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now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey, welcome back to dot
net rocks. I'm Carl Franklin, Amergard Campbell, and you probably know who
we are if you've been listening to the show as long as we've been making
them. Hey, if it's your first one, welcome, Yeah, where
you've been? We've done eighteen hundred and something of it? Where Were you?
Episode eighteen hundred and eighty nine? Can you believe it? There you
go? And I love listening to podcasts that started like in the two thousands
and brag about how long they've been doing podcast a. Yeah, we don't
do that, right, we don't. We really don't. We just go
to work and talk to people. But we were talking the other day about
it. I think we may be the longest continuous running podcast in the world.
Now we may be. Yeah, yeah, it might be true.
Well that's uh yeah, I know we got that going for us. Or
if you're in Mexico, it's fifty five pisos. Don't rub it in anymore
possibly than you possibly can. My friend Richard's in Mexico. Yep, two
weeks he's making us feel cold. Yeah, you guys are having weather.
Although weather in Vancouver. I don't want to just talk about the weather.
But man, yesterday was the first day in Connecticut here where we could actually
go out on the back deck at night. It was sixty two degrees fahrenheit.
Oh good, so broke. That's good. I'm glad. Yeah,
he had snow that turned the rain in Vancouver and we're like, hah,
well, Magnus Martinsen is here. We're going to talk to him in a
minit and Magnus, if you want to jump in on this story that I
have for better know framework feel free. Let's roll the crazy music. A
man, what do you got? Okay? So you know, I do
this show called Security this week with Patrick Hines and Duane Flotten, So I'm
aware. I'm more aware now of the stories that come across my desk about
security, and AI is one of them. Because everybody's worried about AI taking
over the world, of course. So this is an article from PC magazine
and the headline is new malware worm can poison chat, GPT and Gemini powered
assistants. Generative AI models aren't immune to viruses. A new worm can target
AI powered assistance and break some of Gemini and chat GPT security features. Research
reveals, well, they're pointing to an article in Wired and this this is
a really irresponsible article. I don't know what you thought, Richard when you're
written, No, that's exactly what I thought. And I was going to
be annoyed with you for even bringing it up. But if you want to
come at the fact that there's some irresponsible reporting coming on, I'm glad,
yeah, because this is pretty irresponsible at reporting. So the article from Wired
is here, come the AI worms. Security researchers created an AI worm in
a test environment and that can automatically spread between generative AI agents, potentially stealing
data and sending spam emails along the way. And okay, this is a
lab experiment right in a controlled environment. And PC magazine is like, hey,
guess what you're don't use chut, GPT and Gemini because you get this
worm and you're screwed. Yeah it's no worm, and yeah there is and
Wired is a little more reasoned about that. And actually the piece underneath this,
which is you know, from a set of researchers, is better still
because right, really what they're talking about is we do need to be prepared,
Sure we do. Yeah, I mean the most important part to me
was the fact that it spanned open Ai and Gemini and Lama. Yeah,
because that's Facebook, because it shows this is inherent to lllm's right, nothing
to do with any particular model, right, And basically, you know,
they they gave it a what do they do? They gave it a prompt
that allowed it to they've been basically jail broke it, right, And well,
yeahs and jail break is one thing, but the bigger thing here was
the recursion engine to have it generate an output that then it then needs to
immediately respond to. Yeah, you know, the best answer I have to
that is don't do that. Don't do that exactly. So it's it's like
fud right, it's a fun machine. So if you if you're on your
chat rept channel and you've logged in and you're authenticated and you're having a nice
little conversation with chat chept. You don't have to worry about any of this,
right, Yeah, No, I think they're thinking about a future where,
you know, the thing they also promise us with with the Amazon device
which I won't see the name of, just enough ruin people's day, where
you're supposed to be done with that joke. Yes, automatically, you know,
just order me more laundry soap. Now you're imagining this agent doing that,
and could that if it has full authority to go make the order and
complete the sale, you have a risk of exploitation. That's true, whether
it's an LM or in there or not. Yeah, they And it comes
back to our least privilege argument that we've been having about computing ever since the
dawn of computers. Well, and having some gates around Okay, if you're
going to write emails on my behalf, should I look at each one of
them before they send? Or should rules of what you can send? Like,
you know, you could set some parameters around that, but recursively generating
code that then sends email. Yeah, all right, it's good that I
can fix that. That's ten minutes. There we go. Yep, don't
do that's all right. Well I wanted to. I wanted to bring that
up. Agreement on this one. Yeah, we are in violent agreement and
it's a good laugh. But you know, sometimes we need to put these
things in context. And you know that's why you listen. And I want
to believe the Cornell guys were working in faith. It's like, hey,
is there an exploit risk here just to help lead folks into we should deal
with this before it becomes a problem. But I'm on all the rest.
