276: New from AWS – Elastic Commute – Flex Your Way to an Empty Office

Welcome to episode 276 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, our hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan do a speedrun of OpenWorld news, talk about energy needs and the totally not controversial decision to reopen 3 Mile Island, a “managed” exodus from cloud, and Kubernetes news. As well as Amazon’s RTO we are calling “Elastic Commute”. All this and more, right now on The Cloud Pod. Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod Hosts don’t own enough pants for five days a week IBM thinks it can contain the cost of K8s Microsoft loves nuclear energy The Cloudpod tries to give Oracle some love and still does not care The cloud pod goes nuclear on k8s costs ⛽Can IBM contain the costs of Kubernetes and Nuclear Power? Google takes on take over while microsoft takes on nuclear AWS Launches ‘Managed Exodus’: Streamline Your Talent Drain Introducing Amazon WorkForce Alienation™: Scale Your Employee Discontent to the Cloud Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab: Now with Real-Time Resignation Prediction A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info. General News 01:08 IBM acquires Kubernetes cost optimization startup Kubecost IBM is quickly becoming the place where cloud cost companies go to assimilate? Or Die? Rebirthed mabe? Either way, it’s not a great place to end up. On Tuesday they announced the acquisition of Kubecost , a FinOps startup that helps teams monitor and optimize their K8 clusters, with a focus on efficiency – and ultimately cost. This acquisition follows the acquisitions of Apptio, Turbonomic , and Instana over the years. Kubecost is the company behind OpenCost ; a vendor-neutral open source project that forms part of the core Kubecost commercial offering. OpenCost is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundations cohort of sandbox projects. Kubecost is expected to be integrated into IBM’s FinOps Suite , which combines Cloudability and Turbonomic. There is also speculation that it might make its way to OpenShift, too. 02:26 Jsutin- “…so KubeCost lives inside of Kubernetes, and basically has the ability to see how much CPU, how much memory they’re using, then calculate basically the price of the EC2 broken down into the different pods and services.” AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All It’s Money 05:03 Introducing OpenAI o1-preview Reasoning LLM’s have arrived this week. Dun Dun Dun… The idea behind reasoning models is to take more time to “think” before they respond to you. This allows them to reason through complex tasks. and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math. ChatGPT is releasing the first with OpenAI o1-preview, which they expect to ship regular updates and improvements. Alongside the release, they are considering evaluations for the next updates, which are in development. In ChatGPT’s tests they said the model performs similarly to PhD students on benchmark tasks in physics, chemistry and biology. It also excels in math and coding. In a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO), GPT-4o correctly solved only 13% of the problems, while the reasoning model scored 83%. As part of the development of these models, Open AI has come up with a new safety training approach that harnesses the reasoning capabilities to make them adhere to safety and alignment guidelines. One way they measure safety is by testing how well the model continues its safety rules after a user bypasses them (jailbreaking). On one of their hardest tests, GPT-4o scored 22 out of 100, whereas o1-preview scored 84. 07:12 Jonathan – “ I have not played with the O1 preview. I’ve been all in on Claude lately. I’ve been playing around with different system prompts to promote the whole chain of thought thing. I know opening ISA, the reasoning engine is not just a chain of thought under the hood. But I’m curious to know what it was you asked it. And I’ll run your prompts through what I’ve got. Because I do a similar thing where I evaluate evaluate what was asked and then sort of like almost fan out ideas from the central topic. In a way, just having like other ideas be present as tokens in the context window gives the LLM the opportunity to kind of explore more options in the answers that it gives. And so, yeah, it’ll be interesting.” AWS 28:31 AWS Claims Customers are Packing Bags and Heading Back On-Prem AWS says its facing stiff competition from on-premises infrastructure, which is an about face after saying that all workloads would eventually move to the cloud. This is from a summary of evidence given to UK Watchdog, The Competition and Markets Authority. AWS listed several examples of customers returning to their data centers, and AWS said “Building a datacenter requires significant effort, so the fact that customers are doing it highlights the level of flexibility that they have and the attractiveness of moving back to on-premises.” AWS points that 29% of cloud customers (across all providers) have switched to on-premises services. A convenient lawyer-y case against being a monopoly? 