’t do is get invites to the CEO summit. So I’m super pleased to be here with you guys. No, no, it’s totally cool. It’s totally cool if that phone rings. No, I’m kidding. Doesn’t. So what does it mean? So I’d like quickly, um. January last year, uh, we split the sales organization into enterprise and small to medium enterprise and channel. [00:02:15] Stephen Boyle: You guys probably familiar with that? Nicole is the, uh, chief partner officer lives in the SMA and C world and drives the channel, um, drives our marketplace business and, and a lot of other things. Um, for that 60 billion, um, you know, total addressable market that we have. Down there in SME and C. Um, at the same time, we established enterprise partner as part of Nick Parker’s overall organization. [00:02:40] Stephen Boyle: Um, but for most of 2025 we ran it as global systems integrators and advisories, ISVs and digital natives. So three separate footprints all focused entirely on, on, on enterprise. Um, in December, January, we talked about establishing an enterprise partner leader that would. You know, aggregate all of this stuff. [00:03:00] Stephen Boyle: Um, I was fortunate to come through, um, some frankly, pretty hairy, uh, experiences, I bet with some of our senior leaders. Um, I, I’ve loved to [00:03:08] Vince Menzione: been in the room for that [00:03:09] Stephen Boyle: questions like, why Steven Boyle and things like that, right? And really have to dig deep to, uh, to justify. Anyway, uh, I’m blessed and honored, uh, to run that entire portfolio of partners, uh, for the entirety of the enterprise partner world, which now from a chief revenue officer perspective, belongs to Deb. [00:03:25] Stephen Boyle: Deb Co. So Deb is the enterprise leader for all of our sales that we do into that space. Awesome. Um, I have three regional leaders, Nina Harding here in the United States, Ehab Ra in in Europe, and Heather Gordon in Asia that mirror and replicate and flow down the things that we decide to do from a strategy perspective for the, uh, for the core. [00:03:45] Vince Menzione: And we love Nina. She’s been, she was at our last event, [00:03:47] Stephen Boyle: super, super lady. And, uh, you know, the US is still 50% of our overall business. [00:03:53] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:03:53] Stephen Boyle: Too big to fabric. Every time I talk to Nina, I’m like, Nina, you’re too big to fail. We can’t cover you anywhere else. So you know, you’ve gotta be successful here in the Americas. [00:04:01] Vince Menzione: So I think just for breaking it up, I, ’cause I do want to like, it’ll lead to the next question, right? So you have the global systems integrators, all these systems integrators. Essentially you have all of the software companies we used to call ISVs, we now call SDCs or software development corporations. [00:04:17] Vince Menzione: And then you also have the AI stack, I’ll call it. Right? So under Jason Grafe. Yeah. Many, many might know. Jason’s been a guest on the podcast and was Satya’s chief of staff at one time, eight years. Eight years. Wow. I didn’t realize there was that many. [00:04:31] Stephen Boyle: Carry carried a lot of bags for Satya over the years. [00:04:34] Vince Menzione: Unbelievable. Well, let’s, I mean, so AI is an important component, right? And you saw Jay’s, Jay talking, just talking about AI and all these things. I would love to start here, right? Because, uh, you’re, you’re, I wanna get your perspective as Microsoft, your perspective as Microsoft on the biggest shifts you’re seeing in defining this we’ll call AI Frontier. [00:04:54] Vince Menzione: We’re seeing right now, how should partners translate that into how they position and go to market externally? How, how do we need to think about this time? [00:05:02] Stephen Boyle: Yeah, that is, uh, that is a huge question and I’m not sure we’ve got enough time to go into the, into all of the detail. Um, so let me sort of up level it a little bit for you. [00:05:10] Stephen Boyle: And I think, look, the move that we meet at made a couple of months ago and pulling together those three aspects. Nicole had already done it in SME and C. Right. One partner organization across the world with a very common set of goals. We were working closely together, Sandy Gupta, on ISV, Jason on ai, and myself on on si. [00:05:29] Stephen Boyle: But we were still working closely together across silos. So the opportunity for me, 60 days into this role is AI just allows you to wire the partner ecosystem together differently. Right? And even if you look at how we’re going to market an AI today, um. You know, with, with, with chat GPT, with Claude, with Anthropic, um, I think there’s something like 1100 different, you know, language models on Microsoft today. [00:05:55] Stephen Boyle: So the way I think about AI is we are absolutely gonna be the ultimate platform of platforms. Yeah, choice is incredibly important. Um. It’s, it’s, you know, turn the clock back 12 months, everybody was chat gpt five point x, you know, and then six months ago it was Gemini and now it seems to be clawed. And honestly I don’t know what it’s gonna be next quarter. [00:06:15] Stephen Boyle: So the only thing I can do is offer you choice. [00:06:18] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:06:18] Stephen Boyle: And from a partner perspective, I think that minimizes or reduces the risk that you have betting on the Microsoft platform because you can go in a multitude of different directions. I know we’re not in Europe, but if you were in Europe and you were worried about G-G-D-P-R and Jay mentioned sovereignty, you’d probably be like lining up really closely to Misra. [00:06:37] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. And a bunch of other Europe, European partners. So wherever you are in the globe, I wanna be that platform choice. Um, and we will lead with our own first party solutions. I hope they’re not coming for me. Um. I parked safely in the hotel. It can’t be me. Um, but you weren’t vibe coding in the room. Um, but you know, wherever you are in the world, in whichever industry you are in, um, it is our intent to, to offer that platform of platforms and to give the broadest set of partners the opportunity to engage with us. [00:07:07] Vince Menzione: I think that’s really important because I, I have found, especially in the last month or two, people are, it’s almost like a knee jerk. Don’t you feel like people don’t know what to do? There’s been so much noise in the press and the media and, and the markets around open AI and anthropic especially. Where do I go? [00:07:26] Vince Menzione: Seems to be like when I, when I sit, I watch everybody in the room here. I think they’re, they’ve all been thinking that as well. So you can, [00:07:31] Stephen Boyle: there’s a, a little bit of a deer in the headlights moment. Yes. And even I like, I get that. Yeah. Um, you know, I saw, uh, Jay slides. Jay, love the presentation. Love the slides, man. [00:07:40] Stephen Boyle: I’m gonna steal several of them. Um, we’ll talk about that later. We, we [00:07:43] Vince Menzione: have the deck, [00:07:45] Stephen Boyle: but, but in all seriousness, you know, this, this is like. It’s a new paradigm. I will date myself a little bit. Some of you might heard me say this. I sold many computers in the 1980s. Mini computers. Some of you in the room are going, what’s a mini computer? [00:07:59] Stephen Boyle: Um, I sold client server for Sun Microsystems in the nineties. I sold an awful lot of Oracle databases in the Auts, I think they’re called, and I’ve done two stints with Microsoft. This is the biggest, most transformative. Iterative change in technology we’ve ever seen. What, if you wanna call it a paradigm shift or whatever word comes after paradigm shift. [00:08:18] Stephen Boyle: Um, and we are building intelligent systems at scale faster than we’ve ever seen. Scalable, mission critical solutions being implemented today inside of Microsoft and with our most important customers. So, and we can’t do it without partners, right? There is absolutely nothing we can do in this industry. I will, I will put the, you know, the elephant in the room out there. [00:08:40] Stephen Boyle: Our ISD organization has between five and 7,000 people. Our forward deployed engineering organization is about a thousand people. [00:08:47] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:08:48] Stephen Boyle: So when you look at the scale of the total addressable market that Jay just talked about. We are gonna service directly like this much [00:08:55] Vince Menzione: used to be 5%. Was it even, is it even that high? [00:08:58] Stephen Boyle: I doubt it’s, I doubt it’s even that. And the billions of dollars that we spend every year helping our customers transform to what we’re now calling frontier firms is gonna be, have to be driven with every single person in this room in some way, shape, or form. Judson is not asking Marla to significantly increase ISD. [00:09:15] Stephen Boyle: Not asking John to significantly increase FDE, although we probably will hire in that area just because of the, the newness and the, you know, bright shiny object that everybody’s like, oh, FDE, I’ve gotta have those. We’ve got a thousand already today that have been around in John’s organization for 10 plus years doing the things that we are doing today. [00:09:32] Stephen Boyle: But we are gonna build out that muscle. But the real way we’re gonna build out that muscle is with all of you in this room. That’s like categorical. That is my like, probably number one goal for the next one to three years is make sure that, that story that Jay just told about Microsoft not being involved in AstraZeneca. [00:09:48] Stephen Boyle: I probably won’t tell Judson that Jay, but I love the story. Um, like if you could all do that for me, like win, um, that is so, you know, from our worldwide learning, through our skilling enablement through our cloud solution architects that I personally own. We are pivoting aggressively towards making sure that the partners understand our platforms better than any other job, number one for me right now, if you don’t understand what I’m selling, like I’m kind of dead in the water obviously. [00:10:15] Stephen Boyle: Well, [00:10:15] Vince Menzione: I was gonna ask you why now? Why Microsoft? Why now? Right? Because there is a lot of noise. You know, Google just announced, you all announced your results on the same day, which was astounding. That was freaky, wasn’t it? It was. It was the first time. And the, the total commitment, customer commitment is over a trillion dollars now, I think 1.2 trillion is what I counted up. [00:10:33] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. [00:10:34] Vince Menzione: But it’s saying a lot about like, what do I do now, like as these partners in the room. Um, how, I think you kind of already, and you’ve talked about this, about differentiating where Microsoft is, I think J Slide does a lot of justice there. It says how, uh, Microsoft Partners came into the room, surrounded the customer. [00:10:52] Vince Menzione: It feels like Microsoft has always leaned in big time on partners. Uh, more so I would say than any other organization out there. What would [00:10:59] Stephen Boyle: you say Joe Roses, my chief of staff, business manager and so many other things was telling me last night that, you know, we used to say 500,000 partners. [00:11:05] Vince Menzione: Yeah, [00:11:06] Stephen Boyle: it’s a, it’s a significantly higher number than that as well. [00:11:09] Stephen Boyle: So there’s an element of, you know, back to the deer in the headlights, which partners are, are more important. One of my other phrases that I say on a regular basis, the winners and losers are yet to be decided in this next wave. Like, I want all of us to on the right side of that argument. Right? But, but it’s gonna be a challenge and, and companies are going through shifts. [00:11:28] Stephen Boyle: You know, Accenture, maybe, possibly doesn’t need 750,000 employees in the not too distant future. Maybe TCS at 600,000 doesn’t need 600,000 human employees. So we’re going through this dramatic shift of, you know, what’s the right balance going forward. What I would say about Microsoft is notwithstanding the fact that we’ve figured this out for 51 years, which is a little bit mind blowing, um, that you know, all the way back in the seventies we’ve gone through so many iterative changes. [00:11:56] Stephen Boyle: People have questioned just like they’ve questions. A lot of other technology companies, are you gonna be around for the long haul? I think we’ve proven time and time again, and I love Jay’s story. I’ve used that myself about how many companies disappear on a, on a decade to decade, you know, business. 10 years ago I had the opportunity to listen to Craig Clayton Christensen, who’s sadly no longer with us. [00:12:15] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. But you know, the books that he wrote and the story that he told to Microsoft 2014, we were nowhere in cloud. [00:12:21] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:12:22] Stephen Boyle: AWS was so far ahead of us, it was crazy. And he came in and he’s like. You know what? You guys need to be successful. You need to figure out how to cross this chasm again, and we’ve done it time and time again. [00:12:32] Stephen Boyle: You can go back. You know, Microsoft used to be known as a fast follower in ai. I don’t think we’re a fast follower. I think we’re right up there. We’re right at the front, but that race is still being run and the winners are losers are yet to be decided. [00:12:44] Vince Menzione: I was in that room with Clayton Christensen with you, by the way. [00:12:46] Vince Menzione: I remember, I remember that. That was at a Prism conference. [00:12:49] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. Yeah. [00:12:50] Vince Menzione: You men, you touched on this with the GSIs a little bit. How do you see the roles evolving? You know, we, we, we bucketed all, we’ve always been. Fantastic about bucketing ISVs or SDCs and sis and digital natives. Yeah. How does it, how does that all come together? [00:13:06] Vince Menzione: Does it come together any differently in this new AI platform era, or is it the same? [00:13:11] Stephen Boyle: I look, I, I’ve said this for a long time, like if you go into AstraZeneca, the six plus, you know, frontline partners, there’s probably a whole board of second, third tier that, that we don’t know about doing, you know, things across the AstraZeneca group. [00:13:25] Stephen Boyle: It takes several villages and sometimes a small town, especially in my world, in the enterprise world, strategic five hundreds. Yeah. Um, you know, we, we ran some reports a few years ago and it is shocking how many global systems integrators have a footprint in Shell or Exxon or, you know, bank of America or whatever else. [00:13:44] Stephen Boyle: So I’ve always believed that partner to partner is critical. Yeah. I think it became even more critical in the, in the AI world, and I’ll take my new friends at Anthropic. So I went to the first Anthropic partner Summit. Some of you might have been down there in, in San Diego, um, just a couple of months ago. [00:13:59] Stephen Boyle: Same partners, same people from the same partners. In the room, you know, talking about what they’re gonna do together with Anthropic. Um, and I’m looking out across this audience going, okay, well I know him and I know her and I know those guys, and like, I need to figure out how I’m gonna weave this together. [00:14:14] Stephen Boyle: So it’s not just an Accenture and Anthropic or an NTT data and anthropic, but it’s an NTT data plus anthropic plus Microsoft. Story going forward. And then who’s best at delivering those services capabilities? So it’s it at every juncture that I see in the, in the partner community, and this is the, the reason why I argued vehemently with Nick, that it has to be one organization I’m gonna create maybe given a little bit away. [00:14:40] Stephen Boyle: So if you’re recording, stop now. Um, I’m gonna create an enablement organization that is partner agnostic. I don’t necessarily care. I do care about the digital natives, but I don’t care about how I train them. Right. What I’m more important of is how do I train the digital natives in what the sis are doing, and how do I train the sis and what the ISVs Plus digital Natives are doing. [00:15:01] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:15:01] Stephen Boyle: That is my, that’s my game plan. If I fail there, then I think we fail to raise the bar and be differentiated in an AI world, and I’m not set up like that today. [00:15:12] Vince Menzione: I wanna, I wanna ask you, uh, uh, because I was looking at Jay’s slide and the, the managed piece is. And we have a lot of managed service providers in this room today. [00:15:20] Vince Menzione: A lot of them, by the way, come from the old school of managed services. The managed piece seems to be like, if I’m doing something today with ai, we’re gonna talk about security next, uh, up on stage here. It seems like there’s a new set of skills or a different approach to the customer, don’t you? Don’t you agree? [00:15:37] Stephen Boyle: I I [00:15:37] Vince Menzione: think you need to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all [00:15:39] Stephen Boyle: times. I think what it boils down to is you can’t do AI unless you do certain other things. [00:15:44] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:15:44] Stephen Boyle: Right. You could be a modern work specialist and you could make a lot of money being a modern work specialist, or you could be a, a dynamic specialist. [00:15:52] Stephen Boyle: We just held our, uh, inner A in a circle conference last last week, which I was disappointed to miss for the first time in a few years. Those, those days are, are, are fast becoming over. [00:16:03] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:16:04] Stephen Boyle: Um, why? Because everything that I’ve just said is tied together by ai. Yes. And in order to do good ai, you need good data. [00:16:12] Stephen Boyle: And in order to trust everything that you’re getting, as Judson talks about trust and intelligence, you need to wrap that in a really secure [00:16:19] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:16:19] Stephen Boyle: You know, en en environment. Now we will do our best to provide levels of security into how we deliver ai. But that’s not the end of the game, right? You have to take it all, all the way to the edge. [00:16:30] Stephen Boyle: So that’s why a siloed partner or a singular commercial solution area partner in Microsoft’s terms, has got to transform its business. ’cause if you’re gonna do ai, you’ve gotta do those other things as well. [00:16:41] Vince Menzione: Agreed. I must see the model changing, and in fact, I see like bigger organizations becoming managed service providers in many respects. [00:16:48] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, there’s still, there’s still a role for all the old terminology you mentioned is SV to sdc. Yeah. I’m like, I’m been around long enough. Look, it’s ANB still anv, it’s still an isv. Thank you. Independent software vendor. Um, and it’s, you know, where, where AI is allowing software to be, you know, frankly developed in a number of different places. [00:17:07] Stephen Boyle: We are all citizen developers. Um, you know, I was on a call with our internal leadership yesterday, um, and you guys might have heard this story ’cause I think it came out at Ignite. When we turn the agent 365, around and on ourselves. We found 130,000 agents running across Microsoft that had been developed and deployed internally with, I mean, you could call it shadow it. [00:17:28] Stephen Boyle: I guess that would be one phrase that you would use for it, but the reality is if you, if you haven’t got something to do your job today, you have the tools. To build it really, really fast. Um, and that, you know, that’s, that’s a great opportunity for people to be able to do their work, you know, in a better and in a different way. [00:17:45] Stephen Boyle: But it’s also a huge opportunity to make sure that data governance and security and all the other things that we need to deliver are there out of, out of the gate and out of the platform that we deliver. So security’s absolutely critical. Not saying that managed services won’t grow, um, at, at some level as well, but only if they transform into this multifaceted way. [00:18:04] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. Thinking [00:18:05] Vince Menzione: about, well, that’s what I was, I was gonna lead to here with innovating. It’s happening across, I mean, we’re talking about chips, we’re talking about foundational models, LLMs, we’re talking about applications, we’re talking about agents. How should we think about where to play and how to differentiate as partners in this room? [00:18:22] Stephen Boyle: I think. [00:18:25] Stephen Boyle: So look, I mean, one, one of the ways that Judson talks about it is I think silicon’s gonna change over time. Yes. NVIDIA’s definitely the 800 pound gorilla, maybe the 8,000 pound gorilla. Yeah. Uh, but you know, if you read the press, there’s, there’s things happening in, in different places as first party silicon, which we clearly are, are developing, um, in a quantum direction for sure. [00:18:45] Stephen Boyle: Um, there’s lots of different language models that haven’t even been launched on, on, on the marketplace yet, so. You know, Judson’s trying to uplevel our conversations. You’ll hear us talking about conversations more and more as we go into FY 27, um, that obviate all of those layers. Just like even when I was selling Sun Microsystems, it was about the business outcome and the business solution that we were solving for not necessarily the fastest piece of hardware or the best client service solution on, on the market. [00:19:17] Stephen Boyle: So I think what’s gonna happen over the next 12 to 24 months is we’ll have so many different models to choose from. We’ll have more silicon to choose from, but those won’t be the real buying decisions. The real buying decisions of what? How am I trying to transform my finance organization, my HR organization, and my supply chain? [00:19:36] Stephen Boyle: Because the underlying technology, Judson says commodity I, I guess I can go with that. It will be commoditized and we’ll really start to focus back on what the important things are. We’re moving a lot from pilot to production. You guys have probably seen that. The numbers that Jay just showed about how many. [00:19:52] Stephen Boyle: Projects are failing, is getting less and less because we’re getting smarter and smarter about what it takes to actually drive the business outcome. And I need all of us to be talking that same language. Yeah. Having conversations with head of HR about how we’re gonna transform human capital management in the, in the age of agents, if you like, like the underlying platform. [00:20:14] Stephen Boyle: It’s not, don’t worry about it. You wanna be on a secure platform. Don’t get me wrong. But at the same