Indeed, Well, I don't know, magnety, have anything you want to
add to that. I mean, mister cloud guy. I was just listening
to this and we've heard this time and again that that it seems like sometimes
the the the journalist or whatever we should call this person is so desperate to
do something, but they're they're going to write just anything, whether it's you
know, remotely true or not, and and they, like you said,
it's completely irresponsible and that I loathe it. It's not it's not journalism.
I don't know what that is. Yeah, and if anybody would like cite
this article on a podcast or something, and then nobody would do that,
you know, put that in the links. Who would do that? That's
irresponsible, that's irresponsible clickbait. Just it reprehensible. All right, Well that's
the fun, fun way to start the show today. Who's talking to us?
Richard? Hey, I grabbed a comment off of show eighteen eighty one,
so not that long ago. That's the one we did about dot net
Aspire with David Fowler. Yeah, and the comment comes from codeputier otherwise known
as Richard Rukima, one of our longtime listener and occasional guests. He's done,
he lives in both worlds, and he said, I've enjoyed dot net
rocks for over a decade. Yeah, like it's longer than that. I
found emails from you from the aughts, my friend. Oh yeah. I
can't put my finger on it, but this show really felt like this show
is of old such great ton in the conversation with an internal resize that we
all need so desperately, Like David hearing his perspective on Aspire was very inspirational
as well as educational. And to be clear, this is not a diss
of previous content, but this episode is a gold standard on wireless. Oh
cool, And I was thinking about it of a. I know, we're
talking to the guy who invented the technology. I mean, admittedly, David
had a team around him and he's still trying to figure out what he's made.
You know. I saw him at NBC Sydney and they were workshopping it
and literally still trying to figure out how to describe it. So, you
know, one of the things I like about that particular show is we were
trying to understand what he was talking about, and he was trying to understand
what he was doing. So there's this real wrestling match about I know you
got something here, David, I just don't know how to describe it.
Yeah. I thought it was a very fun show, definitely. And Richard,
you know you already have a copy of Music co b. I goodest
noticed about every other thing, but thank you so much for your comment,
And if you'd like a copy of Music Coobe, I read a comment on
the website at dot na Rocks dot com or on the facebooks. We publish
every show there, and if you comment there and I read on the show,
we'll send you a copy of Music COBA. And you can follow us
on Twitter or x or whatever the heck you want to call it, but
all the cool kids are hanging out. I'm Masterdon, so follow us there.
I'm at Carl Franklin at tech hub dot social, and I'm Rich Campbell
at McDon social. And you can find all the other ways. You can
reach me at Carl Franklin dot com. But yeah, send us a two
Rudy too too. Okay, let's bring on Magnus. I'm going to formally
introduce him with his latest bio. Magnus Martinsen is an entrepreneur, a Microsoft
Most Valuable Professional for Azure since the start of the cloud, and a Microsoft
Regional Director. He's a consultant, architect, product development lead, and he
runs his own company, Loftysoft. As an international speaker, Magnus travels the
world to teach, network, learn and experience. His passions include connecting with
audiences and organizing conferences such as Cloudburst and Global Azure. He is, of
course, also very much into good food, wine and great company. Except
for that crap that he tried to make us drink at Ted Neward's party,
I would not recommend taking that tomping. That was my editorial. Tompy all
is mind sharing. So when you see him at a conference, come over
and say hi, welcome back, Magnus. Well, thank you, thank
you very much. Good good of you to have me. What the hell
was that thing that you gave us at Ted Newart's party back in the day.
Uh, it's it's well, it's based on the wormwood, so it's
it's very very bitter and straight. It was the most vile stuff I've ever
It tasted like bile because I've tasted that coming up out of my liver before
when I was a drunken teenager say some fairly horrible things. I remember a
particular tin of fish, but that's that's a different thing. Yeah, you
don't inside, you'll clear a neighborhood. But here's the thing. It was
just like, try this. All the real men in Sweden drink this.
It's good for you, absolutely, and we do. And we do this
when when they when they are hunting in the in the lodge somewhere and they
put this this twig of the wormwood in the bottle and then leave it there.
So like the first the first three shots are pretty okay, but the
bottom line is like whoa da the states I think you got? I think
you got from the top of a bottle car and you're just so, You're
just a week So I guess I wasn't meant for the manliness of the Swedish
liquor clouds. What can I tell you? Yeah? So what are you
thinking about these days? Magnus? Oh? Wow, I'm thinking about a
lot of things. Top of mind in the community world is global Azure of
course is coming up again. But overall I'm working and I'm working with with
enterprises of various various kinds. So really helping large organizations fully adopt the cloud
is a huge journey for for many of them. The biggest challenge is that
they don't have enough experienced people on team on on on in their teams,
so they're kind of struggling to really really fully get you get all of those
promises that we hear about the cloud. You know, it's pay per use,
it's automation, it's agile, it's quick, and it's all those things.
But they can't really reach it because it's hard when you don't have enough
folks that can help you along the way. So that's what I do.