10:41 Matthew – “ I wouldn’t say it’s played as aggressive, but I’ve definitely started to see more articles and I’ve talked with a few companies in the last couple of years that are really kind of evaluating whether their cloud moves were the right moves and whether to move back or not. And the other piece of it is these companies either are using highly specialized workloads that don’t really fit the cloud or they’re large enough. That makes sense to keep them running, but the majority of customers are doing a simple app, and the cloud makes more sense.” 16:21 Message from CEO Andy Jassy: Strengthening our culture and teams It’s time to return to the office full time, says Andy Jassy in his September 16th memo to Amazon Employees. Bye bye, meetings in sweatpants – and bye bye, A LOT of Amazon employees. Jassy says he feels good about the progress they are making together across stores, AWS and advertising, as well as prime video expansion, and investment areas like GenAI, Kuiper and Healthcare, and several others evolving nicely. He talks about his start at the company 27 years ago and their plan to stay for a few years before moving back to NYC. He then goes on to discuss Amazon’s “unique” culture and how it is a key part of its success. The S-team (Amazon’s executive team) wants Amazon to operate like the “world’s largest startup,” which means it has a passion for constantly inventing for customers, a strong urgency for big opportunities, high ownership, fast decision-making and scrappiness. As part of these questions, the S-Team has been thinking about 1) whether they have the right organizational structure to drive the ownership and speed they desire and 2) whether they are set up to invent, collaborate and be connected to each other (and the culture) to deliver the absolute best for the customers and the business. They concluded they could do better on both. To do this, they decided they have too much management, and this is slowing down and causing bureaucracy. To solve this they plan to increase the ration of individual contributors to managers by 15% by the end of Q1 2025. Fewer managers will remove layers and flatten the organization. If it’s done well, it will improve the ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate a sense of ownership and drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers. He points out that he created a bureaucratic mailbox so that people could send emails about needless processes or red tape, and he would read them. We call BS. The controversial part is that it’s time to return to the office five days a week. They want to return to the pre-pandemic days when being out of the office was an exception. They will bring back assigned desks in the US. Because they know many of their employees will need to make accommodations, this new way of working will start on January 2nd, 2025. 18:43 Justin – “ I don’t know how well you can innovate and do the right things for your customers. If you lose all of your senior talent, to attrition. So, I’m definitely a little concerned about maybe what I would call 25, I’m maybe the lost year for Amazon.” 19:02 Jonathan – “… they may have had that culture before, but then the pandemic happened and people realize that things didn’t have to be that way and things could be different and they see the benefits. And I don’t think he’s going to make the change that he thinks he is by doing this. I think it’ll demotivate people. You can’t force culture change through policy. That’s not what the culture is. Culture is the result of all the things that you do, including those policies.” 25:29 Amazon RDS for MySQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift, now generally available, enables near real-time analytics . Zero ETL Integrations make it easy to unify your data across applications and data sources for holistic insights and breaking data silos. AWS is announcing Amazon RDS for MySQL zero-ETL with Amazon Redshift is now GA. This release also includes new features such as data filtering, support for multiple integrations, and the ability to configure zero-ETL integrations in your AWS CloudFormation template . 26:12 Jonathan – “ What’s more painful is having somebody click it in a console and then lose it and then have no commit history to refer back to if they need to rebuild it again. So at least it’s a manageable artifact.” 26:54 AWS Welcomes the OpenSearch Software Foundation AWS is transferring OpenSearch to the OpenSearch Software Foundation, a community-driven initiative under the Linux Foundation . This announcement follows the leadership expansion of the project shared earlier this year. 29:54 AWS shuts down DeepComposer, its MIDI keyboard for AI music The AWS cloud service killing AI has found another victim in DeepComposer , their AI powered keyboard experiment. The DeepComposer project just reached its 5 year milestone, and the physical MIDI piano and AWS service let users compose songs with the help of generative AI. You have until September 17th 2025 to download your data stored there before the service will end. AWS has also announced that the DeepRacer league is ending after this year, and we assume that means the DeepRacer will be defunct soon as well. 30:49 Matthew – “ It’s so funny to look back and think that Deep Compose was five years ago. They had AI in the palm of their hands and let it go.” 37:25 Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports AWS KMS with customer managed keys Amazon S3 Express One Zone , a high-performance, single availability zone S3 storage , now supports server-side encryption. Thanks – but why didn’t this exist before? 