time, I don’t think we, we spent too much time worrying about that. [00:20:21] Vince Menzione: Yeah. We’re not, what you’re saying is we’re not spending enough time on outcomes. On the business outcomes. Right. And that’s where we need to focus. [00:20:27] Vince Menzione: We’re, we’re focusing on, I, I feel like we’re, it’s a signal to, to noise ratio that we’re living through right now. There’s too much noise. [00:20:33] Stephen Boyle: Yeah. [00:20:34] Vince Menzione: And we’re not focusing on the signal. I think that’s what you’re saying. [00:20:36] Stephen Boyle: I, it’s got to be, I mean, to be honest with you, it’s always been, you know, even when I sold what I would perceive, you know, sun in the nineties was a rockman ship to the stars and, you know, kind of sad what happened to that company. [00:20:47] Stephen Boyle: Um, but we, we were, we were fixated on, we had the best client server. But, but nobody was buying, you know, a piece of Sun hardware as a room heater, which is all it did, you know, like for the longest. But if you had SAP, if you had Cybase, if you had Bond, remember Bond, I mean all of those applications that drove the business outcomes, we’ve gotta get back to that kind of mentality. [00:21:09] Stephen Boyle: Yes. And worrying a little bit less about the underlying architecture. Yeah. It needs to be, it needs to be part of the conversation. ’cause it needs to deliver trust and security and intelligence and everything else. Then you need to rapidly move to what are you trying to achieve and how can we ensure the, the, the success of, of your business outcome. [00:21:27] Stephen Boyle: And look, I mean, Palantir pri you know, sort of came out and said, well, the way we do that is through forward deployed engineering. Um, and they stole the show. And, and, you know, they’re, they’re doing very well as a result of doing that. Uh, but if you go and talk to, um, Tom Siebel’s organization at C3 ai. [00:21:43] Stephen Boyle: They’ve had FDS for quite a while. You know, I told you about John Chuchu 10 years ago. John Chu, Chuck’s job was to go and get all the applications that we needed on the Microsoft phone. Remember that? [00:21:54] Vince Menzione: Yes. Um, [00:21:55] Stephen Boyle: you know, so we’ve pivoted John o over the years to doing what he’s doing now, which is to go sometimes in partnership with, with partners into the customer and say, what is it you’re trying to achieve? [00:22:05] Stephen Boyle: Let me show you how I can build that for you in three weeks or three months. That might have taken you three years. We literally just did a hackathon with one partner last, last, last week with, uh, with our ISE organization, the, the, the forward deployed, uh, group that John runs. Um, and one of the big customers said, I’ve just done in three days what would’ve taken me three months. [00:22:26] Stephen Boyle: Now he hasn’t productized it and rolled it out and blah, blah, blah. But the reality is that is how fast things are changing. And this was not a small company. This was a very, very large oil company, and they were like blown away by how much we can achieve. We’ve gotta do that at scale. [00:22:41] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:22:42] Stephen Boyle: You know, we, we have a commitment to scale our FDE community through partnerships to touch all of the S 500 in a very personalized way. [00:22:51] Stephen Boyle: And then, you know, at a slightly, you know, lower ratios down through the, through the majors and into, into Nicole’s SME and C world as well. [00:22:59] Vince Menzione: Jay talks about the decade of the ecosystem. He coined that term back, back on a podcast way back in nine, in, uh, in 2020. Microsoft has been at the, for, we used to call partner to partner back, back in the day. [00:23:10] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. Do you remember those days? How do you think about this ecosystem evolving and what steps are you taking to help bring these organizations together? Because I, I, again, we look at the seven seats or 6.3 seats at the table. The customer has the power now that they didn’t have before. ’cause they have the commitment with like with Microsoft and they can buy off of the marketplace and pull together multiple organizations to go, go do that. [00:23:34] Vince Menzione: How do you think about helping to orchestrate that as the leader of the enterprise partner business? [00:23:39] Stephen Boyle: So I’ll start with a really big example, and I’ll try and sort of scale it down a little bit. But my friends at Accenture, with the Accenture, Microsoft Business Group, we spend an awful lot of time, you know, in, in each other’s pockets, in each other’s deals. [00:23:51] Stephen Boyle: We know everything that’s going on in the Accenture, Microsoft Business Group. And a couple of weeks, or maybe a month or so ago, I was told that the Microsoft Business Group is now larger than the SAP Business group. It probably flip flops. [00:24:03] Vince Menzione: Yeah, [00:24:04] Stephen Boyle: it won’t be too long before the Anthropic Business Group is bigger than both of those. [00:24:08] Stephen Boyle: So what I need my Microsoft team to do is to not spend all of their lives in the. A MBG, the Azure, the Accenture, Microsoft Business group, but to go make friends in the Anthropic Accenture Business group and frankly still to make friends in the SAP business group and maybe in the Oracle Business Group and the list goes on. [00:24:27] Stephen Boyle: So at a macro 11, in the very largest accounts where we haven multiple practices, where we haven’t spent time before, I’m gonna. Push my people into uncomfortable zones and I’m gonna push them to go into those other areas and I’m gonna load them up with technical talent and cloud solution architects and ai, you know, forward deployed engineers. [00:24:45] Stephen Boyle: And I’m gonna force different people to talk together that haven’t talked together. So I can do that in TCS. I can do that, Capgemini, I can do that. Um, you know, in Europe with Capgemini and Misra is a classic example. Um, with the, with the Indian sis, Indian based sis, they’re all big enough where I know all the practices exist. [00:25:04] Stephen Boyle: I just need to do a better job of, of talking to them. Now, when you downsize that into, you know, into a, a company that doesn’t have all of that scale, this the same truth still holds. I need to talk to people who aren’t necessarily motivated every single day to do something with Microsoft. I need to talk to people who are motivated to do something with an AI partner or even a traditional SaaS partner. [00:25:27] Stephen Boyle: I noticed yesterday, actually no, this morning I got a notification that we just passed, um, a billion dollars in revenue on the marketplace with ServiceNow. [00:25:35] Vince Menzione: Nice. [00:25:36] Stephen Boyle: Um, and I think AWS announced the same thing, by the way this month as well. Um, so thank you to the ServiceNow people. Yeah. Um, you know, that is that there’s a tremendous demonstration of how far we’ve come in marketplace. [00:25:48] Stephen Boyle: ’cause that’s another one where we trailed AWS quite significantly. But with the right partnerships. And driving the right motions, we can, you know, we can definitely catch up and we will continue to pass, uh, some of, some of the other hyperscalers in, in, in that way. So really the bottom line to your question is partner to partner is still real. [00:26:08] Vince Menzione: Yeah, [00:26:08] Stephen Boyle: how we do it and what we use to tie things together. And I know that compensation drives behavior and we’re not gonna get into a compensation about like how we get compensated and everything else, but the reality is I’ve gotta break down those barriers and those silos and I’ve gotta deliver real meaningful enablement and practice development so that, so that the people who sit in the Anthropic business group and the people who sit in the Microsoft Business Group are spending as much time together as they are with me. [00:26:34] Stephen Boyle: That makes sense. Simply put, that’s what I, I need to achieve at scale rapidly. [00:26:40] Vince Menzione: So to, we’re getting close to time here, but as you look forward, what would define the most successful partnerships in this ecosystem? Is it, is it what you described, the opening up the aperture or for the, for the leaders in the room here today, what should they go do better and differently? [00:26:58] Stephen Boyle: Um, so obviously we’re closing out this fiscal, we’ve got Microsoft start and Microsoft start for partners coming up in July. Um, I mentioned the fact that we’re, we’re driving. Cu customer engagement through the lens of conversations and how do we achieve business outcomes? I would encourage you to, to gravitate, if you like, above the commercial solution areas where you might have understood, this is how I interact with Microsoft today. [00:27:23] Stephen Boyle: Um, and abstract it up to that AI layer. You know, think about trust, think about intelligence, think about business outcomes, and how do I potentially weave together a story? If I’m in the dynamic space, how do I get better in data? If I’m in the data space, how do I get better in. In that modern work environment, but really use AI as the overlay to, to help tie that together. [00:27:44] Stephen Boyle: That’s one thing. The second thing is if we’re not training you in the right direction, it’s stevenBoyle@microsoft.com. Let me know. Awesome. Um, we’ve got programmatic stuff, um, you know, and we’ve got high touch stuff as well. So I think this is, this is another time where Microsoft is gonna over pivot on all of the training and enablement that we need to do to make sure that you’re, you know, you’re grounded in our platform. [00:28:07] Stephen Boyle: Um, I think there’s a huge opportunity with this agenda future to become more of a software partner. You know, even the deepest services organizations are going to need agents, and the more successful ones will be the ones that can turn on those agents in a repeatable way. So. Our agents, the new SaaS. I’m not exactly saying that, but I think that the agen future is one where even the more services oriented companies will, will have teams of agents that they’re deploying. [00:28:35] Stephen Boyle: In fact, I had a very, very large systems integrator, um, in, in the EBC just about a month ago, three weeks ago. Um, and I was sat next to their head of consulting and he showed me what he called his God dashboard. Uh, and right in the middle of his God dashboard there are like 450 accounts. All of whom I recognized, ’cause they were all in the enterprise, right in the middle of his dashboard was, how many tokens am I spending? [00:29:00] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:29:01] Stephen Boyle: Like, not like what’s my daily runway? You know, not am I making a profit on that account or anything else like that is like, how many tokens have I consumed? Yeah. Because there is an awful lot of, that is the new juice, if you like. That’s, that’s driving the success. You can have the smartest people on the planet, but you’ve got to still arm them with all the best tools that are available out there. [00:29:22] Stephen Boyle: So it’s fascinating to listen to him, how he had gone through that thing of, you know, agent sprawl, how many are really working, how many are not working? How can we prove that? You can prove it through, you know, managing your tokens. There’s a new version of. Finops for tokens, for want of a better phrase, that’s gonna be critical for us all to understand. [00:29:40] Stephen Boyle: ’cause they’re not cheap, they’re not free, that’s for sure. And, and they might not be cheap if you’re not, if you’re not managing them and using them effectively. Yeah. So that’s the other thing that I would really get on top of. And, you know, we’re gonna make some announcements in the not too distant future about the consumption driven future. [00:29:56] Stephen Boyle: Um, that, that we will, that we will deliver with our first party and third party platforms going forward. So that’s another. Another critical thing [00:30:03] Vince Menzione: sounds like some exciting announcements. Pretty soon. [00:30:06] Stephen Boyle: Yeah, could look close. Quarter four, help me close. Quarter four. Yes. That’s priority number one, two, and three right now. [00:30:12] Stephen Boyle: Uh, but get ready for some, you know, for some new announcements in July. Um, look, the future is incredibly bright with Microsoft. It’s incredibly bright in the industry as a whole, right? I mean, let, let’s be honest, the, the growth targets that we will have for ne next year are astronomical, and we will not make them without the partner community that we have, without training and enabling the partner community that we need for tomorrow. [00:30:34] Stephen Boyle: So like, stay close, you know, stay engaged. Talk to your partner development managers, talk to the talk to field reps, talk to the accounts that that, that you are in, and stay as close as you possibly can to our emerging strategy. And, um, you know, look, I, I think if I had fivefold or tenfold the people I have today, I still wouldn’t be able to touch everybody that I would like to touch in the partner community. [00:30:58] Stephen Boyle: So I’ll apologize in advance. Um, but we’re gonna have some, you know, some really cool ways of learning. Um, and we’re gonna make sure that they’re available to the widest possible audience. [00:31:07] Vince Menzione: Well, we bring the practitioners and the experts in the room to help with that as well. Right? Yeah. Because you can’t always have a partner development manager tied to everybody in the room. [00:31:14] Stephen Boyle: I, I would do hackathons on AI every week with every partner and every part of the world, but I can’t. [00:31:19] Vince Menzione: Yeah, exactly. Well, so good to have you today. Thank you. So good to see you again. I don’t know what your schedule is like. I, we didn’t, we don’t have enough time for questions. [00:31:28] Stephen Boyle: That’s cool. [00:31:28] Vince Menzione: From the audience. [00:31:29] Stephen Boyle: I’m gonna stay around for a little [00:31:30] Vince Menzione: while this [00:31:30] Stephen Boyle: morning and I’m coming back [00:31:31] Vince Menzione: for cocktails. Alright, terrific. So. Stephen Boyle will be here for cocktail hour. Thank you. Four 30 and uh, I wanna thank you, sir. So good to have you. Thank you. Good to see you. Absolutely. [00:31:42] Stephen Boyle: So much. Absolutely. Hey, thanks everybody. [00:31:43] Stephen Boyle: Thanks for what you do today, and hopefully thank you for what you do tomorrow as well. [00:31:46] Vince Menzione: Thank you. An incredible leader. [00:31:49] Stephen Boyle: Don’t forget, ultimate [00:31:51] Vince Menzione: partner Alive is coming soon, June 18th at our executive breakfast in New York. I hope to see you there.Description The Future of Tech is Here. Subscribe to our Newsletter:https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ I
AI Unraveled: Latest AI News & Trends, Master GPT, Gemini, Generative AI, LLMs, Prompting, GPT Store
OpenChoreo is an opinionated, “batteries included”, AI-native Kubernetes platform stack for Platform Engineers that combines GitOps, Observability, AI Agents, and Workflows into a custom K8s distribution “super pack” that is managed via Backstage, CLI, API, or MCP. Now a CNCF project.Check out the video podcast version here:
AI Unraveled: Latest AI News & Trends, Master GPT, Gemini, Generative AI, LLMs, Prompting, GPT Store
AI Unraveled: Latest AI News & Trends, Master GPT, Gemini, Generative AI, LLMs, Prompting, GPT Store
On this delicately preserved episode of the Shut Up & Sit Down Podcast, Matt and Tom are venturing through a rolling landscape of cardboard and canned fish.Moytura and Azure are the latest double-bill of mythological titles from Bitewing Games, and have gotten Tom and Matt all excited about abstraction. We follow these beasties with the briny offerings of Conservas - a solo game about making sure you've got juuust enough fish to turn into canned delicacies to be consumed en masse by TikTokers (we presume). And finally, Matt enters his happy place: putting numbers into boxes. Daydream is a roll-and-write with a charming presentation that, like the very best games, hides a crunchy core… Have a great week, everybody!Timestamps:02:34 - Moytura13:00 - Azure23:08 - Conservas29:57 - Daydream
AI Unraveled: Latest AI News & Trends, Master GPT, Gemini, Generative AI, LLMs, Prompting, GPT Store
AI Unraveled: Latest AI News & Trends, Master GPT, Gemini, Generative AI, LLMs, Prompting, GPT Store
“Tęsknię za Ballmerem na scenie.” Łukasz po keynote'cie Build 2026, na którym Satya wymuszał z widowni klaskanie - “nie było wow” - a po osobowościach pokroju Guthriego i Russinovicha został korporacyjny autopilot. Bo to pierwszy od lat Build, gdzie zamiast Azure'owych fajerwerków dostajemy Windows, Windows, Windows.
Innovation isn't about funding, it's about how organisations are built and led. Progress comes from cutting bureaucracy, empowering mission-led teams, and asking the right questions to unlock bold breakthroughs. This week, Dave, Esmee and Rob are joined again by André Loesekrug-Pietri, Chair and Scientific Director of the Joint European Disruptive Initiative (JEDI, Europe's ARPA) to explore how Europe can turn moonshot ambitions into reality by building the right people, culture and operating models for future-shaping organisations. TLDR00:41 – Introduction01:14 – Hang out: Esmee returns and the missing API has been found!05:14 – Dig in: Staying in step with global innovation12:57 – Conversation with André Loesekrug-Pietri1:02:26 – Roland Garros tennis, and unlocking creative energy GuestAndre Loeskrug-Petri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrepietri/X: @eurojediwww.jedi.foundation HostsDave Chapman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/Esmee van de Giessen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/esmeevandegiessen/Rob Kernahan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-kernahan/ ProductionMarcel van der Burg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-vd-burg/Dave Chapman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/ SoundBen Corbett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-corbett-3b6a11135/Louis Corbett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louis-corbett-087250264/ 'Realities Remixed' is an original podcast from Capgemini
What if Snow White was a warrior princess who could make a sword out of lightning and a cloak out of the night sky? And what if moms were nice?? To explore these questions, we read 'Sleep Like Death' by Kalynn Bayron. Conversation starts around 31:50. Before we take a bite out of that apple, let's check in on some of the things we've been playing, watching, and thinking about lately.Playing?Godzilla & other kaiju games at Kaiju BrooklynNight in the Woods (2017)Watching?RuPaul's Drag Race All-Stars 11 (Paramount+)Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 Film)Thinking About?Sony June 2026 State of PlayFind us on Bluesky & Instagram: @NovelGamingPodSend us an e-mail: novelgamingpodcast@gmail.comLogo by: Katie!Theme song: "Bit Bossa" by Azure
Morningstar reported that OpenAI is exploring an IPO, with timing uncertain. OpenAI operates a capped-profit structure under a nonprofit parent and relies on Microsoft's Azure for training and inference through a multiyear partnership. Competitors have raised significant private capital, including Anthropic's up to $4 billion from Amazon and $2 billion from Google, and xAI's $6 billion round in May 2024. OpenAI's commercial revenue comes from ChatGPT subscriptions, enterprise offerings, developer APIs, and Azure distribution, with The Information reporting about a $1.3 billion annualized run rate in late 2023. The company has signed data licensing deals with the Associated Press, Axel Springer, and News Corp, the latter reported by The Wall Street Journal at up to $250 million. Any S-1 would need to detail governance, cost structure, and Microsoft-related economics, while regulatory risks in the United States and Europe could influence timing.Learn more on this news by visiting us at: https://greyjournal.net/news/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Yahoo Finance reported that Oracle beat expectations on total revenue in its fiscal fourth quarter while cloud sales missed analyst estimates. Oracle's cloud portfolio includes Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for compute and AI workloads and cloud applications such as Fusion and NetSuite. Supply limits on GPUs, new data center capacity, and multi-cloud security and compliance reviews are slowing deployments and revenue recognition. Oracle is pursuing multi-cloud strategies with integrations that place Oracle Database near Azure and Google Cloud while expanding AI-ready infrastructure. Founders should expect longer validation cycles, cloud-agnostic requirements, and co-selling motions to move enterprise deals. Key metrics to watch include remaining performance obligations, any disclosed growth splits, and capital expenditures tied to new regions and AI capacity.Learn more on this news by visiting us at: https://greyjournal.net/news/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
As AI matures, it becomes increasingly important to know how it's performing and what it actually costs. Ned and Kyler are joined by Anuj Tyagi, Senior Site Reliability Engineer for RingCentral, to discuss the critical shift toward AI observability. AI observability is not just about costs; Anuj breaks down why observability has to include agent... Read more »
As AI matures, it becomes increasingly important to know how it's performing and what it actually costs. Ned and Kyler are joined by Anuj Tyagi, Senior Site Reliability Engineer for RingCentral, to discuss the critical shift toward AI observability. AI observability is not just about costs; Anuj breaks down why observability has to include agent... Read more »
As AI matures, it becomes increasingly important to know how it's performing and what it actually costs. Ned and Kyler are joined by Anuj Tyagi, Senior Site Reliability Engineer for RingCentral, to discuss the critical shift toward AI observability. AI observability is not just about costs; Anuj breaks down why observability has to include agent... Read more »
In this week's episode, we look at recent Microsoft Tech updates. By popular request, we're expanding our scope beyond Azure to include Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and related Microsoft platforms and capabilities. What's new? What's interesting? What's retiring? (00:00) - Intro and catching up.(03:18) - Show content starts.Show links- Securing code, agents, and models across the development lifecycle- What's new in Azure API Management at Microsoft Build 2026- Azure Container Linux on AKS- Azure Managed Redis Entra ID RBAC- Azure NC RTX PRO 6000- Foundry agent security capabilities transitioning to Agent 365- Azure Infrastructure Resiliency Manager- Logic Apps MCP Server- Give us feedback!
Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, a guardrailed Mythos-class model, to the public and Mythos 5 to trusted partners. OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO. Hackers injected credential-stealing malware into 70+ Microsoft GitHub repos, and Apple details its new Gemini-based foundation models. Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5, a "safe" Mythos-class model it says can't be used for cyberattacks, to the public, and Claude Mythos 5 to trusted orgs (Wired) OpenAI confidentially files for an IPO, says it has "not decided on timing yet", as "there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company" (CNBC) Microsoft disabled 70+ of its repos on GitHub, including Azure-related tools like azure-functions-host, after hackers added credential-stealing malware to them (TechCrunch) MG Siegler: after being left for dead in AI, Apple is set to win at the consumer level — the power of the default, superior product instincts, and no real competition (Spyglass) Ben Thompson: the iPhone is the true core of Siri AI, and Apple is the only company positioned to work across apps with personal context — as long as it's not vaporware (Stratechery) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Network/Cyber Security and Information Security Stormcast
Azure Functions Action and 72 Other Repositories Disabled After Supply Chain Attack https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/miasma-worm-hits-microsoft-again-azure-functions-action-and-72-other-repositories-disabled-after-supply-chain-attack-targeting-ai-coding-agents Active Exploitation of Check Point VPN Authentication Bypass (CVE-2026-50751) https://blog.checkpoint.com/security/check-point-releases-important-hotfix-for-vulnerabilities-in-deprecated-ikev1-vpn-protocol/ Missing IPsec Integrity Protection for IMS SIP Signaling in Verizon VoLTE Deployments https://kb.cert.org/vuls/id/615987 My Upcoming Classes https://www.sans.org/profiles/dr-johannes-ullrich
Join us as Mike Fiedler (AWS Hero, PyPI Safety & Security Engineer, Python Software Foundation) makes the case for eliminating long-lived credentials from your release workflow - before an attacker does it for you. Mike walks through the real-world incidents that motivated Trusted Publishing, how OIDC-based short-lived tokens work under the hood, and the step-by-step process for setting it up in GitHub Actions. You'll learn how the 2024 Ultralytics compromise was forensically investigated thanks to Sigstore attestations, why that API token in your repo is just a password with a fancy hat, common pitfalls that will have you debugging for four hours, and why deleting your old token after setup is the step everyone forgets. PyPI went from 10% Trusted Publishing adoption in February 2024 to 36% today - this episode is how you become part of that number. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome & Introduction 4:00 Mike's PyCon US World Tour Recap 8:00 The Scale of PyPI: 13B Requests/Day & 36% Adoption 12:09 Why Long-Lived Tokens Fail: Four Attack Models 16:47 Case Study: The 2024 Ultralytics Compromise 21:44 What is Trusted Publishing? OIDC Explained 27:04 How the GitHub Actions Flow Actually Works 34:12 Other Registries: npm, RubyGems, crates.io, NuGet 36:34 Common Pitfalls & Debugging Tips 42:29 Provenance & Sigstore Attestations 44:22 The Step Everyone Forgets: Delete Your Old Token 47:06 Migration Guide & Getting Started This Week How to find Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miketheman/ https://www.python.org/psf-landing/ Links from the show:
Join us as Dale Orders (AWS Community Builder, four-time All Builders Welcome participant from Australia) walks through everything you need to know about getting to AWS re:Invent completely free - flights, hotel, conference pass, and more. Dale shares her personal journey from being rejected the first time to attending four AWS conferences through the All Builders Welcome grant program, including two as a mentor. You'll learn the exact eligibility criteria, what the grant actually covers (flights, accommodation, Uber vouchers, a prepaid Visa card, and a free AWS exam voucher), how to write an application that stands out, and the one thing that will get yours rejected immediately. Dale also covers what happens after you're accepted, how to handle the visa process if you're outside the US, and a full list of other tech conference grant programs beyond AWS. Applications typically open in late June - this episode is your head start. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome & Introduction 4:11 What is the All Builders Welcome Program? 8:03 Dale's Journey: Rejected Once, Accepted Four Times 11:07 Eligibility Criteria & Who Should Apply 15:49 The #1 Thing That Will Get Your Application Rejected 16:03 Everything the Grant Actually Covers 17:42 How to Apply & Timeline 18:41 Writing a Winning Application 35:18 Visa Process Warning: Don't Ignore This 38:41 Other Tech Conference Grant Programs & Wrap-up How to find Dale: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dale-orders/ Links from the show:
Join us as Dale Orders (AWS Community Builder, four-time All Builders Welcome participant from Australia) walks through everything you need to know about getting to AWS re:Invent completely free - flights, hotel, conference pass, and more. Dale shares her personal journey from being rejected the first time to attending four AWS conferences through the All Builders Welcome grant program, including two as a mentor. You'll learn the exact eligibility criteria, what the grant actually covers (flights, accommodation, Uber vouchers, a prepaid Visa card, and a free AWS exam voucher), how to write an application that stands out, and the one thing that will get yours rejected immediately. Dale also covers what happens after you're accepted, how to handle the visa process if you're outside the US, and a full list of other tech conference grant programs beyond AWS. Applications typically open in late June - this episode is your head start. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome & Introduction 4:11 What is the All Builders Welcome Program? 8:03 Dale's Journey: Rejected Once, Accepted Four Times 11:07 Eligibility Criteria & Who Should Apply 15:49 The #1 Thing That Will Get Your Application Rejected 16:03 Everything the Grant Actually Covers 17:42 How to Apply & Timeline 18:41 Writing a Winning Application 35:18 Visa Process Warning: Don't Ignore This 38:41 Other Tech Conference Grant Programs & Wrap-up How to find Dale: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dale-orders/ Links from the show:
SummaryIn this episode of the Blue Security Podcast, hosts Andy Jaw and Adam Brewer discuss significant updates in Microsoft's security landscape, including the shift to passwordless authentication, cross-tenant synchronization, and the convergence of sensitivity labels with security groups. They also delve into Azure role governance and the implications of Facebook's new camera roll settings on user privacy.----------------------------------------------------YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/WFs6S42SCDs----------------------------------------------------Documentation: https://www.bighatgroup.com/blog/entra-id-passwordless-default-governance-convergence-may-2026/https://proton.me/blog/meta-ai-facebook-camera-roll----------------------------------------------------Contact Us:Website: https://bluesecuritypod.comBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bluesecuritypod.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bluesecpodYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BlueSecurityPodcast-----------------------------------------------------------Andy JawBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ajawzero.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyjaw/Email: andy@bluesecuritypod.com----------------------------------------------------Adam BrewerTwitter: https://twitter.com/ajbrewerLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjbrewer/Email: adam@bluesecuritypod.com
“Every data center will need some part of AI capabilities to run workloads like inference, because it's just becoming such a fundamental part of all of this cloud technology,” says Alistair Speirs, general manager of Microsoft's Azure Infrastructure. Speirs joins Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology Analyst Anurag Rana on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss how AI infrastructure is reshaping the modern data center, from liquid cooling and dense networking to custom silicon and distributed supercomputing. Speirs explains how Azure is preparing for a world where training, inference and traditional workloads increasingly converge, making software-defined infrastructure, power availability and global scale central to Microsoft's cloud strategy.
Apple shipped Apple Intelligence at WWDC with a new Siri that uses personal context across native apps and runs on a foundation model distilled from Google's Gemini. OpenAI filed a confidential draft S1 with the SEC a week after Anthropic quietly filed theirs, and we walked through what an IPO actually means for the user. Claude Mythos may have already appeared on Microsoft Azure as Claude 5, and it is beating Opus 4.6 on every agentic coding benchmark. And Google cut AI Plus to 5 dollars a month, doubled the storage tier, and shipped a Notebook LM update built for agentic research.Resources1. New Siri AI powered by Apple Intelligencehttps://x.com/tim_cook/status/2064107489847816292https://x.com/signulll/status/20641118847193213822. OpenAI files for potential IPOhttps://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2064094175541461220
In this special report, John Siefert, CEO, Dynamic Communities and Cloud Wars, speaks with Robbie Morrison about Velocio's acquisition of Domain Six and what the move means for customers, partners, and the broader Microsoft ecosystem. Morrison explains how the acquisition expands Velocio's enterprise capabilities, vertical-industry expertise, and delivery capacity while strengthening its ability to help organizations modernize around cloud, data, and AI. Velocio Expands Expertise The Big Themes: Domain Six Expands Velocio's Reach: Velocio's acquisition of Domain Six represents more than a simple expansion of headcount. Robbie Morrison describes the acquisition as a strategic move that adds highly skilled consulting talent, enterprise delivery capabilities, and valuable intellectual property in specialized vertical markets. Domain Six brings expertise in areas such as rental businesses and professional services, allowing Velocio to broaden its market reach while deepening its industry-specific knowledge. Consulting is fundamentally a people-centric business, making the addition of experienced professionals especially valuable. Customers Gain Access to Broader Expertise: One of the biggest benefits of the acquisition is the expanded access customers receive to specialized talent and services. Morrison notes that existing Velocio customers will gain access to Domain Six's industry expertise, while Domain Six customers will benefit from Velocio's larger global team and deeper Microsoft platform knowledge. The combined organization can now offer expertise spanning Azure, Dynamics, Microsoft 365, Fabric, data platforms, and business applications. Governance Has Become a Competitive Advantage: Data governance is no longer just a security requirement. Morrison explains that governance, access controls, documentation, and process discipline have become business enablers. Proper governance ensures that the right employees can access the right information at the right time, allowing organizations to move faster and make better decisions. As AI systems increasingly depend on organizational data, governance frameworks become essential for both compliance and performance. The Big Quote: “Everything that we do is people-centric. We're a consulting business at heart, and a consulting business is built on the knowledge and the abilities of the people you bring in, so bringing in that great team at Domain Six was key." More from Velocio and Robbie Morrison: Connect with Robbie on LinkedIn, read the press release about the Domain 6 acquisition, or check out the Velocio website. Visit Cloud Wars for more.
Realities Remixed, formerly known as Cloud Realities, launches a new season exploring the intersection of people, culture, industry and tech.Life sciences are at a turning point, where scientific innovation, regulatory pressure, and patient expectations collide with unprecedented advances in data, AI, and digital platforms. IT is no longer a supporting function but a critical driver of how therapies are discovered, developed, scaled, and delivered safely and at speed.This week, Dave and Rob kick off the Life Sciences mini‑series with Thorsten Rall, Global Industry Lead for Life Sciences at Capgemini, to exploring the current state of the sector, the key themes shaping the episodes ahead, and what it takes to drive better patient outcomes. TLDR00:30 – Introduction to Life Sciences and co‑host Thorsten Rall04:37 – Hang‑out: Navigating Waterloo Station07:50 – Deep dive with Thorsten Rall into the Life Sciences landscape28:03 - What are the main challenges in the sector and main themes45:31 – BBQ season is starting HostsDave Chapman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/Esmee van de Giessen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/esmeevandegiessen/Rob Kernahan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-kernahan/with co-host Thorsten Rall: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thorsten-alexander-rall-b232185/ ProductionMarcel van der Burg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-vd-burg/Dave Chapman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/ SoundBen Corbett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-corbett-3b6a11135/Louis Corbett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louis-corbett-087250264/ 'Realities Remixed' is an original podcast from Capgemini
On this episode of The SaaS CFO Podcast, Ben Murray welcomes Laina Chan, CEO and founder of MiAI Law, to discuss the intersection of legal expertise and cutting-edge AI. With a three-decade career as a construction law barrister and a background in mathematics, Laina Chan shares how her experiences led to building a platform that transforms legal research and risk management. Laina Chan explains how MiAI Law stands apart by replicating the way barristers think, offering precise, first-principles of legal analysis and verification—features now attracting judges, large law firms, and in-house counsel. She dives into the challenges of bringing AI into traditional legal workflows, recent fundraising wins, and the company's approach to value-based pricing given the high demands of AI inference. Looking ahead, Laina Chan talks about MiAI Law's rapid growth, its entry into the US market, and ambitious plans to reach $1 million in annual recurring revenue. Listen in for exclusive insights on building and scaling an AI-driven SaaS business in the evolving legal tech landscape. Show Notes: 00:00 Unexpected markets for legal tech 05:38 Legal document analysis tools 06:34 Legal risk management system overview 10:27 Testing error validation with a judge 13:58 Subscription pricing and package features 19:17 Microsoft partnership and Azure listing 20:40 Potential UK firm subscription 23:26 Crafting detailed reports Links: SaaS Fundraising Stories: https://www.thesaasnews.com/news/miai-law-secures-aud-2-million-in-funding Laina Chan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lainachanbarrister/ MiAI's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/miai-law/ MiAI's Website: https://miai.law/ To learn more about Ben check out the links below: Subscribe to Ben's daily metrics newsletter: https://saasmetricsschool.beehiiv.com/subscribe Subscribe to Ben's SaaS newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/df1db6bf8bca/the-saas-cfo-sign-up-landing-page SaaS Metrics courses here: https://www.thesaasacademy.com/ Join Ben's SaaS community here: https://www.thesaasacademy.com/offers/ivNjwYDx/checkout Follow Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benrmurray
Dan Nathan welcomes Notable Capital partner Jeff Richards to discuss how public-market concentration and multiple expansion in mega-cap tech are influencing private-market valuations. Richards explains Notable's evolution from GGV Capital and its investments across AI and software, then argues that AI adoption is accelerating rapidly, citing publicly reported Anthropic run-rate growth and broad “token path” benefits for infrastructure and select software. He highlights cybersecurity as a key beneficiary as agents increase enterprise risk and could drive continued growth for leaders like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto, while noting stretched valuations and advising patience for pullbacks. The conversation covers Google's equity raise and Berkshire's participation, Microsoft's questions beyond Azure, and why Richards recently bought Meta. They address enterprise “sticker shock” for AI usage, the shift to measuring output, SaaS durability vs. internal builds at startups, talent-driven M&A, rising VC interest in robotics, and potential IPO demand for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI amid signs of frothy market behavior. —FOLLOW USYouTube: @RiskReversalMediaInstagram: @riskreversalmediaTwitter: @RiskReversalLinkedIn: RiskReversal Media
William and Eyvonne discuss recent tech news, including the growing political and community opposition to AI data centers driven by fears over power and water usage. They also analyze the “AI Chip War” as hyperscalers such as AWS and Google invest in specialized silicon for training and inference. Episode Links: Amid backlash, O'Leary Digital CEO... Read more »
The new Azure file share experience is now generally available! In this episode of Azure Friday, we explore how the new management model simplifies the way you create and manage file shares, helping streamline your day-to-day operations. We also walk through the updated portal experience and highlight some of the key benefits of the new file share experience. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 03:38 - Demo on portal 10:20 - Benefits 12:54 - Closing & learn more Recommended resources Learn Docs Azure Product page Blog post Connect Scott Hanselman | Twitter/X: @SHanselman Azure Friday | Twitter/X: @AzureFriday Azure | Twitter/X: @Azure
We've informally heard that Satya is a listener to LS for a couple years now, but it was still absolutely surreal to meet him and do a live pod at Build, together with our friends at No Priors, the leading VC AI Podcast that we also greatly admire!We covered the MAI model technical takeaways on yesterday's AINews, so I will focus our recap of Satya's main messages around three elements:* Satya's adaptation of the Bill Gates Line for positioning Microsoft as the Frontier Intelligence Platform — customers must gain much more value from the Microsoft ecosystem than Microsoft itself, by building on multi-model harnesses like OpenClaw and Scout, drawing on the full enterprise context exposed by context layers like Work IQ (heavily dogfooded by his C-suite), and building up private evals and traces as a new form of Token IP* AI ROI: On one hand, enterprises are having difficult conversations around Tokenmaxxing and Layoffs, and on the other hand, there are serious re-evaluations of the End of SaaS since the Build vs Buy equation has changed so much. Our previous SemiAnalysis guest had… interesting comments on Microsoft's position on this as the ur-SaaS titan, and Satya had great answers* Making the Impossible Possible: Kevin Scott's inspiring framing around what the most ambitious version of applying AI and technology at large to business and social problems, like education and social impact.Enjoy!Full VideoTranscriptVoiceover: Welcome swyx, Sarah Guo, Elad Gil,, and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, Satya NadellaSarah Guo: Welcome to a crossover episode of No Priors and Lane Space with Satya Nadella. Um, congratulations on an amazing build. No, thank you so much, and it's great to be with both of you. I listen to both of you or b- both the podcasts all the time. It's great to be on it.Thank you so much. [00:01:00] So you're just talking about, um, these amazing, uh, announcements from across the Microsoft estate all morning for, I think, three hours. What is the, uh, what's the most important reflection or takeaway you have?AI as an Ecosystem PlatformSarah Guo: I, I'd say there are, uh, perhaps the, the biggest one for me is let's sort of conceptualize this more as an ecosystem play as opposed to a single model or even a single platform, right?Satya Nadella: I mean, you know, whatever I... At least for me, having grown up at Microsoft, having seen, whatever, four major platform shifts, uh, I sort of fall into that, um, uh, camp where a platform is defined by fundamentally its ability to create more value about the platform versus what's captured in the platform. And so if you, you view what's happening right now, I think this morning's keynote was how can any company, whether it's an AI native company or a traditional enterprise company, participate as a first-class participant where they can point to AI they created, [00:02:00] right?It's not that they don't use other people's AI. Of course they will. But to me, what's the path? What's the recipe? How do I do it? What does a stack look like? What does the tooling look like? What is valuable? How do you do that? That's it. That's sort of our job to do. Yeah. Ecosystem strategy is, uh, very complicated, right?Sarah Guo: Because you end up building certain components, partnering for certain components, supporting them. You just announced this big suite of models. Like, tell us a little bit about the, uh, training strategy for Microsoft now. Yeah.MAI Models & Training StrategySarah Guo: So, so the thing that we wanted to do with the MAI models was to build, and as Mustafa talked about, first of all, a great lineage, right?Satya Nadella: Starting with pre-training, uh, with very good data quality, uh, doing all the ablations, making sure because in, in some sense it's becoming even harder to build a clean lineage model just because there's so much stuff out there, uh, that you truly need to ablate out to be able to have a fantastic [00:03:00] pre-trained model.In fact, that's one of the challenges of a lot of the open weight models is they look great on one benchmark or two, but they're not great on practice. So that's why, in fact, even in the RFDEs are, they, they are pretty gone really excited about these MAI models because how the heck can a small five B model hill climb?Uh, and it goes back a little bit to what I think is ultimately the key thing to do, which is try to pursue finding that cognitive core. Uh, so to me, starting with a clean lineage- Then creating that ability for companies to be able to use this, right? Not just as a generalist, but to create their own specialist by building this hill climbing scaffold around it, right?So it's not just the model, but you have a hill climb scaffold around it, then you will start building your RLE. You will start collecting the traces. Most importantly, you'll have private evals because we know all the evals out there are good, interesting, [00:04:00] but they're not really that critical- They're work, yeahSwyx: at this point because they all can be maxed. And so the point is each company will have its own private eval. And so that end-to-end platform story around our models is sort of, uh, what I think is interesting. And then the one other thing, Sarah, since you brought that up, is I do feel there's a new frontier.Satya Nadella: Like people talk about the frontier and are you operating at the frontier. Um, interestingly enough, if you add a little temporality to it, you can use, let's say, in, in, in fact, the, the Lando Lakes demo we showed was pretty cool. We used, whatever, GPT-55, right? Then you collected a bunch of traces, and then you took a 5B reasoning model and achieved higher.Sarah Guo: Uh, so that is another aspect of what it means to appear... uh, you know, operate at the frontier Yeah. I, I think, uh, I first of all have to congratulate you on basically building a frontier neo lab inside of Microsoft in two years. Um, I'm wondering, you know, you have all this AI strategy that you're rolling out.Lessons from Two Years of AI DevelopmentSwyx: I'm wondering, what do you know now that you wish you would tell yourself two years ago where- or two or [00:05:00] three years ago? Three years for the Jensen partnership, two years for, uh, MEI. Yeah, I mean, I