I help them make asure better. How much of this is a dev problem
versus an assisted problem? Wow, dude, there is a dev problem in
there, but there is a huge governance problem in there because you just don't
know what it is that you're supposed to do. You can't even ask the
questions. So that's a challenge, right. So I work with teams of
people, scores of people who have twenty thirty years of experience. They're really
good engineers of all kinds, and they're really good at what they do,
except they don't have mileage in the cloud, so they don't know which questions
to ask. I mean, if somebody tells you have twenty years of experience
in the cloud, they're lying. Not in the cloud. No, not
in the cloud, they are it professionals. Yeah. To illustrate not knowing
what to do, I'm going to in a new acronym FO D A R
FODD are fear of deleting Azure resources because you know you have hundreds and hundreds
of resources. You just create one website you have You've created resources you may
not even know about, and you come back later and you're like, hmm,
what's this? Should I delete it? That is an excellent, excellent
acronym. It's costing me a lot of money. We should you should?
You should trademark, that acronym. It's it's amazing, that's exactly. That's
exactly a huge problem with many of my customers is that they don't know.
And so they a pretty recent study indicated by you know, self engaging.
They asked people who consume another cloud roughly how much how much of your cloud
spend would you say is waste? And the self estimation was at about a
third. So you got, you gotta, you got, you got a
million dollar you know. Ea with Microsoft three hundred and thirty three thousand,
it's just burning on the lawn. And that's exactly it, Carl, that
they don't know exactly what they have, and they do not use the automation,
and they do not use the you know, the things that you should
the things that most most people know that you should be doing, except they're
not doing it. And when they're not, yeah, I've found you know,
oh look look at this. I found this this cluster of vms here.
What are you using that for? Oh? Those five vms? Oh
I don't know, Wow, do we use them? I didn't. I
didn't. I didn't even know. I didn't even know three months ago,
right, So that's like, you know, ten months of compute just burning
for not real Have you ever you should? You could write a whole you
could do a whole class on understanding and itemized Azure bill. Have you ever
looked at one of these things? Yeah, by the way, this week
because they keep changing the frickin thing too. Yeah, fair enough. The
point is that you never should get to that position in the first place,
so you should do it right. And and and companies again, they're coming
from a world of vms and and let's order. Order a VM means by
hardware, and that's where they're coming from. And there's nothing wrong with that,
except that's not what you're supposed to be doing in the cloud. And
so they transposed that thing to the cloud and it just doesn't work. I
had a nerving experience in Azure the other day. I went to start a
VM that I use for, you know, video recording, and it said,
can't start this VM because there aren't enough resources in this region to support
it. And I'm thinking, aren't enough resources? You're Azure. You've got
you know, underwater data centers all over the world or whatever you have,
you know, and you can't change it. So I had to just wait.
Well, the cloud is infinite for infinite for you, but it's not
infinite for Microsoft. Sure, I'm throwing the sissemin hat on this thing because
I do this conversation on run as all the time. And one of the
essential issues has been, and this is you know, big in the pandemic,
was we did this fast migration to the cloud. And when you architect
an app on pre or architect the resources for an app on prem you architecture
for peak. Right, if the most we're ever going to consume, that's
what I'll buy, even though it'll represent one percent of the utilization. But
that one percent is probably the most profitable point. I don't want it out.
And if you architect that way and throw it into Azure, you're spending
a ton of money on wasted resources. Yeah, absolutely right, and that's
a terrible way to do it. So the migration wizards that Microsoft have been
working on for quite some time now, they're getting better and better, more
and more sophisticated. They actually doing a fair job. So long as you
deploy a bunch of agents inside of your network. First, you let them
be there for a while and listen to the traffic and see what's what,
and then you process that data and then you can write size as they call
it when you migrate to the cloud, and sayf for you, I want
to use this size of thing instead in the cloud because that just makes more
sense. And then you just right sizing is a way of making sure that
you just don't move it like one to one on to the cloud and then
you know, waste a lot of money. And I love that idea that
hey, you know, we don't know any secrets here, we need to
watch you. Yeah, so load up these tools and let them run.
And again, if you're a dev probably listening to this show, you have
to ask it, hey, let's deploy these agents into the network, which
is not going to make that person happy, Like true, that's going to
be a battle, but the alternative is worse. Arguably, we had to
do a security review and things like that before that was allowed in the network
of a large customer that a public sector again that I'm working with right now.
And so after having done all of that, all the due diligence and
figured out that this is not going to steal our information or anything, then
then that was allowed. And the the we're migrating in the size of like
eight nine hundred VMS is the first migration step. Just moved move the things
first, and that's not the biggest thing we've ever seen, but it's it's
sizable for sure, and move that to the cloud to begin with. And
that's kind of when the work starts because the the Migration Wizard is basically automation.