37:58 Now available: Graviton4-powered memory-optimized Amazon EC2 X8g instances Graviton -4-powered, memory-optimized x8g instances are now available in ten virtual sizes and two bare metal sizes, with up to 3TiB of DDR5 memory and up to 192 vCPU’s. 38:33 Justin – “ I think the limitation on CPU is 64 or 96 before. Like, this is doubling or tripling the number of CPUs too, which wasn’t typically the Graviton runs so well, but I don’t see the CPU being my problem. It’s really when I want to run a database in the memory.” GCP 39:37 Safer by default: Automate access control with Sensitive Data Protection and conditional IAM Safer by default, now automated! Google Cloud’s Sensitive Data Protection can automatically discover sensitive data assets and attach tags to your data assets based on sensitivity. Using IAM conditions , you can grant or deny access to the data based on the presence or absence of a sensitivity level tag key or tag value. This has several use cases including: Automate access control across various supported resources based on attributes and classifications. Restrict access to the supported resources like Cloud Storage, BigQuery and CloudSQL until those resources are profiled and classified by sensitive data protection Change access to a resource automatically as the data sensitivity level for that resource changes. 40:57 Justin – “ I would hope this is something you wouldn’t necessarily use for machine accounts or service to service accounts. This to me is a person who’s getting this type of access. This is where you care about the primitives and the context and those things. And this is a context that you are caring about based on the data sensitivity and the context is important to the end user, not necessarily to the machine.” 41:26 How to prevent account takeovers with new certificate-based access Stolen credentials are one of the most common attack vectors used by attackers to gain unauthorized access to user accounts and steal information. Google is providing certificate-based access in the IAM portfolio to help combat stolen credentials, cookie theft, and accidental credential loss. Certificate-based access (CBA) uses mutual TLS to ensure that users’ credentials are bound to a device certificate before authorizing access to cloud resources. CBA provides strong protection requiring the X.509 certificate as a device identifier, and verifies devices with user context for every access request to cloud resources. Even if an attacker compromises a user’s credentials, account access will remain blocked as they do not have the corresponding certificate. Rendering the stolen credentials useless This is a lot of words to say they support X.509 certificates – but we still appreciate it. 42:21 Matthew- “ It’s a great level up though to protect because you see all these articles online of like, somebody got in and 12 things went wrong or in someone’s personal account, somebody launched $30,000 worth of Bitcoin miners. So a really good level up to see.” 42:43 Announcing expanded CIEM support to reduce multi cloud risk in Security Command Center Identities can be a major source of cloud risk when they are not properly managed. Compromised credentials are frequently used to gain unauthorized access to cloud environments, which often magnifies that risk since many user and service accounts are granted access to cloud services and assets beyond their required scope. This means that if just one credential is stolen, or abused, companies may be at risk of data exfiltration and resource compromise. To make this easier, Google is integrating Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) into Security Command Center , their multi-cloud security and risk tool, and are announcing GA of expanded CIEM support for additional clouds and identify providers. (AWS and Entra ID and Okta) Azure 42:43 Introducing o1: OpenAI’s new reasoning model series for developers and enterprises on Azure When OpenAI announces new models, Azure, their closest frenemies, follows closely with the new capability on Microsoft Azure Open AI services. Both the o1-preview and the o1-mini are now available in Azure Open AI service, Azure AI Studio and Github Models. The o1 series enables complex coding, math reasoning, brainstorming and comparative analysis capabilities, setting a new benchmark for AI powered solutions. 