think the, the thing when, that I reflect quite a bit, right, which is sort of obviously I got into all this when I got excited by the, the scaling laws paper and, you know, when, you know, even the OpenAI partnership came about when those folks said, “Hey, we're gonna really throw a lot of computer transformers.”Satya Nadella: Uh, and they've helped. I- the thing that I always look back and say, “Wow, these things, uh, do have capability that they're climbing up.” W- I mean, this, you know, this crude way of saying it is intelligence is log of compute kind of works. Now what I think we underestimated perhaps is the real-world complexity of deploying these so that they actually deliver the value in the real world, right?So the outcomes as measured by any benchmark is interestingly important, but the true eval is when people out there are able to do unique things that they only can value, and it's very [00:06:00] measurable, right? That I wish we had sort of even, like, had more in our consciousness, right? Which is as an industry.Sarah Guo: Because right now I think when people say, “Wow, I don't want a token max,” it's an artifact of us not having thought ourselves as an industry that we are using tokens to create value every step of the way. So I think that's kind of what I wish we had gotten there, but I'm glad we are here.Real-World Value & Use CasesSarah Guo: What are some of the use cases that you've seen that have created the most value for your customers?Because I know that people talk a lot about code, and I think it's pretty clear that that's something that's having very large scale impact. Are there other areas that you find in common that your customers are really benefiting from? Yeah. I think, yeah, to your point, obviously coding is now got... But it's interesting, by the way, Elijah, to even talk about the coding, right?Satya Nadella: Which is coding has worked so well that we now have to rebuild the IDE, right? I mean, it's kind of nuts to see what we sh- launched is like, oh my God, I have these hundred agent sessions. I... The cognitive load it transfers back to me as a human is so [00:07:00] excessive that now I need a new UI. Uh, oh, by the way, I, like the, the chat as the only artifact was also impossible, so that's why we need a canvas.So it's kind of interesting for all the things about where is software needed or where is UI needed, uh, you kind of need that even for code, right? In a fully agentic world. But that said, one of the things that we are starting to see, we started seeing with co-work, but even some of the work we, we showed with auto com- uh, um, autopilot Right on what you see with claws is a good one because if you sort of think about a lot of human capital is doing the glue work, right?If you now can augment that with tokens/agents that are long-running, durable, right, then your ability to scale even what is still judgment and glue work gets amplified like coding does. Uh, so you can... Like, I'm positive that six months from now we'll all be saying, “Oh, wow,” like, all through ni- the night there was a bunch of stuff that [00:08:00] all these autopilots that I have working on my behalf with my delegated authority, so to speak, right?I can... Sort of given even my identity, did a bunch of work, then of course I'll need my new ADE to say, “Well, what did you do?” Like, I might... “Did I do this work?” And so on. So I think that that's where compressing of workflows, uh, completing of tasks, uh, that's where I think a lot of the value gets created. I think you raised a really interesting point, which is there's the actual agent that's doing the code, and then there's a harness around it, and that's the environment, that's the context, that's everything you're setting up as a developer around actually a coding agent.The Harness Concept for Enterprise AISarah Guo: What is the harness for the enterprise? Is there an equivalent concept for broader productivity work, or how do you think about that concept sort of generalized? That's right. So, so in some sense you kind of want the harness to define the models, the, the data, uh, and the tools, and so that you have a loop across those three.Satya Nadella: And so what we are trying to, first of all, make sure is each of our products that we build, right, whether it's GitHub Copilot or the security copi- the, the [00:09:00] stuff we showed with MDASH or even the discovery for science, it doesn't matter, all of them are multi-model harnesses, um, with tools access so that you can do this progressive, uh, disclosure of tools even so that they're token efficient.Uh, and then you're feeding it with very rich context because that's sort of the other hard lesson we have learned in the last two years is, oh my God, the amount of work you need to do to prep the context layer, uh, such that your plan can execute in the most efficient way is where the magic is. So we have, in our case, we have the GitHub harness, which essentially we're using across all our products.It's available in Foundry, and we are open, like you can use your Llama harness, whatever. Or you can use the, um, uh, you know, any open harness or any harness of yours and train with your tools and multiple models and your context. And so that's the pitch. Because right now a lot of dialogue is, um, “Hey, if I train the harness plus tools and the model together, you get [00:10:00] evals.”Elad Gil: And what we are proving out is... And the best example of that is what we did with MDASH, right? Because when it launched, uh, it found bugs or vulnerabilities that were not found by Mythos Uh, and so there is existence proof, I would claim, that you can have a multimodal harness, uh, that can in fact be more, uh, performant in the real world So a premise behind the, uh, training at the independent frontier labs is really, you know, we're gonna have these models, and we'll have an API business, and we'll support enterprises and startups.Sarah Guo: ButPlatform Strategy & Developer EcosystemSarah Guo: a first-party product, be it productivity or code or search, drives the majority of revenue. That's a different value equation than you're describing, I think, with the Microsoft ecosystem. Uh, if, if that's the case, tell me if it's the case, uh, ‘cause obviously you have first-party products and you have enablement products.Satya Nadella: Um, what is the role of the develop- Like what is gonna be hard and the set of skills and the value capture the developer has in that world? Yeah. So I think that there's always [00:11:00] gonna be the case that someone who is super successful in- as a platform builder can also have first-party products. It was true with Windows.It is true, uh, with, uh, the, the SaaS side and the cloud side as well with us and others and so on. But the thing that is, is it should not be a limiter to other people achieving that same success, right? That I think is the core difference, which is the, the network effects this time around, around intelligence are such because they learn from data, and not really lots of data.It's just a few samples that you have to see to understand what's novel about something. So that's why the game becomes how to protect. So that's why I would say every company, having private evals may be the biggest IP, right? Think about it, like what's that private eval that you can then use even a frontier model to hill climb on and not leak the traces may be one of the biggest [00:12:00] drivers, uh, of IP.Like, so in other words, another te- acid test is you have an eval that's private. You're using, uh, a g- a Model A. Can you switch it to Model B and e- you know, climb up? If you can, then you're in control. If you can't, you're not in control, and that's where even the harness decision becomes super important, right?swyx So therefore, having an open harness, letting all models come in, having your evals, your context, your tools help you hill climb, I think is the skills that an AI native startup needs, a SaaS company needs, or every enterprise needs. Yeah, I think in, in a very real way you are ... Microsoft historically is an operating systems company and th- then become a cloud company.Maybe like the third act is that you're a harness or evals company. Whatever w- ... whatever the, the sort of conglomerate of concepts that you wanna put together. Um, and, and I think like enabling every company to have like frontier intelligence or what- what- Yeah ... I forget the, the [00:13:00] exact term that you used, um, is the, is the mission, right?Satya Nadella: That's it. Like that is, that is the platform promise, that you build with us, you will get your intelligence, uh, for your data. That's it. That ... To, to me, that is the ... Like if there was one tagline, uh, for this entire developer conference is- Can everybody operate at the frontier with their frontier intelligence, right?To me, that is so important because otherwise it, I, I don't know how you achieve stable equilibrium, right? Which is how do I then go and say, “Well, my company is gonna have a terminal value because I now know how to continuously compound-” Yeah ... on top of what's a platform that gets better,” right? So when, like Windows obviously came out, Adobe built, Autodesk built, uh, or even like take what Jensen said.We built DX and he built, you know, CUDA on top of it. Um, right? I mean, I always say to Jensen, “God, I got the short end of that,” right? “I wish, uh, we had recognized it.” But nevertheless, but that, that idea that you can build a platform layer [00:14:00] that someone else can then extend out, um, and build their own intelligence layer in this case, I think is everything, right?Without it, why have a developer conference? I can just come and have you all sort of just worship at the altar of one model. Yeah. But that's not a developer conference. Uh,IP, Evals & Company Valueswyx: backstage we, we had a discussion about what is IP or what is the, the value in a company. It used to be the length of, uh, human experience at a company, and now it's this other thing which is the evals, the, uh, experience in sort of applying agents to the company. Can you... I just want you to like flesh that out a bit more ‘cause- Yeah ... it was very insightful.Satya Nadella: It's a great way to frame it, right? Because yeah, at the end of the day, every company is gonna have both the human capital that is still gonna be super valuable, uh, because humans, uh, and their ability to find the gaps that exist at all times is going to be the way we all will create value, right?I mean, so I'm definitely in the camp that this is going to be about expressing new forms of human agency and ambition even as token capital goes up, right? So let's say a cor- any corporation [00:15:00] has lots of tokens and lot of human capital. The question is how do you compound the two? So if you have a... Like if you take in Teams I have a bunch of agents doing work and a bunch of humans doing work, and the traces between those, that is really important context of how that enterprise is creating value.Then that goes back to train not a generalist model, but to train the company veteran agent, uh, right? That is super valuable again, right? Which is when a company goes says, “It should in fact go onto the balance sheet,” is how I think about it, right? That's so... In fact, there may be... Like human capital was never possible to go put on a balance sheet, uh, because you didn't know how to capture the tacit knowledge.swyx: Whereas now I think you can with the agents that have learned through the h- through, through time, through all the traces. Uh, so that's what at least we think will happen. I, I think the SEC is gonna have to have accounting standards- ... for token, uh, expertise Uh, y- y- you're talking about the equilibrium [00:16:00] state, um, and a stable equilibrium where companies have this compounding value and can see terminal value for themselves.Future of SaaS & Business ModelsSarah Guo: Another challenge to, you know, the considered equilibrium of, okay, there are applications and workflows that are sort of common to a vertical or a horizontal. Um, and this was, like, the generation of SaaS companies and, you know, Microsoft has lots of SaaS properties as well. And then there are things that are very specific to every enterprise that they're differentiated against.Elad Gil: Um, I'm sure you have heard much and participate in much of the debate about the end of software because all these workflows are, are cheap to generate now. Um, do you think the equilibrium looks different between what agents get built- Yeah ... in enterprises versus in their vendors in the future? Yeah. So I think what's happening there is, see, we, we had a particular way we captured, um, I would say workflow in apps, right?Satya Nadella: Because we built a, a data model, right? We schematized some part of some business process. Mm-hmm. We then built a bunch of business logic. Yep. And then we put a bunch of UI [00:17:00] on top of it, right? So that's kind of what every SaaS company- And a little configuration. For, like, 20, 20 years that was the plan.Right, that- Yeah ... and that was it. So interestingly enough, now you kind of get to re-litigate that vertical stacking, right? So I still think, for example, that data model that you built underneath every SaaS application is super good, right? Like, why reinvent it? Like, I, I, my general ledger better be a general ledger.I don't need new schema creation. No. Uh, in fact, that entity relationship, uh, is actually pretty good, robust thing that I want to feed. And you want it to be stable. That's right. Yeah. Then same thing with business logic, right? If, if you look at, uh... We have this product called Power BI, right? It is like dashboards galore people created.The beauty underneath that dashboard is a very rich semantic model, right? Someone took the pain to create a dashboard and do all the measures, and you want that. That's business logic, right? I want that to be available to me. So I think the [00:18:00] challenge of the SaaS business model is we packaged one way. We now have to learn how to unbundle these things and rebundle in new ways and discover new business models, right?I mean, if you look at it, d- what's happening today with Microsoft 365 is a great example, right? We have this thing called Work IQ. In fact, like, what we are realizing is, oh my God, like, you know, if you look at... In fact, there's a pa- historical parallel too, right? We sold first Exchange and SharePoint and, uh, you know, before Teams, we had a thing called Lync Server and what have you, and we thought, “Oh, that's all gonna move to the cloud.”But little did we realize that, um, the number of people who will use servers in the cloud is 10X, 100X, right? Because people were not buying servers, they were just buying a subscription. Mm-hmm. The same thing is now happening with M365 because with Work IQ, we have exposed what is perhaps the most important database in a company that never got used as a database because it was only captive to our apps.Mm-hmm. Right? It, it was all email operated on it, Teams operated [00:19:00] on it, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint. But now, like this is one of the coo- coolest things I get to do with Work IQ. I go to a GitHub repo and I say, “Hey, I attended a bunch of design meetings last week related to this repo. Can you capture all that and tell me what changes I should make?”I mean, think about that, right? It literally can go look at all those transcripts, come back with a plan to change a code base, right? Previously, you could never have thought of using M365 for something like that. So the value creation opportunity now in the agent world is in fact 10X more, but it does require us to have...Sarah Guo: For example, there's going to be usage around M365, right? Which is going to be perhaps more than even the e- end users and we have to even re-architect. Like, in fact, like what I use to serve an inbox or a mailbox cannot be used to serve an agent. Uh, and so that's sort of what we are doing.Pricing Models: Per-User, Consumption & OutcomesSarah Guo: I don't believe in, like, permanent business models for any of these domains, but in the [00:20:00] near term, do you have a prediction between, uh, you know, outcomes-based pricing, token-based pricing?Elad Gil: Enterprise bundles Yeah. The way I- I think about this is always we've had... Like, let's even take the per-user pricing. Mm-hmm. The per-user pricing is really an artifact of someone creating a budget needing certainty, right? Because it's the most important thing. Like, somebody wants a budget- Mm-hmm ... they need a per user.Satya Nadella: And, and per user is just a set of entitlements to usage, right? That's kind of what it is. And so the way is, if the first bundling will be take some usage, bundle it into per user stacks and, you know, then sell subscriptions. So subscriptions I think are gonna be there, per user is gonna be there. Then the next big thing will be consumption.So people will say, “I want consumption.” And it's also possible that people will say, “I don't even want to pay for any of the subscriptions or the consumption's outcome.” Mm. But remember, most people love outcomes until they have an outcome, because once you have an outcome, it's like giving away royalty, [00:21:00] right?Mm. I mean, like I, I've talked to customers who love, you know, outcome-based pricing, and I say, “I'm all in,” until they, “Oh my God,” like, “what are you talking about? You're sharing in my outcome? No, no, no. I want you to go back to per-user pricing, and I want you to consumption price,” right? So I think that debate will go on.Uh, but and all, all, all of these business models have a particular time and a place versus one to rule them all. And if anything, if you're a SaaS vendor or you're a platform vendor, having that flexibility... And quite frankly, we face this with GitHub, right? We just recently announced a per-user pricing on GitHub because little, you know, we- GitHub Copilot was constructed at a per-user level before we understood even, uh, the intensity of usage of agents, right?It was an interactive way for a developer to use code complete, maybe tasks. It was not like, oh, I launched 10,000, you know, agents that are going on all day, right? So that is what the adjustment is about. So now that we really want, there will [00:22:00] always be a per user, but there will have to be a consumption meter.Durability of SaaS & Build vs BuySarah Guo: How do you think about the durability of SaaS more generally? One thing I've observed is in a lot of enterprises internally, there will be teams that almost have agent euphoria. They're so excited about the explosion of things they can build that they're trying to rebuild a lot of applications or going to their SaaS vendors and saying, “We're not gonna work with you anymore,” or, “We're considering an internal project.”And it seems like in six to nine months, maybe some of those people will come back and say, “Actually, we, we can't rebuild everything.” How do you think about what's durable in this world and what isn't? Yeah, it's a... It... I think we have to go through one full budget cycle on this to really see the, um- Uh, the sort of the emergence of the equilibrium, because at the end of the day, there's marginal cost to even generating the app, right?Elad Gil: In, in fact, there can be even a, a simple way to say it, like if you should always acquire something if the marginal cost of building and maintaining, uh, something on your own is higher. Uh, right? That should be like it's a quantifiable- Yeah. Right? A quantifiable thing. And [00:23:00] the maintenance part is important, right?Even, like you got to remember like, hey, you know, all the security stuff that now AI will find, you better fix them too fast. Uh, of course, there's a coding agent to help you with, but then that burns tokens, right? So whose responsibility is it? It's kind of like a, a cycle that you've got to think through.And I think we have gone through the excitement that I can generate a lot of software. I think the next thing would be what software do I really want to generate? Mm-hmm. What software do I want to use from others? How do I compose these two into some agentic workflow that I have agency over, right?Sarah Guo: Because I think there'll be very little tolerance for anybody who's inflexible, uh, at the vendor level. Uh, but at the same time, I think that anyone who has got that flexibility shows up, delivers the value, will be back at again, right? We're selling software, uh, but with just different business models, in fact Uh, speaking about building software, um, one of my favorite moments from, I think, a previous build maybe one or two years ago was they had a b- they, they...Swyx: There was a section of you building your [00:24:00] own software. I'm curious if you're building anything now. Yeah. So I, I think the... You know, first of all, let's face it, right? Building software has made it possible for even the incompetence of a CEO of a company- ... like ours, uh, you can build, so thank God. But that said, I, I, I, I do feel that, you know, something like, um, GitHub Copilot to me, and especially the new Sessions app or the new app, has just made it so much more possible for you to have agency over artifacts that you felt you couldn't touch before, right?Satya Nadella: So to, for me as a CEO, even to go to a code base, uh, to be able to learn about it, like I remember joining Microsoft long back, you know, first and then you say, man, everybody had to go in and look at, you know, whatever, Cutler's, Malik, or what have you to learn how to do good C, uh, C++ code. Um, so now that ability to be more full stack up and down is so good, but that doesn't mean every one of us should be doing the same thing.The question is: [00:25:00] how do you then have the ability to inspect things, learn things, see things, um, I think is just so much more. And so to me, what I'm building a lot of is these long-running Foundry agents. Uh, right? So there's autopilots. So the easiest thing is, to me, I think I just built one, uh, even last week, where the idea was, hey, can I have an agent that is continuously monitoring essentially my own chief of staff autopilot, right?We're gonna have that obviously in, uh, Scout. That's what, uh, uh, we showed. But it is so easy and trivial to build. I took Work IQ. I said, “Take Work IQ, go, uh, and build a Foundry long-running agent.” Uh, store all the memory in, um, uh, using Ray Fin, right? Basically at my backend as a service. And lo and behold, it built it, and not only built it, I could say publish to Teams, and it published the damn thing to Teams.Sarah Guo: So the ability, uh, to have a, you know, some end-to-end project like this complete is just pretty [00:26:00] miraculous. How do you think, uh,Future Engineering RolesSarah Guo: that impacts the different types of engineering roles that exist in the future? Because right now I think there's, you know, a dozen different types of engineers that you can be, from QA, front end, et cetera.You know, there's a big swath. I've heard some people argue that in four or five years we'll basically end up with four engineering roles. It'll be people who are managing agents, it'll be four deployed engineers or FDEs, it'll be security engineers, and then people working on large scale infrastructure for a small number of services, and then everything else just collapses into the agentic world.Satya Nadella: Yeah, I- Do you think that's a correct view of the world? Yeah, I mean, I think, I think we'll have to experiment our way through it. But what you said is what... There are some very at scale things. At LinkedIn, they did structurally change- Mm-hmm ... uh, and it, you know, basically built up a new discipline called full stack builder, right?So they went and said, “Hey, let's bring, uh, people from design and product management, front end engineering, all put them together.” Uh, but also have an edge, right? It's not like the design person still doesn't have the design edge, or the front end [00:27:00] person doesn't have the front end edge, but you can give yourself bigger scope in roles so that you're not confined to one role.Um, and then r- equally, infrastructure has become very critical, right? So in other words, like, I mean, RLEs, I mean, one thing we've realized is even for the Excel team, for example. Mm-hmm. Building the RLE in which a reward can be learned is actually one of the hardest sort of infrastructure problems.Mm-hmm. Uh, and so you kind of need even new talent, right? Distributed systems people even in what was considered an end user app team, uh, because it's a different skill set. So yes, infrastructure, science is the