So now we have moved. Now, we have moved them. Now
we have lots of service running in the cloud. Now is where the work
actually begins to to migrate some of that those workloads off the machines that they're
running on. They could be like just hey, we're running on a we're
running a sequel server on a VM. Well, dude, why you could
use database database service same thing except no VM that do you know? The
problems aren't always our fault, right one of the but you know, usually
there's something that we can do to remedy the situation. But one of the
problems that I had recently was that Microsoft was changing the IP address of a
web app on me without telling me they were going to do that. Had
no notification except that, you know, somebody tweeted me and said, hey,
this site's down. And when you go and look oh that IP address,
the A record is different, and so yeah, yeah, I guess
I have to fix it in DNS. I wrote a little I wrote a
little PowerShell app. I know that I can fix that in another way.
But in the meantime, I have this PowerShell app that I wrote that runs
against dot net rocks and other websites that I have and tests for content that
I know is going to be there. Yeah. So that's running once an
hour and just in a script on my machine. Yeah, well that works.
It's emails the way if dot rocks is down. Yeah, that's one
way. I'm sure there are other ways, but you know, you use
the tools that you know before you dive into the tools that you don't know.
Yeah. Well, nowadays we have enterprises and things that are ready to
move to the cloud. Again. It's it's weird for someone like me who
has been in the cloud since the very beginning. Means I have well,
not the twenty years of experience that's going to be hard, but at least
the plug ten plus now right, and now I'm talking to companies that have
never touched it because you know, reasons, because compliancy, because of you
know, it's public sector and it's been difficult and we haven't been able to
move right and now they're getting there and they're moving into this huge enterprise grade
platform which has everything and everything extra. When we started using Windows Azure in
the beginning as it was called Windows, it's called Windows in the beginning,
right, it had like five services. That was that was it. That
was that was all you could do. No VM, no VM. Even
you only had a huge post of service. Was the only thing you could
do. So it's it's really interesting to see these people who are coming into
this now and haven't been part of the journey. It's harder for them,
I think. I mean, there's an upside to being in early that you
got to see the pieces built, although you also went through all the convulsions
of the sure getting because they made new ones. Yeah, at the same
time, like in New now with stuff like those Migration wizard things seem to
make life easier. But you ever look at the portal, like that's a
lot of stuff. There's a lot of stuff, all the stuff. It
is overwhelming and I'm so surprised at you know, the questions that you get,
the comments that you get, because obviously I've lost that perspective. I
know how the sausage was made, how the cookies were baked. I know
all of it. I know why Azure Monitor is working the way it does.
You know how the wormwood was mixed, my friend, I know exactly
how the wormwood was mixed, and it was strong. It was very very
strong. Yeah. Yeah, it's good to be able to lead them through
that, but it definitely I feels like it's a better time now. There
is a whole conversation going on around repatriation of I'm take people taking stuff back
out of the class. Yeah, I've heard a couple of cases of that,
and some some kind of notable that that somebody like wrote up a post
about it then said hey, we were going to use the cloud, and
we started doing this and then we just realized how expensive and crazy it was
and we just moved away again. Like Okay. When I look at that,
I go like, okay, so it's my specific expertise to help companies
just make the cloud better. Okay, So I'm looking at what you're doing,
and I just realized that you did not approach this in a responsible way.
You did not approach it in a learning way. You didn't have the
people to do this, and now you're like finding that it's not pay per
use, it's not you know, optimized, and it's costing you too much,
and it's not secure and all the things that you're saying that it's not
it's because you didn't do your homework. And now you're backing out. Now
you're backing out and blaming the cloud. Hm, that's not fair. So,
I mean, I was trying to work through reasonable that seemed to me
seems the most likely scenario. You shipped a bunch of vms up in the
cloud. Oddly enough, they cost money, no surprise. Yeah, now
you're going to ship a bunch of vms back out of the cloud again where
moving up to services and all those other options. You know, you could
have tuned this better, But I'm trying to find better scenarios. I mean,
one would argue, if you're running a twenty four to seven knock,
if you already have around the clock SIS submits and so forth, your more
or less could be operating your own clouds, So why are you using somebody
else's That the rest of the arguments become so much harder, Like I'm just
trying to figure out what the cloud isn't good at that you could point it
a service and go, yeah, maybe that's better to keep on premp.