44:36 Jonathan – “A model garden. It sounds so beautiful until you realize it’s just a concrete building that uses millions of gallons of water a day.” 44:49 Azure Public IPs are now zone-redundant by default Azure is making their Public IP’s redundant by default. This means that unless you specifically select a single zone when deploying your Microsoft Azure Standard Public IPs, they will automatically be zone-redundant without any extra steps on your part. This zone redundancy will be at no-extra cost. A zone-redundant IP is created in three zones for a region and can survive any single zone failure, improving the resiliency of your application using the public IP. 45:20 Matthew – “So when I started in Azure, I realized that these weren’t set up. If you try to attach a non multizonal IP address to a multi zonal service, it just yells at you. So to me, this is like one of those EIPs that are all multizonal by default. You don’t even think about what zone…so you don’t have to think about it. Where here you used to think about it and then there was no migration path to say, hey, take this single zone IP address and move it to be multi-zone. Even if you charge me more for it, there was nothing. So you would have to completely change your IP address, which we all know customers never whitelist specific IP addresses. They never caused the problems. You do that change never.” 46:53 Microsoft and Oracle enhance Oracle Database@Azure with data and AI integration Oracle Database@Azure got some updates from Open World including: Fabric integration Integration with Sentinel and compliance certifications to provide “industry leading” security and compliance. Sure, Jan. Plans to expand to a total of 21 primary regions, each with at least two availability zones and support for Oracle’s Maximum Availability Architecture. 47:36 Jonathan – “Out of all the companies who build Oracle database and re -select the cloud providers, Oracle is most definitely the industry leader.” 47:57 Advanced Container Networking Services: Enhancing security and observability in AKS Microsoft Azure Container network team is giving out gifts this week. Following the success of advanced network observability , which provides deep insights in network traffic within AKS clusters, they now introduce fully qualified domain name filtering as a new security feature. 48:26 Microsoft Deal Will Reopen Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant to Power AI Listener note: paywall article Microsoft signed a deal to restart a power plan on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania to power its rapidly expanding data center footprint for AI. The plan TMI Unit 1, which shut down in 2019 for economic reasons will be producing the energy for Microsoft. A separate reactor at the site partially melted down in 1979. The reactor generated more than 800 megawatts of power, and constellation energy, The plant owner said it would be ready for MS by 2028. We expect protests. Green energy? AI? GPU’s? This all needs (carbon free) power. 49:39 Justin – “And they’re willing to wait for it till 2028. So they have expectations that not only is this plausible and something they can get the Nuclear Energy Commission to approve, but that they will still have AI dominating this much of their power consumption that they need 800 megawatts.” 50:29 Elastic pools for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale now Generally Available! Azure is announcing GA for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale elastic pools . While you may start with a standalone hyper-scale database, chances are that as your fleet of databases grows, you want to optimize price and performance across a set of hyper-scale databases. Elastic pools offer the convenience of pooling resources like CPU, memory, and IO while ensuring strong security isolation between those databases. 51:02 Justin – “Yeah, I mean it’s no different than back in the day when you would take all your VM’s on Prem and say OK cool, we had 100 gigabytes memory. I’m going to allocate 200 gigabytes of memory to all your servers and hope that none of them, not all of them, blow up at once. Because you know your workloads. So now you’re able to do this. With hyper scale, which is equivalent to Aurora, but is actually with Microsoft SQL engine and it also gets rid of the increased storage price, but they’ve gotten rid of the SQL licensing.” Oracle Hold onto your butts – it’s time for OpenWorld news. There are a lot of things to cover this week from OpenWorld, to save our hosts’ sanity we won’t get too deep into all of these, but will try to highlight key things. If you REALLY care about Oracle, well – that’s why you’re here, deep into the show notes, where the show note editor has done **all** the work to arrange and manage the chaos for you. You’re welcome. 