other one, obviously. Um, so I think we'll see how these evolve, right? Where's the s- real... I mean, always the world will have a bunch of specialists.Okay. Um, you know, I think the generalist role is going to be the most exciting, right? Because the leverage of a generalist- Mm-hmm ... um, is where we are going to see the maximum returns, right? When, when you said, “Hey, are you coding?” I'm now a gen- Like, what... I've basically translated [00:28:00] knowledge work Right?Which I did, where I created a Word document or a spreadsheet, or even, uh... And now I can build an app, right? It's in the same sentence. Uh, right? That idea that, “Oh, wow, my generalist skills have gotten higher leverage,” I think is what we're gonna see across the board. Music to the ears of CEOs and VCs that are, like, a little dangerous and a lot of- Golden age for idea peopleSarah Guo: idea people. Yeah. Uh- With a lot of agency. I- if you take that idea of personal agency and you just zoom it out to the organizational context, um, uh, my partner Mike Renall, who, uh, actually started his career at Microsoft, just wrote an essay where one of the big takeaways is i- it's an age where you can be much more ambitious, and you need to be, given the pace of the environment and how quickly, actually, users and companies are open to adopting new technologies.Satya Nadella: Um, how do you think about... I, I feel silly asking this of somebody running a, you know, trillion-dollar-plus company already, butAmbition & Making the Impossible PossibleSatya Nadella: how do you think about how Microsoft can be more ambitious now? It's a great question. Um, I [00:29:00] think, um- I think the, the thing in these type of transitions is to have a conceptual model of how work can change to go after outcomes that you could hardly imagine previously, right?In fact, Kevin Scott has this nice line, right, which is, um, when you can make the impossible... Like, when you're making hard things easier, that's sort of one point of leverage. But true ambition is about making the impossible possible. So now the thing that is missing a little bit in all of our organizations is what is that new conceptual model of what can we build?What was impossible and what can we build? And I'll give you one example of this, right, which is I take great inspiration from sort of the people who were managing the Azure net- network. And they came to the... This was from even last year. You know, we were scaling. You saw that I, I [00:30:00] talked about sort of how we built in the last 15 months more Azure capacity than we built in the first 15 years.I mean, it's crazy. Wild. Yeah. Right? It's pretty wild. And it's the same team. So they saw that and they said, “Bob, this just ain't gonna work if we don't reconceptualize our work.” So they built... Essentially they said, “Our job is not to do Azure networking. Our job is to build the agentic system does, that, that does Azure networking,” right?These are the folks managing the 500-plus fiber operators managing the VAN, right, all over. And fiber operations ultimately is a physical operation. Things get cut, things get, uh, you know, have to be repaired. You know, we have fancy words called DevOps and so on. Basically, emails are coming in and you gotta go respond to them, take care of it.So they built this agentic system. They even have a character for it. It's called Miles, and it sort of does all this stuff, right? They started sort of screaming for more tokens and so on. And so they were saying, “Look, uh, we don't need a headcount. We need tokens in order to be able to [00:31:00] manage, uh, our operation.”That reconceptualization- Mm-hmm ... of what their work is, right? They, they basically took their work and made it meta, right? That meta work is now their new work. Mm-hmm. Right? In the ‘80s, if somebody had come to us and said, “4 billion people are gonna get up in the morning and start typing,” my model would've been, we need 4 billion typists?But we're not doing typing, we're doing knowledge work. So that, to me, I think is it, right, which is whether it's Microsoft or whether it's any organization, is to give ourselves permission to do new types of metacognition, meta work, using these new tools to change the outputs that matter, uh, and then really make the impossible possible.Sarah Guo: So completing that dot or the, the connective tissue across those, I think, is where a lot of the enterprise value will get created.Data Center Build-Out & Community ImpactSarah Guo: Should we talk about data centers? Yeah, please ask. Oh, okay. Well, uh, uh, w- we-- this leads nicely into the data center build-up. I always think, I- I just-- I'm just impressed at the sheer scale of the [00:32:00] build-out from Microsoft, but also everyone else, that this is redefining what it means to be a hyperscaler.And I just feel like that, that, that is at unprecedented scale on finances, uh, on the way you run the company, but also the communities that are, that are impacted. Um, yeah, just talk a bit more about what you're seeing on the ground, like when you visit your- Yeah, I think there are two aspects of it.Satya Nadella: Obviously, the, the build-out is, uh, extraordinary. Um, you know, nothing like this has happened, and it's great to be, uh, one of the participants in it. Uh, but you brought up the other part, right? I think at this point it's clear that unless we as an industry, uh, are very principled about ensuring that the benefits of all the stuff we're talking about are felt in real ways, uh, at the community level, right?Because this is not just a, a campaign, um, right? It has to be real, where people are saying, “Look, this is not ch- changing the prices on energy for me.” In fact, if anything, it's bringing down prices because long term there's going to be a better [00:33:00] grid, there is going to be more energy. Water consumption is, in fact, not sort of, uh...In fact, water is being replenished, right? You gotta really, you know, educate folks on truly what's happening, the cl- uh, the closed loop systems we are building. We have to invest in the training, the jobs, the tax base. In fact, the least talked about stuff is the amount of jobs that get created during construction, after construction.What's the tax base that's there in the community? And, and all this has to be real. Um, and, and if that is the case, then we will have permission. If it is not, we won't have permission. It's as simple as that, right? Which is, uh, we, we... I think we have to take it as an industry pretty seriously. Uh, I think it's good for communities to be skeptical, ask the hard questions, for us to do the hard work, earn that.Um, but at the end of the day, if there's-- if we can really be the produ-- Wait. I've always felt like in human history, if you use a lot of energy but also create a lot of value for society- The story has been fantastic. If you don't [00:34:00] do that, it's not been that great. And this time around, I'm a firm believer that ultimately if you do have a token economy that drives productivity, that drives economic growth, that drives broad spread, um, you know, participation, better health outcomes, um, then I think we'll be in a great place.Sarah Guo: Uh, and that's at least what we all have to be focused on. Yeah. It, it makes me think actually that with all these initiatives that you're doing, might be e- easier to see ROI in the communities first before in enterprise. Yeah. I, I mean, I think both sides. Yeah. In fact, it comes back together. It has to be the people in the communities are going to be employed, are going to be participants, uh, in the real economy, right?Satya Nadella: That's I think the question is. Like, if we- if the broad economy is doing well and the communities are doing well, the dots get connected. It's sort of the market forces are such that we will connect the dots. And that I think is it. Like, you ought to be able to see the evidence. You can't be about o- any one company, uh, but it has to be broad economic growth and broad [00:35:00] ec- you know, community permission.Elad Gil: Yeah. I guess I wanna talk aboutSocietal Impact & Optimism About AIElad Gil: what you're most optimistic about currently or what have you most updated your personal models on regarding societal impact of AI? So you're saying what's the, the, the- What have you updated most on in terms of societal impact of AI? Yeah. I think the, um, the p- the most, um- Critical thing is the first question we even started with, which is we need to tell the story and make it real that everybody has a real shot to participate as a first-class participant in this new economy.Satya Nadella: Right? That's kind of, I think we- in the next 12 months, 18 months, we need a way for people to say, “Oh, wow, I get it.” Right? There's going to be tremendous capability, tremendous amount of infrastructure, but I can see what is going to happen, whether it's the benefits like health outcomes or my ability to create a startup or my ability to run my [00:36:00] local sort of, uh, store more efficiently.It's just happening, and I see that, uh, benefit myself, right? That to me, you know, earning that permission in a path-dependent way, we can't wait. See, the one thing, Eli, that I've now learned is I think the world is gonna be very skeptical of tech and tech companies that say, “Trust us, we've got it. The g- future is gonna be glorious.”Sarah Guo: Uh, you kind of have to deliver tangible benefits. Um, and quite frankly, politicians winning elections, uh, because they have advocated for that. That will be at least my adjustment because without it, um, thinking that somehow... Because it's too important this time around. It's too much of the economy for it not to be the case So one very simple framework I have for, you know, what are, what is gonna be the broad benefit of AI, um, beyond the communities just working in technology, are, are sort of wealth creation- Yepit's [00:37:00] gonna happen in a ton of different companies, startups and large companies. Then you have healthcare. Uh, you, you had amazing demos today. There are companies like Open Evidence. I think that is happening. Um,Education & Future of LearningSarah Guo: education seems like another one that's an- Yep ... obvious good where we haven't seen as much impact as I'd expect.Swyx: Do you have a hypothesis on why that might be, or if it'll come? Yeah, I mean, I think this is where, again, how we think about education, how... You know, recently I met with, uh, the founders of Alpha School and learnt a lot about what they were going and going about, and it's fascinating to listen, uh, to how to even rethink- MmSatya Nadella: uh, what does education really look like. Because I think it's actually very important. Mm. Uh, and I'm not saying anything traditionally being done is less important, right? I was even looking at the, uh... It's fascinating to see. I, I, I forget the which Stanford class it was, uh, the, the Asian guidelines for CS something.Mm. Uh, because you still need people to learn. Uh, like it was an interesting AI class that they were making sure people were learning how to apply softmax appropriately versus saying, “Hey, fix my training run.” Mm-hmm. Uh, so I think learning concepts is important. It's going to [00:38:00] be, uh, critical. But the way we create the incentives, what are the credentials, how we value those credentials, what is the employment opportunity for those credentials?So I think that there's a complete change that has to happen, uh, given the way to get to information, way to educate yourself, way to continuously keep yourself updated has changed so much. So I think interestingly enough, maybe the next big startup and success story could be someone who builds a new university, um, or a new, um, pedagogy even of how to get someone to go through a curriculum and find economic opportunity, uh, that's highly valuable.Well, that has felt, uh, perhaps impossible for a long time, but it's a great note to end on and something that might be possible. It's still possible. Yeah. Thank you, Satya. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah. I appreciate it. Thank you all. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe
The new Azure file share experience is now generally available! In this episode of Azure Friday, we explore how the new management model simplifies the way you create and manage file shares, helping streamline your day-to-day operations. We also walk through the updated portal experience and highlight some of the key benefits of the new file share experience. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 03:38 - Demo on portal 10:20 - Benefits 12:54 - Closing & learn more Recommended resources Learn Docs Azure Product page Blog post Connect Scott Hanselman | Twitter/X: @SHanselman Azure Friday | Twitter/X: @AzureFriday Azure | Twitter/X: @Azure
Run enterprise Postgres workloads on Azure HorizonDB with around 3x the throughput of self-managed deployments — zone-resilient by default, no architectural trade-offs. Call AI models directly from SQL, build durable vector pipelines inside the database, and deliver high-accuracy similarity search at massive scale with DiskANN and AI re-ranking, all without leaving PostgreSQL. Debug and optimize queries faster with the Azure HorizonDB VS Code extension. Visualize execution plans, let Copilot generate fixes, and clone production data to test environments in seconds. Charles Feddersen, PostgreSQL Partner Director PM, shares how to put all of it to work on Azure. ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - Azure HorizonDB features 00:57 - Open-source PostgreSQL 02:24 - How it works 03:37 - Performance 04:51 - Enterprise-ready security 05:34 - Memory & storage work together 06:29 - AI Model Management + AI Functions 08:24 - AI Pipelines 09:50 - DiskANN + AI Re-ranking 10:50 - VS Code Extension + Data Cloning 12:31 - Wrap up ► Link References Check out our blog at https://aka.ms/azurepostgresblog ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft's official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. • Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries • Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog • Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: • Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics • Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ • Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ • Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics
In this episode, Scott Becker discusses Microsoft's recent rebound, highlighting its recovery from a steep decline, strong AI and Azure performance, and the continued leadership of CEO Satya Nadella.
Scott Hanselman talks with Omar Shorbaji from the Anyscale engineering team about how Anyscale on Azure scales Python AI workloads from a single notebook to thousands of CPUs and GPUs. Built on Ray, the most widely adopted AI compute engine, Anyscale gives you a unified runtime to build, train, and serve, running directly on Azure Kubernetes Service without the complexity of managing Kubernetes. See a live demo that fine-tunes a vision-language-action robotics policy, with the metrics you need to push GPU utilization higher. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:52 - Ray and the Anyscale platform 03:11 - Start of demo: Workspaces 04:38 - Running a job and viewing utilization metrics 05:24 - Choosing the right scale 06:53 - Abstracting Kubernetes on AKS 08:53 - Wrap up and where to learn more Recommended resources Learn Docs Anyscale on Azure Connect Scott Hanselman | Twitter/X: @SHanselman Anyscale | Twitter/X: @anyscalecompute Azure Friday | Twitter/X: @AzureFriday Azure | Twitter/X: @Azure
I'm excited to work with Microsoft once again as the presenting sponsors of the AI Engineer World's Fair! We'll streaming live from MS Build today for a special crossover pod with our friends at No Priors and the one and only Satya Nadella. However we did not hold back with this interview - we asked all the burning questions about uptime and Copilot that we know you have in your minds. Lets go!For almost two decades, GitHub has been the home of software, where both open source and closed flow, through commits, pull requests, reviews, actions, etc.This ecosystem flourished as open-source maintainers and contributors would continue shipping code for the benefit of the community. However as coding agents began to ship mass quantities of code - growing 1400% in 2026, it marked a new era that was both extremely exciting and challenging for GitHub.While these agents help more people ship more projects, they also significantly increase the floor of how much code is shipped, how often it is shipped, how many people commit code, and basically orders of magnitude multiples in every dimension of GitHub infrastructure:Now GitHub inevitably experiences more pressure on their infrastructure which was originally designed around human developers moving at human speed. This has resulted in a very publicly notable uptime story:So it begs the question of whether current systems around code can absorb what AI produces. Can CI/CD keep up when every idea becomes a build? Can open source maintainers survive floods of AI-generated slop contributions? Can GitHub preserve the human social contract of software while becoming the operating layer for agents?Which brings us to the perfect person to answer these questions: GitHub COO Kyle Daigle. In this episode, he joins swyx to unpack what happens when AI doesn't just autocomplete code, but starts changing how companies operate, how open source works, how pull requests get reviewed, and how GitHub itself has to scale. We go deep on GitHub's internal AI workflows: micro-skills, WorkIQ, MCP, Slack, Teams, email, Copilot workflows, the new Copilot desktop app, CLI, cloud agents, and how Kyle uses agents to look backwards across company context before deciding what to do next. Kyle also reflects on GitHub's history building webhooks, APIs, Actions, npm, Dependabot, and Semmle, why the AI era is breaking GitHub in new ways, how Actions became a general-purpose compute layer, and what Copilot becomes after code completion.Full Video PodWe discuss:* Kyle's expanded role across GitHub* How AI got Kyle coding again after years in leadership* Why GitHub rolls out AI through existing workflows instead of forcing new tools* WorkIQ, MCP, Slack, Teams, email, and GitHub as company context* Why massive “mega-skills” are giving way to small, atomic micro-skills* How AI changes summarization, communications, marketing, and analyst work* Why former developers in leadership may have a unique advantage in the AI era* Kyle's “15 agents on Saturday” workflow* How Kyle built an AI-generated executive presentation for CRO/CFO teams* Why AI changes the chief of staff role without removing the human work* GitHub Actions, webhooks, arbitrary code execution, and secure agent compute* The npm acquisition, supply-chain security, 2FA, and token invalidation* Slop forks, vendoring, and whether AI agents change dependency management* What pull requests become when most PRs come from agents* Prompt requests, vouching, AI review, and trust in open source* What counts as a “developer” when AI lowers the barrier to building* GitHub Spark, low-code, and why GitHub refuses to hide the code* 14x commit growth, Actions load, databases, monorepos, and availability* Copilot's evolution from completion to CLI, desktop app, cloud agents, and SDK* Context, memory, rules, and making GitHub “act like Kyle wants it to act”* Ambient AI, OpenClaw, enterprise security, and the new operating system for agents* What swyx should ask Satya Nadella about Microsoft's AI futureKyle Daigle* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyledaigle* X: https://x.com/kdaigleTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:03:36 Why AI Got Kyle Coding Again00:07:04 Running GitHub with AI: WorkIQ, MCP, Slack, Teams, and Skills00:15:39 The Golden Age for Former Developers in Leadership00:17:31 15 Agents on Saturday and AI-Generated Executive Work00:20:20 How AI Changes the Chief of Staff Role00:21:45 GitHub's History: Actions, npm, Webhooks, and Open Source00:28:45 Slop Forks, Vendoring, and AI Dependency Management00:33:57 Pull Requests, Prompt Requests, and Trust in Agent-Generated Code00:41:21 GitHub Stars, 200M+ Developers, and the New AI Builder Wave00:45:15 GitHub Spark, Low-Code, and Why GitHub Still Shows the Code00:47:38 GitHub's Hardest Era: 14x Growth, Reliability, and Scale00:59:21 Actions as the Compute Layer for CI/CD and Automation01:02:04 The State and Future of GitHub Copilot01:08:24 Ambient AI, Background Agents, and the Future of the SDLC01:13:09 OpenClaw, Enterprise Security, and the New OS for Agents01:18:03 Build Announcements, WorkIQ, FoundryIQ, and Microsoft Context01:21:41 What Should swyx Ask Satya?TranscriptIntroduction: Kyle Daigle's Expanded Role at GitHub and MicrosoftSwyx [00:00:00]: We're here with Kyle Daigle, COO of GitHub. Welcome.Kyle [00:00:07]: Hey, thanks for having me.Swyx [00:00:08]: You're not just CEO of GitHub. People know you as that. You have a new role.Kyle [00:00:11]: So I have an expanded role now. I've been working at GitHub for thirteen years and doing all things developer. Joined as a developer myself. And now, I'm also responsible as the CMO of Developer for Microsoft. And so all the kind of learnings and passion for developers and how we work with them and how we communicate and how we bring our products to market, we're also bringing that expertise to the broader Microsoft ecosystem and helping every developer that uses a Microsoft product or would like to have a sort of similar experience that they've had with GitHub over the years. So it's a different role in some ways, but it's also just building on the experience that I've had at GitHub of just sort of tell the truth, be authentic, show people how to use it and then let the products speak for themselves. Now just doing that with, all of Microsoft.Swyx [00:01:09]: We'll be releasing this in conjunction with Build. You got lots of stuff planned, and we can sort of touch on that whenever it's appropriate. I think one of the interesting things is I rarely meet a COO who's also a CMO. I think you're a very outward facing and you're very confident publicly. That's rare. Do you actually view yourself as COO? What's What is your thing?From GitHub Developer to COO/CMO: Building the Platform and Operating GitHubKyle [00:01:33]: I think for me, it's been funny. The titles have always been, a— have always felt a little strange to me. I joined GitHub as a developer? I wrote so much of theSwyx [00:01:46]: Let's bring that up. You wrote the back ends?Kyle [00:01:48]: I was going through, I was going through, some old photos, when folks were talking about how things were being built or how there was a build GitHub. I built, webhooks and worked with teams building the API, built the platform layer. Anything that integrated with GitHub, up until really twenty eighteen, I built or ran the engineering teams. And that's kind of where my the beginning of my passion always was helping people build things, deliver them to, their customers. And so being a developer, building for developers was always super unique. In a— I think as my role expanded, it became my ability to talk to not just developers, but also enterprise customers or business leaders and have this translation layer. And then through all those years, GitHub has always operated pretty uniquely. Post-pandemic, working remotely was not as novel as it was when GitHub started in two thousand and eight. But all that expertise of running remote teams, doing it well, became this sort of bigger role, ultimately turning into the COO role of how do we operate GitHub in the way that GitHub's always operated after the Microsoft acquisition. And kind of so on from there. So like for me, I think the— I've, I still code. I love coding but the problem has always been, people. It's a much harder problem to both support our own employees, a harder problem to communicate to developers and enterprise buyers what we're building why it matters, ‘cause those are two very different messages. And so getting to work in the mix of COO, CMO, also just being a dev, I think is what's kept me at GitHub for so long.AI Workflows for Leadership: Commits, Retrospectives, and ContextSwyx [00:03:40]: Apparently, you have— your commits have gone up. What's this? What's going on?Kyle [00:03:45]: Rui's called me out pretty aggressively. So I think— as you can imagine, right, you can see my normal era of being a dev In the twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen era, and then moving into management, and then ultimately the COO role. I think what you see there is me, really getting back to