I don't know. I mean, if it's the only thing I come down
to is if the service has, you know, very very strict restrictions on
data governance and where you can where you can host it, and where you
can run into But that's a feature, that's a yeah, And I feel
like Microsoft is done a huge amount of work on that, Like if all
you got to do is search, when it comes down to I need to
comply with this set of regulations for this country. They have ratifications in place
for it. Yeah, yes, and they support a lot of the services
today support such things as bring your own key and so forth. Right,
so you have your own, your very own key that that no one can
decrypt, not even Microsoft. So it's encrypted with your key except as your
secretary because he left it on your desktop. Oh yeah, post posted underneath
the desk exactly. And there and therein lies the bigger joke, which is
arguably like I have seen a small third party data center get rated by the
FBI because of one of their customers, and they took and the FBI took
all of the racks, and so I had that customer that was in there
and their machine. They would get their machines back two years later, but
in the meantime they're at the corridor. You know, the judge didn't understand
the ratifications what they were doing. They cleared that building. You can't do
that with the cloud data center. A nobody's got enough for cliffs like getting
access to that data center. Are those machines going to be even worth anything
in two years? That's another question. That was the thing. It was
largely destructed. It was with the destruction of the business that we couldn't replace
them. It's crazy because of one customer. Wow, yeah, and yeah
terrible. So you know that in that sense, I said, you know,
the upside to the cloud is go ahead, knock yourself out, like
it's just at that scale, that's not possible. Great, agreed, But
we were we were there before that, before such time where companies were legitimately
legitimately they were saying that we can't go to the cloud because it's not secure
enough. We don't know that it's secure, we haven't seen the evidence of
that. We also don't know that it's compliant. That was like a blocker,
an adoption blocker in the early days. Nowadays people go to the cloud
because it's more secure. Yeah, and nothing you ever do is going to
change that, you know, and arguabily it always has been. It's just
that now you can't deny it. Yeah, yeah, true, fair enough.
Yeah, And we used to say that do you think that you're security
team who actually goes to bed at night and works eight hours a day is
more vigilant than you know, a team of hundreds of people that are watching
what's going on behind the scenes and Azure twenty four to seven. It's just
there's just no way. It's it's not possible. There's no way. And
somebody was saying, it's funny. There was a networking company that was saying
that, well, basically the slur that that you know, networking for Microsoft,
well it's not the best product, it's not you know, I don't
know that it's the most secure, and so forth. I was like,
are you shitting me? You just pull that out of the air. You're
talking about the company that probably has the most of network of anyone on the
planet, with with like the best teams that do networking and networking security that
even exists at all, and you're just you're just blurting out there that you
think that their product is not good enough based on what dude? Yeah right,
yeah, I can't wait to hear your analysis in detail. I please
have it at my desk by nine o'clock tomorrow morning, exactly. Pass on
stunt Kirk out. But it's a it is, without a doubt, an
extremely hard problem. Yes, and gentlemen, we should stop at this moment
for this very important message, and we're back. It's done in rocks.
I'm Richard Campbell, let's Carl Franklin, and we're talking to our friend Mangus
Martins and about it his work in the cloud, and we you mentioned it
briefly at the top, but certainly the Global Azure move event is a thing
coming up in about another month, right, it's in April, Yeah,
April eighteen to through twenty. Is what's happening this time, And it's been
going on for a while now. It's Global azer is a thing. Lot
Lasher dot net is a thing that has been around for quite some time.
And what it really is more than ten years, it's been twelve, so
really what it is, it's I guess it's instigation on learning, instigation on
a global scale. If you will, we just hang out together and run
this event everyone at once, and everyone is. Any organizer of a community
meet up anywhere who wants to learn about Ashure, they simply just register their
event as well on the same site. And the idea is that they can
then benefit and their attendees can then benefit from the shared sponsorships that we get,
for example, from Microsoft. We get ASHU passes from Microsoft, and
if they need some, they can get them through us. So we just
do it all at the same time. Nice and it does speak too.
I think a huge topic here, which is learning to right size the utilization
of Azure to get out of the VM world and into the services world and
into what it could be a platform piece like the rethinking of the way you
provide services to your company. Absolutely right. We didn't even know what we
were starting. When Global Azure did start. We had no idea what was
going to happen or what we what we found. If you will, you
know, they say that innovation is just taking two pre existing ideas and combining
them in a new way that no one ever thought of yet. So I
guess we did community and the Globe because we just said, hey, how
about you guys do an event at the same time as we do, And
then more and more people like, hey, you also want to join,
and you and you, and I posted that thing internally at Microsoft for the
MVPs, there is an alias called the for Azure MVPs. I posted it
there. I said, Hey, a bunch of us are doing this community
events on this one day, you want to join, and ca boom.
It was like an understatement. I think it was like almost one hundred locations
the first year we did it, so apparently we found a potential that nobody
knew would be there. Yeah, that's kind of cool. There is noise.
So how big is it now? Well, it took a huge bump
during the pandemic of this section. Yeah, it's an important topic to cover.
That community took a huge, you know, whack on the head,
and a lot of people just stopped doing community and there weren't enough other people
coming into doing community because you were simply not allowed to have meetups TOLT.
Yeah. Yeah, but just before twenty nineteen was our largest year, and
that year I think we were around three hundred and thirty six locations at the
same time. Wow, which is huge. I don't know of any any
larger community event than that. And and what's one thing that I find is
amusing is if you would aggregate all the community events of the same kind that
are called global something in you know, boot camp, there's there's AI,
there's DevOps, there's plenty of them, even a couple coming out from Microsoft
that are using the same naming standard. We were the first ones to ever
do a global something boot Camp, Global Azure, Azure boot Camp as it
were. Nowadays there's tons of them doing the same kind of thing. So
I guess we showed to the world that it is possible to do community activism
on a global scale, and now kind of everyone does that. Yeah,
I'm thinking net comp which is very much around the world kind of thing.