55:12 Introducing the best platform for AI workloads – OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE) OKE or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Kubernetes Engine gets new capabilities to let customers meet their AI and ML workload needs. Cool! Optimized for AI workloads: OKE offers built-in observability and health checks for your container environment and now includes the capability to track current and historical RDMA and GPU errors to improve operability for customers using GPUs. Now supports Ubuntu for GPU workloads and worker nodes. Lots of noise about containers for training and security by design that isn’t new. There’s a Steinbeck joke here (Get it? Grapes of Wrath? Okie? Ok, so maybe that one doesn’t work.) 55:28 Announcing Oracle Cloud Guard Container Security OCI is announcing a limited availability ( beta) release of Container Governance through the Oracle Cloud Guard’s container security. This single pane of glass experience for managing your large scale containerized workload compliance. Key features include: Ready to go recipes to give you secure and compliant baseline configurations for container security Single Pane of Glass Robust exception management Remote monitoring 55:38 Enhanced monitoring in OKE with Logging Analytics OCI OKE integration with OCI Logging Analytic s to give you high availability into your K8 environment. OCI logging analytics gives you a comprehensive ML/AI-powered monitoring solution across all environments, including OKE monitoring. 55:50 OCI Kubernetes Engine supports OpenId Connect (OIDC) OKE supports OIDC or OpenID Connect allowing you a secure and flexible way to authenticate and authorize users within applications and systems. With this OKE capability you can authorize kubernetes pods to access non-OCI resources using third party security token services. 55:55 Simplify operations with OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE) add-ons Take advantage of your K* operations with OCI OKE add-ons. These add ons cover 4 key container areas today with more coming in the future Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler Istio service Mesh OCI Native Ingress controller Kubernetes Metrics Server Please note – someone write down the date and time – Jonathan is impressed with something from Oracle. 56:49 Announcing OCI Streaming with Apache Kafka, in limited availability OCI is launching a new managed kafka service, currently in beta with GA in the fall. 57:00 OCI Database with PostgreSQL release new features OCI Database for PostgreSQL released several new features including support for versions 13, 14, and 15. Extension support. New Vertical scaling and flexible shapes, Network security group integration. 57:09 Streamline your IT management with OCI Resource Analytics Asset and Resource management for your OCI environment. Simplify centralized inventory, advanced troubleshooting and glean insights from the built in dashboards and reports. 57:23 Announcing GPU support for Oracle Machine Learning Notebooks on Autonomous Database Autonomous Database Serverless now provides integrated access to OCI GPU instances through Oracle Machine Learning (OML) notebooks. 57:30 Announcing Oracle Code Assist beta and NetSuite SuiteScript support Last year they announced Code Assist and AI code companion. Now they have released and optimized the Java version of Code Assist available in beta for developers to help build new applications faster and quickly update code written in older Java versions. While it was optimized for Java, it does work with most modern languages including Python, Javascript, suitescript, rust, ruby, go, pl/sql, C# and C. Suitescript is a custom javascript language for Netsuite to enable customization of their SaaS ERP. Future updates will be coming out for code-assist to further enhance this experience for suitescript. 58:19 Announcing private IP address support for OCI Object Storage using private endpoints OCI announced GA of private endpoints for OCI object storage in all commercial regions. Private endpoints help enable secure, private connectivity using a private IP address to access OCI object storage from your VCN or on-premise network. This will be fun to manage. We’ll pass. 58:48 OCI Fleet Application Management is now generally available – simplifying full-stack patching and compliance management at scale Given the name of this, you’d think this would have to do with managing your applications – but you’d be wrong. GA of OCI Fleet Application Management was announced The new service simplifies centralized management and patch operations across your entire cloud stack for any software or technology deployed on OCI. We see what you’ve done here Oracle. We don’t like it. 59:15 Building storage systems for the future: The OCI roadmap Other storage things announced other than HPMT Object STorage HDFS connector for your Hadoop based needs Coming in the next few months Scale 10x File storage with Lustre File Storage usage quotas Object storage support for multiple checksums File storage 30 minute RPO Block Volumes support for customer managed keys for cross-region replication. 1:00:23 Introducing the new standardized OCI Landing Zones framework for an even easier onboarding to OCI Accelerating your zero trust journey on OCI with zero trust landing zone Oracle announced the early preview of OCIE zero trust landing zones, a new solution that enables a one-click provisioning for both secure, high performing architecture for your cloud tenancy, with deployment and hardened configuration of key services in need to meet certain requirements. This is based on recommendations from CISA and UK governments National Cyber Secure Centre. The following is provisioned with OCI Zero Trust Landing zones Base tenancy = IAM, KMS, Cloud Guard, Vulnerability Scanning, bastion, logging, events (auditing), notification and security zones. As well as you can enable ZTNA around applications and workloads, devices and visibility into marketplace partners. OCI Access Governance for Attribute and policy based access controls. OCI zero trust packet routing for network microsegmentation. Networking enhancements with next-gen firewalls like fortinet’s fortigate. Observability enhancements. A reference architecture. 