coding thanks to AI. I— similar to, attaching problems between how to market and how to operate a business and how to code, I find, building agents and workflows that are connecting very disparate problems to be what's driving this. So that's, some of it's writing software. A lot of it is, connecting a ton of a different data sources to, help me out. But that is completely me really diving in on the AI side in trying out our tools, trying out everyone's tools, But building for me, building for the non-technical leader, though I'm technical and how we're, able to use these tools more than just the simple, call and response that I think a lot of the non-technical, your employers, you have to get— you have to use AI, and so everyone uses, ChatGPT or Copilot or Claude or whatever. To really get into, how is this going to help me out, it— I find that it's not the I need to write a blog post, I need to those simple examples. Helping people find the workflows of, “Okay, I need you to go through all the PRs today. I need you to go through everything that we've posted online. I need you to go through what we did the last three months. Go through all of my Obsidian notes for any mentions of this then go through my transcripts at work.” We use, Teams, so, using WorkIQ, go call that MCP server, grab all the transcripts, go through all the Slack, and then build me out the plan of, what this week's messaging actually was. That's something that was, impossible because for me, I find AI in a what most of this launch here is actually, less building forward. It's actually, a recursive loop backwards. I'm always looking at what had happened first. Go back through the week and tell me what we did, what worked, what didn't work? And then tell me in the next three or four days-What would you tweak based on this sort of like looking backwards and then looking ahead a little bit? I find that to be so much more valuable, especially for like non-technical, because that retrospection is actually LLMs are very good at that. Like finding all the patterns, pulling them out, and then applying that retrospection to just a couple of days or just like a short period of time. Is all a bunch of apps that I've built and launched a bunch of, internal tools. I use the new, GitHub Copilot app, the desktop app with workflows. Every time I crack open my laptop, it's running workflows for me. It's just a ton of different stuff and of course, it all ends up on, it all ends up on GitHub.Swyx [00:06:47]: Of course. That's where, that's where, stuff is hosted. Man, there's so much to ask you. I was going to leave the how do you run a company with AI thing at the end. I have to ask one— double click one thing. You said, you are looking back at the week. You're, you're understanding what happens. When you say we That's three thousand people. How?Rolling Out AI Internally: Skills, CLIs, and Company ContextKyle [00:07:09]: I think when we started rolling out AI internally beyond engineering, right? One of the things that I was really, passionate about is like we have to do this in a way where no one has to change how they work. I don't want to have to teach you a tool. I don't want to have to teach you something new. And so for us, we tried out a few tools. Most of them don't work because I got to get you on board? I got to teach you how to use it. What we've actually ended up doing is we've built like a set of skills internally. We have we each have our set of skills, and we've just been distributing even to the non-technical folks, the CLI. And then effectively, we're just giving it access to like read about everything that we're writing. So that's for us, that's usually GitHub, Teams, Email, and Slack. So Teams for, video chat, generally speaking.Swyx [00:08:03]: Teams and Slack?Kyle [00:08:04]: so we use Teams for video communication, but we don't use it for chat. W-we— GitHub for a long history, right? We're alwaysSwyx [00:08:13]: Also SlackKyle [00:08:14]: Talking about ChatOps and like everything is built into Slack. Like every command, every flow.Swyx [00:08:18]: So even though you have been acquired for I don't know, eight years nowKyle [00:08:22]: we stillSwyx [00:08:23]: You still use Slack?Kyle [00:08:23]: it's a purpose-built tool for us, and I think the reality is that moving off of it would be so bluntly expensive? Simply because all the tooling is, baked in with that paradigm. And they both have their pros and cons but they don't work the same way at all. We still use a bunch of different tools Because it's the purpose-built tools that We need. And thenSwyx [00:08:47]: Well, the same doesn't go for the rest of Microsoft, presumably.Kyle [00:08:50]: like the like various teams like operateSwyx [00:08:53]: They make their own decisionsKyle [00:08:54]: Various ways. I think it just matters what you're trying to what you're trying to do. But we do we do work across kind of every tool that we use, and then by giving everyone access to all of that context and the new WorkIQ MCP server, which is quite cool if you do live in the M365 like world. I can ask it all these backwards-facing questions, and it's incredibly important for our teams that are working remotely. There's a lot of stuff you miss when you're not in an office, and we are spread out all over the world. So most of that is looking back. And then we post, we post either auto-automatically into GitHub issues or discussions, these sorts of like findings or like our industry reports. Like what's happening this morning, today, yesterday. A little automation gets run. We'll use the app. We might use GitHub Actions like with, our agentic workflows just to go do that run, and then we push it into GitHub, and w-we keep having a conversation. So usually for us, it's about that sort of like looking back, looking forward on the non-technical side. And then of course for a lot of those folks, it's also building an app, pushing it to GitHub pages or pushing it somewhere to host it et cetera. But it's just like enabling everyone with that power of it's going to take me a week to figure this out. Instead, we're going “Okay I built a skill. Let's put it into a repo. We'll all share that skill together, and then we'll use the CLI or now the app-” “just to run it.”Micro Skills vs. Mega Skills: How GitHub Uses AI at WorkSwyx [00:10:26]: All right. I think, I think we're going straight into like the team management and productivity thing. I think a lot of people are getting various levels of LLM psychosis. How do you manage the bloat of skills? Like everyone Has their thing, and they're Like trying to promote it to the rest of their peers in their org, right? And obviously, whoever becomes a skill influencer internally becomes like an AI leader, right? Of sorts. I assume you have those.Kyle [00:10:50]: like I think we haveSwyx [00:10:52]: And I assume it's a mess a Yeah.Kyle [00:10:54]: there's like I— like I think the reality is there's two pieces. Like first is I think that we're ending the era of these like massive, beautiful, perfect skills that are just like not any of those things. ‘cause for a while, right every tweet every day is like go download the skills, the perfectly managed thing to do this entire workflow. And I think that like what we've found and what— I was just with my team, this week, and we were talking about the skill side, and we're really talking about these like incredibly micro skills that are just doing one thing for us very well Versus a skill that's going to do I said, that full report. That doesn't really exist on our side anymore. It's usually how do— like a single skill that's going to identify the most important marketing information given any MCP server. Like this is the most important thing. Less about stitch a bunch of tools together and have it produce this mega output because then weeks go by, months go by, things change, and you want to tweakSwyx [00:11:58]: It's brittleKyle [00:11:58]: Your mega skill and you're screwed? You can't do that. And so now we're really just talking about the Legos we're using and just letting the instruction book be something we're all putting together. Whereas I think a lot of AI skills for a while have been that mega instruction book style.Swyx [00:12:15]: I've, thought a lot about Postel's law. I don't know if that's a term that is, means things to folks. It's the idea that you should be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you output, right? And I think that's like a good framing principle for skills. This is my skills, obviously on GitHub. I feel like everyone should have like how like some repos In GitHub are special repos? I feel like we should sort of reify the slash skills and everyone like give it some kind of special presentation. Anyway, so, yeah, this is one of those like download Download anything, transcribe anything, and then you can string together the atomic skills that do one thing well Into like some kind of orchestration skill that calls other skills. I assume, does that match?Kyle [00:12:56]: I like I think so. I think that theSwyx [00:13:00]: Summarize anything.Kyle [00:13:01]: Like I think the- For me, summarizing something for I do communications and PR and analyst relations and marketing and customer activities, and so my summarize everything is very different for each one of those like Contexts. What ‘Cause if I'm summarizing something for an analyst, that's a very different thing than, probably how I'm going to summarize something for like a customer meeting or an engagement. So that's I think like the difference when we're talking about the like the tools I might use on Saturday or the skills I might use on a Saturday when it's just for Kyle. Yeah, those are kind of like they have an atomic actual tool underneath or maybe skill, and then Kyle cares about X. But I think when we're talking about work and enabling the the marketers, communicators there, it's the atomic, this is what good summarization is, and then this is what I care about as for marketing for communications For whatever. And that I think is like the interesting matrix problem when we go from like a developer set of concerns to all kinds of different professions, is that what that word means to me is different than it means to you is different than it means to the analyst or the salesperson, and that's where I think the matrix mess is that we're starting to like still starting to find. It's about these mega skills but they're all just slight permutations, but those permutations are really important. It's the difference between someone reading this and going “Did AI make this?” what Or “This makes total sense, and I would expect this when I'm giving a briefing to Gartner,” or like whatever else.Swyx [00:14:37]: I think the beauty of it maybe is that you don't have to be that careful about what goes in there. It doesn't have to exactly fit as long as it like roughly is contained in there. I used to complain about plugin hell, basically. Like when you have a framework and then you have a hundred things that you need to integrate, everyone does like the GitHub used to be bloated full of these things. And now we don't need them anymore ‘cause now you just use skills.Former Developers in Leadership: AI as a Creation MultiplierKyle [00:15:00]: And like I think the most magical thing is the just that like I can just also crack it open. Like Like yes, I could go like change the how the plugin is coded, or like I could go do that now with AI, but I think there's just something more magical about getting a response back and being “That's not right,” and then you just crack the skill open, you just type English words and it's different. That building block is just, I think very unique. Once I get everyone to kind of understand how to best how to best make those changes to get the most power out of them.Swyx [00:15:36]: Is there a— you have a your peer group that Of people like you. Is there a common framing for Something I'm feeling is, which is true, is that is this a golden age for former developers who are now in leadership? Because you can wield the tools, you would know the right words, you're maybe not too close to the details. Doesn't matter. But like you're more effective than someone who doesn't come from that background.Kyle [00:15:59]: I think that like the secret has always been your ability to identify patterns and solve problems, and I think that for folks that like myself that don't code day to day anymore, that has made me successful as a developer, made me successful as a COO and now CMO. And so now that I have access to get and write code, I'm now applying that sort of like pattern finding and problem solving, and I know enough still about how to then go and say, “Oh, I want to make an app, but I don't want to break into jail or create something that's not going to be able to work or to be deployed scale or whatever.” that ability to apply all that additional business knowledge and still code I think is what makes that so interesting to me. Slightly different than I think some of the other like technical leaders that became business leaders and now are going back to their apps and updating them. Good for them? But I think the more, much more interesting thing is, well, now I have this whole new set of expertise over ten plus years. Why not take that and use that as a developer with these AI tools? So I definitely think that makes me more powerful, but I think that's true for like every dev as well. Most of the dev friends I still have also have some other underlying skill and passion. There's really talented, very kind of linear computer science software devs, absolutely. I just find that the folks that came from a different career, went to school for something else, went off and did this random thing, and then became a software dev, or were a dev, did a random thing, came back. Learning that extra set of information, learning those extra skills, and now having the power of an AI where I can crank up fifteen agents on Saturday while my kids are doing lacrosse, That's like really powerful. And I think it gets me back to that feeling of like creation, and it's very hard to replicate that in most other senses? That first time you build an app and you click it and you show someone that's magical. And so being able to do that not just in code, but across all kinds of different assets that's, that's huge. We were doing we're doing our every year we do our revenue planning. We talk about okay, what is it going to look like for next year? And of course as you imagine, there's, slideshows everywhere talking about what are we going to talk about, what's the narrative, et cetera. And so as you said I'm “Okay, well, I could probably just like build something to build this and then that way I don't have to go build the whole spreadsheet or I have to pass it to my team.” So we went through this process, and I got all the information and used the skills I mentioned. I built like a little app just to make it so I could look at some of the information in a SQLite database, more easily. And I ultimately built this entire presentation without touching any of it and I was “Okay, I'm just going to present this to our CRO, the CFO, their teams,” without mentioning I'd built it with AI. I like built a skill to make it look very much not AI driven. Just not pretty.AI-Generated Presentations, Human Taste, and the Changing Chief of Staff RoleSwyx [00:19:03]: Like a design. Yeah.Kyle [00:19:03]: Not pretty. But just like very clearly not AI. Kind of like don't do anything interesting.Swyx [00:19:08]: That's, yeah, that is valuable.Kyle [00:19:08]: Just go Exactly. We did the whole thing through. It used my notes from Obsidian, it used all the context I mentioned before, the plans, and Never came up once that it was AI generated.Swyx [00:19:20]: It didn't matter.Kyle [00:19:20]: Never once. D It didn't matter. And so now I takeSwyx [00:19:23]: This is a toolKyle [00:19:23]: I can take that tool and go, “Look, I don't want you to go build slideshows.” They're just helping us share information with each other. If this thing can do it With a little bit of crafting from you and then we can look at it together, awesome. There's no value in all that extra work. I think that the ability to, make it look humanly bad and and build a little app to, manipulate the data I think is part of, that upside for devs that are now in leadership roles. Because, the thing that I feel like I said before, this that's all a people, that's all a people problem. I know if you've used a coworker or not to build a slide deck, unless you spent a bunch of time to not do it.Swyx [00:20:07]: I know, but like it was so, I think there's a certain charm to just being blatantly AI. ‘Cause I think that you're well, you're just honest about There may be mistakes here that I cannot vouch for. So how much value is there? But anyway I think, actually the real question I want to ask is, there's a— You were a chief of staff To Thomas. And in the pre-AI world, the that job would've been a chief of staff job of like Can you prep me these slides and all that? And now you do it yourself.Kyle [00:20:35]: I still, I still have a chief of staff. Because, the difference is it's sort of the discussion every time we have some sort of technology evolution is it's not that the jobs the roles don't all go away, they just change? And so yeah, I don't have someone spending all their time building out slides for me and presentations ‘cause I don't need that anymore. But now I need that person that is able to go and find all the different connections between humans in those discussions to help me find out, okay, I should be meeting with this group and this team, and they have an opportunity, and I'm going to be in San Francisco today, I'm going to be in Seattle tomorrow. Those sorts of human connection aspects are still incredibly valuable and has always been a big part of that chief of staff role. But now just like chiefs of staff are not opening up, letters to process, they're doing emails. What It's the same thing. And now they're, they're not building out as many of these presentations because they have the the ability to have a AI take it on for, and share that with me and great. Let's keep moving ‘cause it's allowing us to go faster and make better decisions more quickly.Swyx [00:21:45]: Awesome. Well, so we can dive into more sort of, Productivity insights as you go. I did want to do a little bit of a brief history of colleague and hub. Because, we started here. And then you also involved the NPM acquisition. I did, I do want to touch upon that. And then more recently, I just want to bring up to present day where we're having uptime issues Which transparently we've already Addressed publicly, but we'll, we'll discuss in the pod. Did I miss anything? Like what, any other major highlights? Obviously, it's, it's a lot of years to cover.A Brief History of GitHub: Webhooks, Actions, Acquisitions, and Platform EvolutionKyle [00:22:15]: No the I think one of one highlight was right before the acquisition closed in twenty eighteen, I got to launch the first version of ActionsSwyx [00:22:27]: OhKyle [00:22:27]: At GitHub Universe. So it was OSwyx [00:22:29]: They're that young?Kyle [00:22:30]: It was October of twenty eighteen, I think. Yeah. Yeah.Swyx [00:22:33]: Gee, Jesus.Kyle [00:22:34]: I got to I was the engineering leader on that project and got to launch that. And then, yeah, we did acquisitions of NPM you said, Semmle, Dependabot Pul Panda a whole bunch of things. That was a bigSwyx [00:22:47]: Pul Panda.Kyle [00:22:48]: Abi is doing well.Swyx [00:22:51]: DX. Holy crap.Kyle [00:22:52]: Did well on DX. I and like that was a that was the big shift, after the acquisition. I had to join the sort of business side.Swyx [00:23:00]: So I need to hit you on some of these things ‘cause you were there. Right? And how often do I get to talk to someone who was there? But yeah, Actions. Is that the number one source of security issues on GitHub?Kyle [00:23:11]: Oh, sh I think that the number one source of, security issues is probably like all, the literal code in everyone's like underlying repositories. I would say back further than that is, if you remember I had to show in this graph was this is, I'm, didn't say this before, this is ultimately webhooks.Swyx [00:23:30]: You yeah.Kyle [00:23:31]: Like circa whatever it was.Swyx [00:23:32]: It says Hookshot in there.Kyle [00:23:32]: I forget. Yeah. Yeah, Hookshot's in there. And so like back then, it says GitHub Services. Do you see, it says Hookshot FE for front end, and then it says GitHub Services. GitHub Services back in the old days, right? You we had a repository that was Ruby code, and you could write any Ruby code in there, and then we would execute that On your behalf As a service, and then that way if an if you were trying to integrate with something, it didn't we would run it for you.Swyx [00:23:57]: And of course no containers ‘causeKyle [00:23:58]: No, ‘cause it wasSwyx [00:23:59]: Well, no containersKyle [00:24:00]: Twenty fourteen. And so there was some isolation obviously, but it was mostly the separations on the server level. That's like an example as long as the very old version of Pages, which ran on its own containerization infrastructure, not on Actions.Swyx [00:24:15]: Which like all-time great product.Kyle [00:24:16]: Pages powers the internet at this point to some degree. Those were places where like clearly there were no like issues like to my knowledge. But it was those things where I'm looking at and going “Okay, well we can't be running arbitrary Ruby code,” like on everyone's behalf. Then containerizing all of that up intoUh into actions now where yeah the containerization, is r-really good. The pinning most folks aren't pinning it the like to a particularSwyx [00:24:48]: ImagesKyle [00:24:48]: Sha, et cetera like their workflows, and so that's a big that's a big place Of pain for folks if they're just doing similar to any dependency management, just V1 or newest or latest, I think. But, that journey from that day to “Okay, we're just going to run all this arbitrary code, and, it'll basically be okay,” to now, no, we have, really good containerization. We have a new, underlying, ag-agent, containerization, service. It's like we're using it under the hood. It's through Azure. They recently announced it. The Azure, Dev Compute, but it's, very fast, very fast compute to be able to, spin up your own cloud agents, or whatnot. We're using it under the hood for some parts of the new,Swyx [00:25:36]: Microsoft Dev Box?Kyle [00:25:37]: No. Dev Compute, yeah.Swyx [00:25:41]: Hmm. Not finding it just yet.Kyle [00:25:44]: Oh, it's, it's in there somewhere.Swyx [00:25:46]: All right. Well, we'll cut that out.Kyle [00:25:47]: Sorry. But with, Dev Compute, you can, run, really fast, spin up really, small VMs really quickly, so you're doing a tool callSwyx [00:25:58]: Same conceptKyle [00:25:58]: Just do it containerize exact-exactly. So we're using that so definitely moving that direction to protect us from every every piece of code that we're ultimately running.Swyx [00:26:07]: look, that grows into the full SDLC? Code hosting was just the start and and then it's grown beyond that. Let's talk about NPM may-maybe ‘cause I think that's also, a very major point in the industry. I do think, it was looking for a home. It was, kind of struggling as a business, right? I don't know, I don't know how you would characterize that whole acquisition and how itNPM, Package Security, and Keeping the Internet RunningKyle [00:26:33]: like when we were talking to the team, I think the big thing for the both of us was to find a way to keep NPM, which was basically powering the internet then and way more so now to some degree running. Keep it going keep continuing to scale. It was having scaling problems, if I recall, back at that time. They were doing some rewrites. ItSwyx [00:27:00]: that's cute compared to now.Kyle [00:27:01]: Well, that's the thing is like when I'm talking to folks now, there's there's so many more underlying uses of NPM than there were back when we had them join in with GitHub. But that was ultimately the goal. It was really okay, we used to have pages. We have, the world's code. Let's make sure that we can keep NPM running well for the world. And we put a bunch of time and investment into fixing some of the underlying backend, changes, some of which we talked about some of the manifest work, et cetera. And then now, really trying to bring the the security posture of NPM up to speed. But, it is a unique challenge in that every move that we make to make it more secure will break a lot of people. And security is paramount. And also, we take it very seriously. We're, the any time that we have a problem with GitHub or we make a change that makes us more secure but hurts, there's, a