But I do think it came after the the Azure Global Yeah, well,
it's it's fine a new idea though, I mean, no, you know,
the Internet kind of encourages us to do that, you know, it
really does. Well, you think about the original RDS in the nineties doing
the simul past events right really before the Internet was even up for that,
there were going to say accept no Internet. Yeah that was when we had
regions and we directed something weird. Yeah yeah, those funny titles of art.
Yeah yeah. I do think the interaction between the sissigmin and the DEV
around right sizing resources here about you know that because on one hand, I
know, as the sissidmin, Hey these vms are running all the time,
but they're not actually busy, like how does this break apart? But you've
got to interact with the dev to say, can you give me a measure
to know when to dial something down and to dial it up for what we
can move to a service. And so you're thinking, I think mostly about
things such as you know, CPU or utilization or those kinds of things.
What I even I even include a third role in this conversation normally, And
I stated, it has to start there. It has to start with what
the business people wants to measure. What actually is a measurable something for the
for the industry for what we are doing. Is it number of sales?
Is it, you know, a number of users? Is it a number
of What is it that that makes the day for the business owner in this
context? And I always say that you start by measuring that you don't put
anything out there. You don't put anything in the cloud unless you have a
measurement that satisfies that what they are, what the suits, the being counters,
they excel people what they are, what they are asking for. That's
what we really want to see. And if we can have that on a
dashboard in the beginning right arguably before the workload moved, would be nice.
Exactly, that would be the best. That would be the absolute best.
And then we can actually see that trend line over time and they can understand
and that that I think is the most important. And of course then then
comes you know, CPU percentage and memory usage and other things that are Yeah,
I appreciate that those are very abstract measures where we're yeah, cost of
transaction, value of transaction, like those kinds. I'm an email I did
a lot of e commerce work. Yeah, we made the dashboard that showed
when the website was faster, we made more money for customer. Yeah,
which which needle is it that moves the business? That's what we want to
note that if I can get a CFO excited, I can get more budget.
That's correct. And also you won't have you won't have that surprise conversation
in the future where it's like, why is our costing this much? We
didn't think it was going to cost this much. Oh, we're backing out
of the cloud, We're moving away. This is not what we expected.
Well, I also feel like we did not measure stuff on prem Well,
that's true. The side effective azure is you are getting a monthly bill and
that varies. It is and that yes, And it's hard because we have
been taught for decades that i T is a budget item. It's a huge
piece piece of Yes, cost center on the budget. This like this,
this many this many millions and and that's it. And now there's no more
conversation between the business and the i T until next year. We're going to
have the same conversation once. And it's really weird. And that's exactly what
how the cloud does not work. Yeah, maybe that's the real issue bank
This is that when I was directing it, I had an annual conversation with
finance about our spend for the year. That's right. And occasionally you go
in for exceptions because hey, we're making this big push and that I need
to get a few more machines. And it's got a two month leap time,
but that was an exception. But I had one year and typically four
year horizons, like we're going to renew the data set of contract, We're
going to buy new hardware. And these were two Comma spends right Like they
were big spends. So you would sit in the boardroom with the finance guys
and hammer this stuff out and we'd look at leasing deals and all these other
things, and all of that goes away with the cloud in exchange for a
monthly bill that kind of like your cell phone bill can surprise you. Yeah,
well, when I turn on my phone in bangal Or, it costs
five bucks a minute, and good luck trying to decipher and how well does
az your advisor help with this kind of thing? And do you use it?
And what is it? So I use azur Advisor to to look up
the recommendations that are in there. Is like saying there are things like,
okay, you're you seem to be running a lot of virtual machines, would
you maybe consider using a reserved instance plan instead? And makes like are you
going to keep these machines for a year? Are you going to keep them
for three years? Does that look like a thing you might do? Well?
Then here's the recommendation that says you should be buying a reserved instance plan
to get to get a really really big discount if you do. But that
that really it sounds such a it sounds like such a technical question, right,
but it really is not. This is this is a very very interesting
question that I've been using for for quite some time to illustrate what the problem
really is. So you're saying, it sounds like I can just say next,
next, finish on this dialogue, and and and all of a sudden,
I have this great discount because I now bought a reserved instance plan.
Wonderful. Okay, So now I just spent a couple one hundred thousand dollars
doing that. Because if we had a many we had many machines, maybe
I should ask, you know, the business people first. And now it
becomes this question of are we going to continue using vms as in infrastructure services
or are we actually going to migrate the applications away from those vms and put
them on platform services instead. That conversation, are you going to have that
with a bunch of people who are business people and IT people. Well,
now you have to talk to the devs. Are the debvs ready to actually
move them out of the vms the applications. That is right, and that
strategy is much much larger conversation than the question of should I activate reserve instances.
You're right, but it also makes more sense because I should have the
finance guys in the room at that point, I should have dev room.