snow day for developers or a really bad fire that they have to go put out. And so we've, have changed the 2FA policies. We've changed the way the tokens work. When we find tokens that have been exposed or potentially, exposed, we invalidate them, andSwyx [00:28:22]: I love that feature in GitHub. Yeah, it's greatKyle [00:28:23]: That creates issues, but, the but that's the thing is we're trying to push the community, forward without necessarily, doing something that is going to break the contract that's been for 15 years or close to it or some amount of years on NPM.Slop Forks, Vendoring, and the Future of Open Source Supply ChainsSwyx [00:28:43]: I think the— So now we're talking about, open source and publishing. And I think there's something here with what people are calling slop forks, which, I think Malta from Vercel is doing. And, part of me thinks, well, the way to get past any vulnerabilities, we just, let's just get rid of the concept of NPM. And we only publish source code. And anytime you want to import it you have your coding agent look at it and then adapt whatever subset you're going to use into your vendor it. But, the AI vendor it. Is that realistic? I don't know. Is it— Will that solve all our security issues? I don't know.Kyle [00:29:24]: I don't think it'll solve I so Mitchell was just talking Mitchell Hashimoto Was just talking about this today, and I think that I-in some ways, it's all all things, old or new again? Yeah, absolutely vendoring everything. Like I do I do remember twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen.Swyx [00:29:42]: This is Yeah. Let's, we must return toKyle [00:29:43]: That's what is We were vendoring everything. We were having actual discussions around, or at least I remember we were “Should we take this full thing?” “Why is this so big? We only need this one file.” And so I do think there's something true there where having either taking only what you need or the dependencies just getting incredibly small over time, I think will help to some degree, but it's not going to solve the fundamental problem, I don't think, because the vulnerabilities in an agent looking at them, there's time and time again, there's a million different ways in which we can convince an agent that this thing is, secure or not and pull it in. Or we can do static code analysis or runtime testing to say whether the code works or not. That is, I think, the step that needs to continue to be, invested in. The question is just on, how much scope. Should it be this enormous project that I'm pulling down, or should it be this piece? Either most companies are running some amount of security checking on the on the packages that they're bringing in or vendoring. That I think won't change. That's like what advanced security does to some degree, Socket does some degree. Like everyone is doing a piece of that. How we each do that like especially when we're talking to enterprise customers, is just like very different. No there's no one wants one single way to do it. And I think that's always been GitHub's, unique position in the world. I talk a lot to maintainers, I talk a lot to folks about this. It's we're— we rarely start like a process and a practice and like push it onto the community. We usually wait for the sort of like RFC process socially or literally, everyone agreeing, and then we'll cement something in. Because otherwise we'reMaintainers, RFCs, Vouching, and the Social Layer of TrustSwyx [00:31:35]: That fits your role in the ecosystem, yeahKyle [00:31:36]: We're GitHub. Yeah, we don't want to shape the whole thing. We want it to be figured out. But like how do you balance that like sort of Role in the industry to keep everything as secure as is possible and make sure that you're you're not going to be compromised as a human, ‘cause that's usually how it all happens. And Not not create a process or lock us into a flow that you're not going to or like Mitchell's not going to or other open source projects aren't going to like. That's always been a tricky balance for us, and I think that's something that we haven't talked about enough is we're not going to be able to fix everything for everyone in a way that everyone is going to like. So tell, help us, tell us what is working. When Mitchell was talking about, the Upvote, the upSwyx [00:32:22]: I was going to bring up his thing. Yeah.Kyle [00:32:23]: I forget what it Yeah. When he's talking to us, I was chatting with him and talking to him about this and I put it on Twitter and we talked to, also over DM, was “We're going to keep working.” but I think the important thing is I do actually want to hear what isn't working for you. And as, be as specific and clear for your project as is possible. And to every piece of credit over the many years that we've known each other through the industry, he's always done that and I appreciate that ‘cause there are places that we need to fix up, and we hear from him, and we'll fix up just like we do all other kinds of maintainers. But that that process between making those types of improvements and being more secure and like creating, I forget what he calls it's not the proof process, not the claims process. Do what I'm talking about? He has that he his projects have a way for you to kind of like,Swyx [00:33:13]: VouchKyle [00:33:13]: Vouch. Thank you. Yeah. He has like the vouch system for saying, “Hey, you should accept my PRs.” That's beenSwyx [00:33:20]: I just built this into GitHub. I don't know.Kyle [00:33:22]: Well, see, but that's the thing is that you say that and like he and his community really likes this and then I'll go talk to other maintainers and other maintainers, globally, and they're “No, this doesn't work for me.” And that is the tension, but also the kind of beauty of GitHub, depending on which way you look at it is we want to help maintainers, so we create all these tools to let you have more control over how much you take in from AI and PRs. But you can also use this. What You can go use this project, and if it takes off and becomes the kind of mostly standard, then yeah, we probably wouldn't enforce it but we would add it in because that's the flow that we tend to do?Swyx [00:34:02]: I hear a lot of people don't know the history of the pull request. And like like that's how, that's something that GitHub standardized basically.Kyle [00:34:08]: Yeah. It was a very messy process Like beforehand, and now the we have the benefit of it being the process? And now we have to go and Figure out the next best process or what adaptations change, or what does a pull request look like when eighty percent of your PRs are just coming from your agents and not From other devs?Swyx [00:34:31]: Do you like the prompt request idea from Peter?Kyle [00:34:34]: like I think that for each like each idea I think has its merits. I'm not, I'm not avoiding saying anything good or bad, but I feel like I've seen a version of we have that we have entire Thomas' store. Take all the assets of what you've built and put that in. I think that's got great ideas. There's all these various permutations of the PR flow, but I think the reason why there's not a single answer is ultimately we're trying to codify trust. We're trying to say “Okay, if Sean reviews this I'm going to trust it because you're Sean or you're the senior dev or you're the whatever.” And right now, when we are working in a flow where an agent writes code and another agent reviews code and then Kyle goes and looks at it the trust is kind of diffuse. And most of the tools that we're talking about are talking more about verification flows. We have more assets to look at, so I can probably say whether this is a good PR or not. But that still doesn't solve, I think, the human problem of I'm looking at a PR and I want to know if I can trust it. And we're still, we still tend to use human signals for that? Mitchell approving it or Kyle approving it or whatever. And so I think that's, I think that's why most of these options haven't really solved it is because, it's a social problem ultimately. It's a it's a human problem to review it and agree. Or you fully trust the tool and you're imbuing that tool with full trust Which I think in some cases that absolutely exists.AI-Generated PRs, Trust, and the Waymo AnalogySwyx [00:36:08]: And so like in the same way that there will be a tipping point in society when we don't allow humans to drive anymore Because machines are measurably better than Than humans. I'm looking for that tipping point, right? Like Mythos is ridiculously expensive. Someday we'll have Mythos on a desktop. I don't know. Will, does that change the equation?Kyle [00:36:30]: I think it's more I took a Waymo here, and I was on my phone and not looking around at all. There are other, self-driving, vehicles that I would not trust while, staring at the road. And I think that trust is something that isSwyx [00:36:48]: Is this a Zoox thing? What is itKyle [00:36:50]: I think that is both. I think that is both. LikeSwyx [00:36:53]: There's Zoox in this robo taxi. That's it. It'sKyle [00:36:56]: Well, depending on what level Of self-driving. But, my point is sort of that I think part of that is I strongly believe that's, a mixture of verifiable proof. Like how many accidents, how much data, and so on, and the human aspect of how I feel when I'm in this car, what it tells me, et cetera. And so that's why I think some of the like Some of these some of our AI tools tend to, imbue me with more of that feeling of trust, even if the data says this is 100% accurate. I feel like it takes more time for us to go, “Should I trust this or not?” And that's in the soft sense of, startups with high agency, weekend projects, and open source. And then there's enterprises and regulated industries and everything else, and that is an even harder problem to go solve because even when it is fully verified, not only do you have to have trust from the humans on the team, you probably have to have trust from multinational,Swyx [00:37:55]: Oh my GodKyle [00:37:55]: Multi governments around the world and regulating agencies. And so that's where I feel like until we tip over to your point on the sort of like human EQ side of it. I feel okay this feels okay I've been proven enough. Then the ball will start to roll a lot faster, where we'll end up getting to the “Okay, we can trust this,” and feel good about it in the Most difficult of cases.Reputation, Sponsors, Stars, and Bot Activity on GitHubSwyx [00:38:18]: If human trust is the thing that matters, I feel like GitHub as the developer social network could maybe do more there. Like vouchers are one system But, we have star counts, and then we have Contributor rights, and that's it. And I feel like there should be more in that space. I don't know if there's any other design decisions there.Kyle [00:38:37]: I think that one of the places that we don't really expose right now in this sort of way is, some degree of like hard trust and support, which would like for me is like sponsors is a good example of that.Swyx [00:38:49]: Ah.Kyle [00:38:49]: It like costs you something. To prove that I believe in your project and I trust you To some degree or I want to support you at the very least.Swyx [00:38:56]: Solve payments for open source. Why not?Kyle [00:38:58]: I think that I think that like as we keep moving forward, right, there's more and more projects where I'm, adding more and more dollars into sponsors personally because I want to like support them, but I also like know of I've probably never met them in person, but, I know of enough of their work that I want to support them. I think the thing that I don't love about stars or commit counts or anything else is ultimately, even with all of the various, abuse and de-spamming and deduplication work that we do or anti-abuse work that we do, these are all, not active social signals. They're passive ones that are ultimately gamifiable. And you may trust me, but another open source maintainer may not. And on what heuristic should you be, trusting me? That I think, is kind of where some of our thinking is right now. What signal from me is most important to you? You— If you can define that potentially, honestly in an agentic workflow that's what we see some of these open source projects do, where you have GitHub actions, and then you have like an agentic workflow that's calling AI, and you're setting these rules. Like if Kyle has submitted and gotten accepted PRs across any given project and has a social handle tied to his account in GitHub, and that social account's older than a certain amount. Really complex measures that matter to you ‘cause most open source projects have that heuristic built into their heads, if not written down in the contributing guidelines. You could take that and then go apply that and then just say, “Oh, we're not going to accept this PR.” Building something that is, I think, malleable to everyone's needs, is a little bit better, rather than going “Hmm, this account's too young.” Because what happens? The attackers just go and go and create a multitude of accounts, and they wait Until it ages up. Needs to have a certain amount of stars. That's how star inflation happens. Need to have a certain amount of reposSwyx [00:40:46]: Oh my God. YeahKyle [00:40:47]: With PRs. They all just create repos and submit PRs to each other, and then they come in and do something nefarious. And so, it's hard. It's hard to find the measure. So I think we're, we're looking more at how can we provide you tools so you can kind of choose what's best for you. And of course, we'll give you some standards. But the trust vector, gets down to I don't know, some version of like human digital ID like everyone's been talking about. Like how do I prove that it's meSwyx [00:41:13]: Give me your eyeballsKyle [00:41:14]: On the internet. Give me your eyeballs. Exactly.Swyx [00:41:18]: The I got to keep moving on Topics, but obviously I can go all day on this stuff because, I've been involved in GitHub and open source My entire professional career. Stars. Very superficial. Everyone knows it. But I think time to one hundred thousand stars is the fastest I've ever seen. Like people just reached that in I don't know, months. And then like at the same time I don't trust it right? Like how many of these are real or bot or like whatever. I don't know how to ask this but like what can we do about it? LikeKyle [00:41:49]: JustSwyx [00:41:49]: Is stars broken? Is stars fine?Kyle [00:41:51]: I think that there's kind of two, there's like two pieces. Obviously we're constantly like trying to find ways in which like your users are producing spam, which would, I would include like be like only doing star gamification. When we find them, we pluck ‘em out and we,Swyx [00:42:08]: But it's like a Whac-A-MoleKyle [00:42:10]: It's a hundred percent like a Whac-A-MoleSwyx [00:42:11]: There's no wayKyle [00:42:11]: Now, powered by AI to be helpful. But I think more so what I'm seeing is, a lot of the like fastest time to X tends to be because we're now inviting so many more people into like software development on GitHub That like the zeitgeist is just swarming? And it'sSwyx [00:42:32]: It's not just developers anymoreKyle [00:42:33]: And it's not you and I. Like like however you want to say like what a developer is it's not just folks who have been coding for a very long time. It's folks that have maybe started coding or only joined in since the AI era. And nowSwyx [00:42:44]: what's the latest Octoverse number? I know eighty million was my lastRem- member that a number of developers on GitHubKyle [00:42:50]: Oh, we're over 200 million now.Swyx [00:42:53]: Okay. Well, so you see?Kyle [00:42:55]: Like over 200 million developers now.Swyx [00:42:56]: But it's not developers, right? It's, it's people with a GitHub account.What Counts as a Developer in the AI Era?Kyle [00:43:00]: So, so this is, this is the biggest debate that I would say, everyone loves to have at GitHub at this point. From my perspective, right, I think that there's, there's clearly a difference between, professional enterprise developer and then developers. But I think that I think that the idea that we should be I don't know, splitting hairs or segmenting developers in the early era of software development is, not worth our not worth the time. SoSwyx [00:43:29]: When you get into gatekeepingKyle [00:43:31]: 100%Swyx [00:43:31]: What is a developer?Kyle [00:43:31]: 100%. ‘Cause I wasn't a developer when I started writing code? I was going toSwyx [00:43:36]: Oh, no. I made— I cloned a thing, seven years before I learned to code. And then I and then I wrote about my learning to code journey, and people Just called me a fraud ‘cause I had a GitHub account. And I'm “Well, no, I just use GitHub, but I don't know-” “I didn't know what I was doing.”Kyle [00:43:49]: I I remember that. I remember those sets of posts, and like that's, that's b******t. So I fight very clearly on the line of, if you create code, if you have an idea and you create it into some way of, I'm, I'm going to run it and use the app right now, you may still use AI in that moment, but that's okay. At some point you're going to do the next thing. You're going to create a big— You're going to have to learn about this database. You're going to fix a bug, whatever. We're all on some same journey, and those people are also hearing about the great new agent skill package or a new CLI tool or a new whatever. And those projects are going up because you want to be a part of this moment, just like I wanted to be a part of the Ruby community when Ruby was popping off when I started becoming a developer, and now I can just click the star button. And so I think that yes, there's clearly some amount of like spamming and game gamification that we're working against, but I really think we're just seeing this whole new cohort of folks that are moving from technology to technology because they're not working on a 20-year-old software application. They're working on a side app that they built on the weekend for their friends or for their new idea or whatever. And that's how you see these enormous charts going up and to the right with With stars.Swyx [00:44:59]: I think something that's remarkable is the persistence or, that GitHub extends to those folks. Usually when I see platforms go into a new audience, they usually have to, have like a second platform with a different name that wraps the main platform. But somehow GitHub has been able to sort of persist and extend, and it's friendly and whatever? So it's, it's nice.Spark, Low-Code, and Always Showing the CodeKyle [00:45:19]: I that's partially why I think as we've tried to move into I don't know, more like low-code-y things. We so we started working on Spark as like a way to, build an app and run it. I think that the reality is that we anytime we try to, kind of put even a veneer on top of it without when we put a veneer on top of something, we still always show you the code. That's kind of like a tenant. We're never going to, hide the code from you ever, because whatSwyx [00:45:52]: Why would you?Kyle [00:45:52]: That's, yeah, that's the whole point? However, I think that what we learned with things like Spark is that really the value of Spark for most devs is, easy runtime. And you may have a runtime or a host that you're going to use for that or you just build something and run it but, the package of making that even more simple isn't really needed for folks that are trying to build software and not just trying to build, an app, which is, slightly different, a slightly different goal. So I want to get you in, I want to get you comfortable. I think the best thing for me as, someone that did not traditionally come into software dev way back, I want anyone to be able to breach that chasm and not be in the I don't know, I feel like we're, we're still in an era of, STEM. I've got a 12-year-old and an eight-year-old, and it's “We got to get ‘em into STEM,”? Over and over. And I like I do, I do the things that good parents do. I was “Oh, you want to do coding?” “Yes, I want to do coding.” Do coding classes. But now they're just not afraid of doing software. And that's, I think, the thing that's honestly kept me at GitHub for so long. Anyone should be able to go and build a thing, just like I can go change a light switch in my house. I'm not going to go into the breaker box ‘cause I'll probably kill myself? But, I can go change that light switch. Everyone should be able to go and say, “This fricking app doesn't do what I want. I want it to work like this.” And that I think, is what's kind of kept us all connected with GitHub through the years and some and during the easiest of times or in the hard times because of that opportunity of, we're the home for all developers, and we want everyone to be able to have that feeling that we've had of, had an idea, I created it and holy s**t here it is.Swyx [00:47:37]: Here it is. All right, I'm going to try to do more spicy questions.GitHub's Hardest Scaling Moment: Growth, Agents, and UptimeKyle [00:47:42]: Great.Swyx [00:47:42]: Is it an easy time now or a hard time?Kyle [00:47:45]: Oh at GitHub? It's a hard time. Like, it's a hard time and also, I was just with my team and I said, “This is also, the best and most exciting time that I think I can remember at GitHub.” BecauseSwyx [00:47:57]: Best of times, worst of times. It's never oneKyle [00:47:59]: ‘cause we've we were talking about Octoverse reports and, usually we do an Octoverse report once a year, and we look at the numbers, and we say, “Oh my goodness.” I was at Universe in October saying, “This was the fastest year of growth that we've ever had,” right? And now we're doing more in a month than we did in a year last year.Swyx [00:48:20]: You're talking about PRs.Kyle [00:48:21]: Commits.Swyx [00:48:21]: Commits, yeah.Kyle [00:48:22]: PRs. Kind of like you name it by roughly every measure that we're looking at, there's some amount of sort of growth that is much bigger, and that is breaking our system in new ways, not old ways. Like webhooks were always notoriously, unreliable over the years?Swyx [00:48:38]: Whose fault is that?Kyle [00:48:39]: not anymore mine, but for a period of time, I'm sure you could pull up a tweet that was “It was me. I'm sorry.” but, now, that got rewritten at a scale level that is still working and is not having problems today. Now what we're finding isn't just the isn't the-The simple stuff that folks are on the sometimes on Twitter or on the internet are “Hey, why is this like this?” Sure. There's absolutely silly problems that we shouldn't exist. But now we're talking about, unique, novel permission problems that happen only at a scale across all different objects or whatever, that now we have to go rewrite this underlying system. And so it's, there are problems that yeah, caught us off guard, which I think I said. Like the growth is astronomical, but also we're making such material progress in that I'm excited once we're once we've kind of like reimagined the underlying foundation layer, or pieces of it at least, what's going to be possible when it's not just all of us and all the new people that are being developers and all of their agents and all the tools like working together. Because that'll still happen in that in that GitHub tool, that GitHub community. But it's a it's a hard day anytime we can't give you what you're looking for. We have the same problem internally. We operate through github. Com. Of course, we have backups when things go down and whatnot for our own operations but we feel it too. If it's not working it's not working for us, and that's kind of like the promise of dogfooding for GitHub. It's always been true. We're using the same tool you're using. We're not using a super secret version. We and so we also need it to be great for us for our customers of course for open source. And now an exponential growth of agents, Doing it too.Swyx [00:50:32]: I wanted to load for audio listeners who maybe haven't seen your tweets, whatever. So one billion commits in twenty-five. Now it's two hundred and seventy-five million per week on pace for fourteen billion this year, if growth remains linear. Is that still the pace? I don't know. It's been aKyle [00:50:48]: it's, it's speedingSwyx [00:50:50]: Roughly.Kyle [00:50:50]: It's still speeding up.Swyx [00:50:51]: It's, it's April, so yeah.Kyle [00:50:51]: Exactly. This was in April.Swyx [00:50:53]: All right. So basically you have fourteen x growth, right? Year on year on year. And I think that's a scaling issue. I think, I'm going to like try to really steel man this thing. People have experienced fourteen x growth. They haven't had your downtime. And that's like— C-can we go dig into that? Why? Like what's the— what broke? What are we doing to fix it? Like just anything for the community to reassure them.Why GitHub Reliability Is Breaking in New WaysKyle [00:51:18]: so there's a Like I was saying, there's a couple different places that we've seen the growth issues. Some of the growth issues, which is why we're t— I was talking about pushing hard on more CPUs is in actions in particular. More tools, more agents, more PRs mean more builds, more builds mean more CPUs. And so we are expanding through not just our data center, but obviously we were talking about moving to Azure and moving to, adding an additional cloud compute because we simply need more CPUs. Not as much GPUs. We definitely need GPUs too, but now CPUs are becoming a factor.Swyx [00:51:53]: It's very CPU heavy.Kyle [00:51:54]: Underneath the hood when it comes to some of the underlying services, we've been breaking up over the years our database infrastructure, so that way we have, more cognitive separation between our the various services. The place that we continue to have pain is in, permissioning. And so right now m-many of our permissioning layers sit into a database that we like internally call MySQL One, and old Hubbers will know what I'm talking about. And so we've been pulling things out of MySQL One for many years, because like and we use we use Vitess and we use other technologies to shard and we do it as one bigSwyx [00:52:31]: Famous thing, PlanetScale was born from this andKyle [00:52:32]: A hundred percent. Sam Old Hubber and friend. And so finding these opportunities to like break this out and then do that globally. The other thing that I think is interesting and both a unique opportunity and tricky is we also run everything I just talked about in a black box container with GitHub Enterprise Server for people that work on-prem. So we take everything I just said, and we also do it on-prem, and we also do all of that and we do it in a data residence setup for customers that need to have their data in a single location. Each of these has the unique characteristic around how we're sort of storing that data in MySQL or in a permissioning setup. That's where some of these outages have oc-occurred, where you're seeing it more like across the board rather than just like the one pieceSwyx [00:53:17]: Filling the databaseKyle [00:53:17]: Isn't quite working. Exactly. And so part of it is that. I think there's been some other places where agents are much more or more projects appear to be moving towards monorepo versus we were going the other direction for many years in the industry. Repos were smaller, but there were more of them, and now we're seeing the opposite. Repos are bigger, and there's, not fewer of them per se ‘cause there's new growth, but, we're just seeing many more big repos. Big repos, big monorepos have always had, a unique performance problem. Because each one, is slightly different if, particularly if the underlying blobs are incredibly big Inside the repos. And so we've done a ton of work that you pro— like most people haven't probably experienced, unless you're in this case of the monorepo. But that Git, infrastructure layer improvement does help the overall, system because, many of the improvements that make monorepos work better make all repo infrastructure work better. And so, I could kind of keep going down the line where it's another thing where we're moving out of, We're changing how we do j I'll just say job queuing for lack of a better, explanation changing the underlying technologies there.Swyx [00:54:32]: I spent two years being a job queuing guy, so.Kyle [00:54:34]: And so it's kind of a little bit of a little bit of piece by piece, and it's mostly because as we were— as it was built, we built everything in a way that assumed, I guess in some ways that the size of the pipe of work was going to remain the same. There's just going to be more people coming through each of those pipes. But instead now in places whereA git push was, generally a certain size for example, is now, no longer true.Swyx [00:55:03]: Oh, yeah.Kyle [00:55:03]: OrSwyx [00:55:05]: I push a thousandKyle [00:55:06]: On the average. 100%Swyx [00:55:06]: A thousand line commits like dailyKyle [00:55:07]: Same thing with PRs. Like PRs same thing. And like we've talked about optimizing that and making changes where, and there were technology choices that did not work there? And it got slow, and it didn't It was not fast. It did not do what the users wanted. And so we've been reeling that all out and going “Okay, that's just not right. Let's stop putting good money after bad and do it the do it the right way or the right way now.” So there's It's a it's a lot of things, not quite when I've experienced scale at GitHub historically, it's almost always two options that we've used. We go vertical scaling, particularly with databases, right? And we go horizontal scaling. Oh, we just have more people using this service. Great. We're going to add more servers, and we rack them in our data center, or we use it in a cloud. And now we're sort of in a like diagonal, where like vertical doesn't really work anymore. Horizontal isn't work either because we're all We all have some CPU or GPU constraints in the world now, and now we have to go in and like crack open services that have been running for 10 or 15 years and go, “Okay, the rules of this service have legitimately changed, and now we have to rewrite them.” None of this is an excuse. This is like we're We have to do the work. We have to make it better.Swyx [00:56:22]: actually as an infra guy, I'm “This is like one of the most fascinating scaling challenges I've ever seen.”Kyle [00:56:26]: That's that's, that's the thing that's the thing that it's hard for Like when we weren't talking about it publicly, and I was like I came out, and I was “Hey, I just want to explain what's going on.” Part of it comes from a very old GitHub ethos, which is it's our it's our uptime. It's down. W What I know you're a developer, so you're, you're inclined to want to understand more what's going on. But at the same time us going “Hey, this service didn't, perform the way we expected, and now we have to go change it,” we weren't We're not trying to hide anything from you i
Scott Hanselman talks with Omar Shorbaji from the Anyscale engineering team about how Anyscale on Azure scales Python AI workloads from a single notebook to thousands of CPUs and GPUs. Built on Ray, the most widely adopted AI compute engine, Anyscale gives you a unified runtime to build, train, and serve, running directly on Azure Kubernetes Service without the complexity of managing Kubernetes. See a live demo that fine-tunes a vision-language-action robotics policy, with the metrics you need to push GPU utilization higher. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:52 - Ray and the Anyscale platform 03:11 - Start of demo: Workspaces 04:38 - Running a job and viewing utilization metrics 05:24 - Choosing the right scale 06:53 - Abstracting Kubernetes on AKS 08:53 - Wrap up and where to learn more Recommended resources Learn Docs Anyscale on Azure Connect Scott Hanselman | Twitter/X: @SHanselman Anyscale | Twitter/X: @anyscalecompute Azure Friday | Twitter/X: @AzureFriday Azure | Twitter/X: @Azure
Qumulo and Cisco Launch Bridge-to-Cloud Architecture to Help Enterprises Beat the Flash Crunch at Cisco Live 2026 By Doug Green “Capacity extends to the cloud instantly. Users and applications never know that the systems have been extended into the cloud.” At Cisco Live 2026, Doug Green spoke with Brandon Whitelaw of Qumulo about the company's new Bridge-to-Cloud architecture with Cisco, a solution designed to help enterprises respond to one of the most urgent infrastructure challenges of the AI era: fast-growing data workloads, constrained flash supply, longer hardware lead times and rising demand for high-performance storage. Qumulo describes itself as an accelerated data company. In the podcast, Whitelaw explains that Qumulo helps organizations store and manage mission-critical file and object data across data centers, edge environments and the major public clouds. The goal is to unify those datasets into a consistent, AI-enabled data fabric that can support both today's high-performance applications and tomorrow's AI pipelines. Qumulo's customers include autonomous driving companies, media and entertainment organizations, special effects shops, sports broadcasters, life sciences organizations, genomic research teams, hospitals, public sector agencies and government entities. The common thread is data: large, high-capacity, high-performance datasets that must be available, protected and ready for use. The Cisco announcement focuses on Cloud Native Qumulo Enterprise combined with Cisco Unified Computing System through Qumulo's Cloud Data Fabric. The solution is designed to let enterprises extend file workloads from on-premises Cisco UCS infrastructure into the cloud without forcing a disruptive migration, application refactoring or a rebuild of existing workflows. For enterprise IT teams, the problem is practical. AI infrastructure demand is reshaping the market for memory and NVMe systems, creating pressure on traditional capacity planning. Instead of waiting months for new hardware or overprovisioning all-flash systems, Qumulo and Cisco are offering a bridge: keep trusted on-premises infrastructure in place while extending selected workloads into the cloud as needed. Whitelaw says the architecture gives enterprises a way to free up on-premises infrastructure for the most critical applications, while using cloud capacity to handle growth, burst demand and AI-readiness. The result is a hybrid model that is not simply about cloud migration. It is about operational flexibility. The solution also positions enterprise data for AI and analytics. Qumulo says CNQ Enterprise includes Cloud Data Fabric and NeuralProtect and can run on Cisco UCS on-premises as well as across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The architecture is intended to make enterprise datasets available for AI pipelines into services such as Microsoft AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI. For Cisco partners, service providers and enterprise IT teams, the message from the podcast is clear: hybrid cloud is becoming a pressure-release valve for data infrastructure. The Bridge-to-Cloud model offers a way to gain capacity relief, preserve application continuity, support elastic scale and prepare data for AI without forcing customers into a disruptive replatforming project. Qumulo CNQ Enterprise is available now for deployment on Cisco UCS on-premises infrastructure and across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and OCI. It is also available through Cisco for simplified enterprise procurement. Qumulo is exhibiting at booth 4018 at Cisco Live 2026 in Las Vegas. Learn more at: https://qumulo.com/product/cisco/
What does it actually take to partner with Microsoft, Google, or Amazon — and turn that relationship into real revenue? In this episode, Jeff Mains sits down with Chaitra Vedullapalli, co-founder of Women in Cloud and pioneer of the Co-Launch 4P Framework. Chaitra spent nearly 27 years inside corporate giants like Oracle and Microsoft before stepping out to build a global economic access movement that has unlocked over $600 million for founders across 120 countries.She breaks down exactly why most SaaS founders get ignored by hyperscalers (hint: it's a mindset problem), how to align your go-to-market to their priorities instead of your own, and the practical framework she uses to drive visibility, demand, and partnerships at scale. You'll also learn the critical difference between a gateway offer and a core revenue offer — and why confusing the two is silently killing your pipeline.If you're building a SaaS or AI product and want to stop feeling invisible to enterprise giants, this episode is your roadmap.Key Takeaways4:17 — **The brutal truth about hyperscaler ecosystems.** Billions in multi-year cloud commitments are happening inside the Big Three, and most founders don't even know these opportunities exist. Hyperscalers aren't waiting for you — they're waiting for founders who want to co-launch with them.5:24 — **Why founders get ignored.** Founders enter hyperscaler ecosystems with a founder-led, "me-first" sales mindset — but hyperscalers want partners who can attract customers, build unique IP on their platforms, and co-own go-to-market.8:22 — **Origin of Women in Cloud.** Written on a napkin with a goal to democratize $1 billion in economic access, Women in Cloud has grown into a 150,000-member distribution engine across 120 countries, with $600M already unlocked.19:14 — **What being "in the hyperscaler channel" actually looks like.** It's not just listing your product on a marketplace. True channel presence means co-presenting at events, appearing in joint press releases, getting amplified through their marketing, and executing inside *their* rhythm — not yours.22:29 — **The Co-Launch 4P Framework explained.** Product offer, Promotion, Publicity, and Partnership — and how the EmpowerHer 50 campaign used all four to generate 10 million impressions and unlock $1M in AI scholarships through Microsoft.27:21 — **How to access the hyperscaler calendar.** Join their ISV or founder partner program — the full calendar of AI tours, product launches, and summits is available. Use it to architect your campaign around their priorities, not yours.28:07 — **Gateway offer vs. core offer.** Every founder needs two offers: a gateway offer (free, educational, easy to join — builds visibility and trust) and a core revenue offer (paid transformation — what hyperscalers ultimately care about).33:32 — **How leadership evolves from corporate to founder.** In corporate, someone sets the paradigm shift for you. As a founder, you *are* the paradigm shift. Chaitra shares how she learned to set direction, communicate vision, and lead through ambiguity.37:03 — **Why you have more leverage than you think.** You're not a small fish asking a favor. Your SaaS product drives cloud consumption revenue for hyperscalers. You bring them customers, solutions for their field sellers, and ecosystem diversity — all at once.41:55 — **The one thing to do today.** Learn the language before you knock the door. Replace "sponsorship ask" with "co-investment." Say co-build, co-sell, co-launch — and build something so indispensable they come to *you*.Tweetable Quotes"Hyperscalers are not waiting for founders. They are waiting for founders who want to co-launch their go-to-market with them." — Chaitra Vedullapalli"Being in the hyperscaler channel is not a status. It's an activity. It requires you showing up, staying aligned, and executing inside their rhythm — not your rhythm." — Chaitra Vedullapalli"You don't want to ask them to dance. You have to build something worth dancing with — and make it impossible for them to refuse." — Chaitra Vedullapalli"Stop thinking of yourself as a small fish asking a big fish to help. You are a revenue opportunity, a solution asset, and an ecosystem story — all at once." — Chaitra Vedullapalli"Before you try to dance with the giant, learn the steps they already know." — Chaitra Vedullapalli"If you don't have the 'co' in front of your language, you usually won't survive in the hyperscaler ecosystem." — Chaitra Vedullapalli"Community is underrated — but even in community, you need micro cohorts doing the same thing together." — Chaitra VedullapalliSaaS Leadership Lessons1. Shift from "Me" to "We" — or Stay Invisible Most founders enter hyperscaler ecosystems with a solo founder mindset. Hyperscalers require a "we" mindset: collaboration with their teams, alignment to their goals, and co-ownership of outcomes. The shift isn't optional — it's the price of entry.2. You Have More Leverage Than You Think Your SaaS product drives cloud consumption revenue for Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Your vertical solution fills gaps their field sellers can't. You're not asking for a favor — you're bringing them customers, solutions, and ecosystem narrative. Negotiate accordingly.3. Every Go-to-Market Needs Two Offers Build a gateway offer (free, educational, easy to join) that creates demand and visibility, and a separate core revenue offer (paid transformation) that closes. Confusing the two — or having only one — will stall your pipeline before it starts.4. Execute Inside Their Rhythm, Not Yours Join the partner program. Study the hyperscaler's quarterly calendar. Align your campaign architecture to their AI tours, announcements, and field priorities. The companies that win aren't shouting louder — they're speaking through the megaphones the hyperscalers already control.5. Use the ODA Loop When Things Break Down Observe what's actually happening in the market. Orient your team to the new reality. Decide with clarity. Act with precision. When geopolitical shifts, funding droughts, or market pivots hit, this framework prevents panic and keeps momentum.6. Founders Must Set the Paradigm Shift In corporate, leadership defines the vision for you. As a founder, you are the vision. Developing the ability to articulate a compelling paradigm shift — and galvanize collective action around it — is the single most critical leadership skill to build.Guest Resourcescvedulla@womenincloud.comhttps://womenincloud.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/chaitrav/Episode SponsorThe Futureproof Series - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfkXKUPZ5xuOqMPR7_gzGybncTtavyR1NThe Captain's KeysSmall Fish, Big Pond – https://smallfishbigpond.com/ Use the promo code ‘SaaSFuel'Champion Leadership Group – https://championleadership.com/SaaS Fuel ResourcesWebsite - https://championleadership.com/Jeff Mains on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffkmains/Twitter - https://twitter.com/jeffkmainsFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/thesaasguy/Instagram - https://instagram.com/jeffkmains
Lots of people move to the cloud; it's common. In fact, it's very common to hear customers who are being asked to migrate their workloads to a cloud vendor for a variety of reasons. You might not agree, but often there is some reason to move to the cloud. Sometimes it's even moving from one cloud to another, just because one of the big three (AWS, Azure, GCP) seems more attractive this year than the one from last year. When you move, do you size your system for the peak? 80% of the peak? Perhaps there is another goal for which you design. Do you worry about ever being under-provisioned and letting customers have a slower system? Or do you ensure you never hit the peak, which increases costs? Read the rest of Over or Under Provisioned
In this episode, Scott Becker discusses Microsoft's recent rebound, highlighting its recovery from a steep decline, strong AI and Azure performance, and the continued leadership of CEO Satya Nadella.
Frank Lesniak joins Andrew Pla for a wide-ranging conversation that covers Frank's newly minted Microsoft MVP status, his journey through PowerShell, and what it looks like to build a real presence in the tech community. Frank talks through the pipeline struggles that tripped him up early on, how his VB Script and object-oriented background made the shift to PowerShell's object model feel disorienting, and how AI has quietly changed the way he approaches scripting today. The conversation takes a thoughtful turn as Andrew and Frank dig into impostor syndrome, the value of conference speaking, and how showing up consistently in the community compounds into a career. Frank also shares an update on DuPage Animal Friends, the nonprofit he serves, which supports one of the country's highest-performing open-admission animal shelters. Key Takeaways: The PowerShell pipeline is one of the most commonly cited stumbling blocks for newcomers, especially those coming from text-based scripting backgrounds. Learning to visualize what your objects look like at each stage of the pipeline, using tools like Get-Member, is a skill that pays dividends long term. Showing up at conferences and user groups, even when you feel underprepared, is how you build the reps that eventually make it feel natural. Frank's consulting background gave him a head start on presentation skills, and he's clear that no one is born polished. Community involvement and career growth are more connected than they might look from the outside. Engaging with people on GitHub, at events, and through open source creates a feedback loop that builds confidence and opens doors. Guest Bio: Frank Lesniak returns to The PowerShell Podcast, this time as a Microsoft MVP (Microsoft Azure, PowerShell). Frank is a Sr. Cybersecurity & Enterprise Technology Architect at West Monroe, where PowerShell runs through client work on corporate M&A: carve-outs, tenant-to-tenant migrations, identity consolidation, endpoint moves, and security posture improvement across Microsoft 365, Azure, Entra ID, Active Directory, Intune, Defender, and Windows. Beyond consulting, Frank speaks at technical conferences, mentors first-time speakers, and publishes open-source PowerShell standards and tooling, including PSStyleGuide, GloryRole, and PSConnMon. His public work threads least-privilege identity, cloud role mining, cross-platform observability, and high-quality AI-assisted development through standards, automated tests, and automated code quality reviews. Connect with Frank: https://linktr.ee/franklesniak Connect with Andrew: https://andrewpla.tech/links PSConnMon - PowerShell Network Monitoring - https://github.com/franklesniak/PSConnMon/ GloryRole - Automating Least-Privlege Azure and Entra ID Directory Roles - https://gloryrole.com PowerShell Style Guide - https://github.com/franklesniak/PSStyleGuide PowerShell Style Guide + Coding Agents Lightning Talk - https://github.com/devops-collective-inc/pshsummit26/tree/main/PowerShellStyleGuideForCodingAgentsAndHumans-Lesniak Coding Agent Accelerator Template Repo (Coming Soon!) - https://github.com/franklesniak/copilot-repo-template ProStateKit - the DSC v3-Intune Starter Kit - https://github.com/franklesniak/ProStateKit ProStateKit Promotional Commercial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA5vMH522F0 macOSLab - Automating Legit macOS VMs - https://github.com/franklesniak/macOSLab DuPage Animal Friends - https://www.dupageanimalfriends.org/ PDQ Discord: https://discord.gg/pdq The PowerShell Podcast: https://www.pdq.com/resources/the-powershell-podcast/ Previous episodes with Frank Lesniak: https://powershellpodcast.podbean.com/?s=Frank+Lesniak The PowerShell Podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Eg-uEGaurmY
In this Mentor Moment, Bobby Kerr - former Dragon and former CEO of Insomnia Coffee - shares the strategic lessons that helped scale Insomnia from a small coffee business into a recognised national brand. Bobby breaks down why underfunding was one of his biggest early mistakes, how letting go of ego helped him choose the right brand name and structure, and why partnerships with companies like Spar, Easons, Penneys, and Meadows & Byrne became key routes to growth. This is a practical lesson in playing the long game, building multiple revenue streams, and making the kind of strategic decisions that give a business more ways to survive and scale. Listen back to the full conversation in Episode 439 of The Entrepreneur Experiment - and subscribe/follow so you don't miss the next Mentor Moment. *Our Sponsors * Nostra: https://bit.ly/nostra26 Azure: https://bit.ly/azure26 Follow The Entrepreneur Experiment: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/entrepreneurexperiment/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@entrepreneurexperiment
This episode covers a CISA contractor's accidental exposure of AWS GovCloud credentials and internal system details on GitHub, the FBI's efforts to patch vulnerable routers, and a critical NGINX vulnerability with public proof-of-concept code. The team also discusses Microsoft's handling of a disputed Azure Backup security finding, the challenges of vulnerability disclosure and CVE assignment, and GitHub's ban of security researcher Nightmare Eclipse following the publication of unpatched Windows vulnerability research.Join us LIVE on Mondays, 4:30pm EST.A weekly Podcast with BHIS and Friends. We discuss notable Infosec, and infosec-adjacent news stories gathered by our community news team.https://www.youtube.com/@BlackHillsInformationSecurityChat with us on Discord! - https://discord.gg/bhis
Hosts Ned and Kyler compare notes on everything they've been doing with AI, including the successes they’ve enjoyed and headaches they've suffered building and implementing AI agents. They talk about how AI has sped up their workflows, how managing multiple AI agents is akin to raising toddlers, the necessity of using deterministic scripts for increased... Read more »