Now we're going to make a schedule. Hey, here are all the apps
that are all running in vms right now. We can do one a quarter,
yes, these one, these ones that are ten down the line,
you can start buying years of reservedances for them, lowering their for sure.
For some of the other one absolutely one hundred percent. For some of them.
It is not even worth it to you know, that application, it's
not so important, it's not that expensive, and rebuilding it to move off
of it. That fix it, forget about it. That's not we'll just
we'll just leave that one. But the other one here is magnus. It's
getting it's getting those guys in the room. Like so often, we're doing
our own job and not worry not recognizing that this is a strategic conversation where
all the players need to be in the room and making a plan. Well,
you know which person we haven't called out yet, And I would argue
that this is this is the most important person to have in the room for
this conversation. You want to know the human resource director. Interesting, Yes,
I only call it HR when I've got problems. That's right. But
you have a problem, but you just don't know it yet. The problem.
The problem is that you don't have enough people with enough skills in azure.
You have wonderful, wonderful people in your business. They work there for
a long time. They know their stuff, they know it t they know
dev, they know all that, but they just don't know how to make
an optimized, secure, compliant deployment of your application in the cloud. The
factory. That's a that's that's that's exactly you have a factory pattern. Now
you have two problems, right, yeah, yes, So that means that
you have to have a solid plan for either acquiring skilled people. Good luck
with that. Those the people who are really skilled with cloud stuff, they
already have a job. But you also, yeah, they're busy. Uh.
And then you have to also include uh, you know, the training
or retraining or upskilling or changing the skill of your your existing people so that
they will understand how to actually use the cloud in a good way. I
mean, I do debate the value of training getting skilled in migration because that's
going to end, yes in x men years. It's operations that you want
to be skilled. Operations, governance, the security and compliance pieces that are
going to be so important. Maybe you didn't know that to begin with that
compliance was going to be important because you didn't realize. And then much later
you have an application running in the cloud and your customer says, we want
to be we need to be compliant with so and so. Are you complied
with so and so? Otherwise we can't buy your service? And now compliance
is very important, but it wasn't before, So now we have to go
fix compliance after the fact. Is there any AI that Azure has, or
maybe even chat GPT that can help us find problems and correct them. It's
getting to that point you can't You can't release anything from Microsoft right now except
going through like this AI wash first, right, is it AI enough?
If it's not a enough, they can they can get it. I mean,
at the simplest level, you could ask chat GPT here, tell me
how to get a list of resources that haven't been used in the last six
months and help help me deactivate them. Yeah, but imagine having a complete
AI engine inside of your governance in your cloud use. I'm not so sure
I want that. You'll ask it. You'll ask it. Hey, dude,
what can I like? How can I optimize my cost? And it's
going to base that on your utilization, your usage, and it's going to
base it on the experience of the entire usage of everyone using Yeah, that
I would like. I would like something to tell me what to do when
I ask a question. But as we discovered in the better known framework story,
you don't want something that just has agency and it's going to go do
things on your behalf without you being involved. You know. No, No,
that's not what we're talking about. I guess no, No, I'm
talking about just help me figure this out. What am I doing wrong,
you know, or why this application seems to be down. And then this
also comes back to this age old question of what is an application in the
cloud? If you have you know, my application consists of twenty five different
resources, multiple different you know, locations around my subscriptions and various things.
I want to be able to see that thing as one application because to me.
It is one. So what is this wonderful AI you're talking about?
I was getting to it. I mean Microsoft is getting to it. They're
they're working all of these things into their their existing services. They're taking all
the services that they had and just adding AI to them. If you yeah,
we think it. Azure Advisor will have an LM and it's sooner or
later. Yeah, probably sooner. Yeah. Yeah, and Azure monitor and
you know this has been this has been a while coming. Know that there
was this Azure graph thing you could have. Yeah, so Azure graph is
is just a little graph that explains that all the resources, all all the
things you have. So that's one step in that direction. But Microsoft is
not taking multiple steps in that direction over the I believe over the next six
months is going to be an exciting time for monitoring Azure. Okay, fair
enough. Yeah, do you think it's going to It's going to evolve.
But I appreciate that probably they're not going to introduce new tools. I mean,
haven't helped me if they do, but rather take the tools that we're
already supposedly understand and add more LM to them right here and there. Yeah,
that would be wonderful. Yeah, that's what we're going to get.
I'm sure. I'm certain there's plenty of evidence to show that they're doing deep
out Like you look at some of this other sentinels doing this day and its
ability to look across multiple logs and events and so forth and say, hey,
there's some unusual behavior here. As a composite of that view, that's
a good summarizer engineer, Yeah, it is. And that argument is what
we have been using for a while to talk about, for example, security
in the cloud. Why is a company why are the huge cloud giants so
good at security? Well, it's because they have a data pool of security
data which is larger than anyone's. Yeah, you might be on your business,
your tiny little business, which you think is huge, is very small
in the cloud. It's being attacked right now, except you can't see that
based on the data you have. But Microsoft can see the attack on you,
an attack on other people as a larger pattern, and they can tell
you listen, this thing here that you don't perceive as an attack is in
fact an attack, right, And that, you know, is why you
want to have the power of that information size, that data size, and
if you put an NLM on that then you have something. Yeah, you
have some interesting things, So I am looking. It will be interesting to
see what that's going on. Of course, we're recording this just before the
MVP summit. You and I are going to be there, I think magnets
so exactly. You know, there's some briefings along these lines we're not going
to be allowed to talk about, right, Yeah, clearly there's motion there.
This last year seemed like the hype cycle for especially from Microsoft, with
the Copilot. Of all the things. I'm hopefully this is the year that
we see a bunch of implemented stuff that can make our lives better. Yeah,
you get a copilot, you get a call a copilot, everybody gets
a co pilot. At one point I was poking some friends inside of the
company. There was like, there's one hundred and eighty of these and most
of them should not see the light of day. Oh my god. No.
Yeah, I can see why as well. But that's to that point.
It feels a little bit in the beginning here, which is where we
are in the beginning of the co pilot era, is that some of these
are so bland or they really they really can't do anything yet that it's just
like, if you're going to release a new version of whatever you have,
it's going to have to have AI and a co pilot in it, or
you're not shipping. So they are like shipping this tiny little thing that they
call a co pilot for whatever, and it can't do anything yet. Yeah.
But one of the reasons I mentioned Aspire at the top of the show
is it's it's about cloud native behavior too, Like I'm hoping that our tools
as devs get better at thinking helping us fall into cloud thinking. Yeah.
Yes, it's not just that I identified that these are these are secure related
strings or special tokens and so forth. Is that I'm also you know,
pushing towards key vaults or where is the secure stur for this that we can
read against like that sort of cloud native behavior so that we tend to do
the right things that we're building software. Mm hmm, that's right, that's
right. Well, I can't wait to see what happens. I hope so,
because I don't know that it's true yet, we'll see, we'll see.
I think it. I think it will be true because it seems like
an actual good use case of of L MSM, so I saved the most
important question for last. What flavors of ice cream? Does lofty soft serve?
Serves? That? Definitely observes it serves chocolate, chocolate. Nice.
I really can't pick on you for a crazy name with a name like pwop
Yeah, yeah, where are you going to go with that? But I
applaud your you know, being funny there with lofty soft. It's kind of
a funny sounding name, but you won't forget it. Well, I just
wanted to buy it a man that had dot com at the end. I
wasn't too expensive. It's not a bad reasons the name you can get yeah,
exactly. And people be like, lofty does that mean that because you're
doing things in the cloud? I'm like, yeah, sure, yeah,
that's exactly what that was. That was what I was going for all along.
Actually, yes, all the truth is out Magnus now we know yep.
Yeah. And Howard and meatballs at home. It was the last time
Jessica whipped up a batch of those, so they're good as ever. You
know you should you should pop over Yeah, be right there. It's been
a long time, so we av that's all started at an or dev right
yeah, that's what we met. Yeah, yeah, network keep seeing each
other at every freaking conference around the world. I guess I would go to
ordev just to attend to go to the bishop's arms and to come over for
meatballs. I would do that. There you go. Well, I'm happy
to have It's just we can't do it October November when it's freaking it's terrible.
That's when you drink the wormwood my mouse. Sorry. I don't know
if they serve that at the Green Lion, but I'd rather have scotch.
Yeah, fair enough. Those are those are good bars. So is there
anything else you want to talk about before we jump off? I mean,
so, I'm really looking forward to the next steps on the cloud, and
I guess we kind of all we already covered that. But I think that
the new Horizons scenario, it's just to continue to make it easier for people
to get it. And that's hard when you keep adding new things all the
time. And I think, I think though, I think though, that
we are we are at a place now where the cloud is It's hard to
say it's stabilizing, but I think it is, and it seems to be.
It seems to be and a challenge now is that now everyone is talking
about AI. Okay, cool, we love AI. AIR services are cool?
AIR services are great? I get it, I get it. Where
are all the AI services running? They're running in the cloud. So what
a company, and this is kind of a cautionary tail here, what a
company really needs to understand is to use AI services with you know, oh
we have we're going to put you know, all of our massive amounts of
data and we're going to do our own copilot and whatnot. We're going to
run it on our own data and so forth. Oh, that's good for
you, except you now realize that you have to understand how to use the
cloud platform as well, because you're moving petabytes of data into the cloud now,
and they're security and governance and data transport and all the things and costs.
But the conversation right now seems to be all about AI and how cool
AI is and how we're going to use that. Well, guess what,
there's a platform underneath called Azure that you may need to look into as well.
So that's kind of a cautionary tale here, and all that AI excitement
is that you actually need to understand the platform. Well, center enough sure,
mangus. Thanks, it's been a pleasure catching up with you again.
Yeah, thank you very much. All right, we'll talk to you next
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