1:01:20 Oracle Expands Multi Cloud Capabilities with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure Oracle has partnerships now with AWS, Azure and Google to run Oracle Database@ services. AWS launched, and we talked about hs last week Oracle Database@Azure is now in Six Azure Datacenters with that increasing to 15 soon Oracle Database@Google is now GA in 4 google cloud regions, with expansion to additional regions in process. 1:01:45 Oracle Offers First Zettascale Cloud Computing Cluster Oracle announced the first zettascale cloud computing cluster accelerated by NVIDIA blackwell platform. OCI is now taking orders for the largest AI supercomputer in the cloud available with up to 131,072 NVIDIA blackwell GPUs. (do you think they built this for Elon?) “We have one of the broadest AI infrastructure offerings and are supporting customers that are running some of the most demanding AI workloads in the cloud,” said Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “With Oracle’s distributed cloud, customers have the flexibility to deploy cloud and AI services wherever they choose while preserving the highest levels of data and AI sovereignty.” The 131,072 NVIDIA blackwell GPus deliver 2.4 zettaFLOPs of peak performance. The maximum scale of the OCI supercluster offers more than three times as many GPUs as the frontier supercomputer and more than six times that of other hyperscalers. OCI superclusters can be powered by either the H100 or H200 tensor core GPUs or NVIDIA blackwell GPUs. Was this built for Elon first? Just curious… 1:04:49 Oracle Introduces an AI-centric Generative Development Infrastructure for Enterprises Oracle announced Generative development (gendev) for enterprises, a groundbreaking AI-centric application development infrastructure. It provides innovative development technologies that enables developers to rapidly generate sophisticated applications and make it easy for applications to use AI-powered natural language interfaces and human-centric data. Gendev combines technologies in Oracle Database 23ai, including JSON relational duality views, AI vector search and APEX to facilitate development using Gen AI. “Just as paved roads had to be built for us to get the full benefit of cars, we have to change the application development infrastructure to get the full benefit of AI app generation. GenDev enables developers to harness AI to swiftly generate modular, evolvable enterprise applications that are understandable and safe. Users can interact with data and applications using natural language and find data based on its semantic content,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, Mission-Critical Database Technologies, Oracle . “Oracle Database 23ai provides the AI-centric infrastructure needed to dramatically accelerate generative development for enterprise apps.” Autonomous Database further simplifies and accelerates GenDev with these new key features: Oracle Autonomous Database Select AI with RAG and other enhancements: Enables customers to reduce the risk of hallucinations by leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI Vector Search to provide more precise responses to natural language questions when using large language models (LLMs) with enterprise data. Autonomous Database also eliminates the need for expertise in creating AI pipelines to generate and populate vector embeddings. Broader support for LLMs: Helps organizations gain more value from generative AI with built-in integration from Autonomous Database to additional LLMs: Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Hugging Face. Autonomous Database integrates with 35 different LLMs across seven providers to give customers a wide choice in building GenDev applications. Autonomous Database NVIDIA GPU support: Enables customers to access NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate performance of certain AI data operations without having to worry about provisioning or managing GPU servers. Initially, customers can take advantage of Oracle Machine Learning Notebooks that use GPU-enabled Python packages for resource-intensive workloads, such as generating vector embeddings using transformer models and building deep learning models. Data Studio AI enhancements: Enable customers to prepare and load data using natural language, as well as use a visual “drag and drop” tool to create AI pipelines with text and image vector embeddings. Graph Studio enhancements: Enable users to build Operational Property Graph models without code, new in Oracle Database 23ai, using the built-in self-service tool. Autonomous Database for Developers: Enables users to access the rich set of features and tools provided by Autonomous Database at a flat hourly rate. This provides a lower and more predictable entry point ($0.039/hour = $28.54/month) for development use cases with a simple upgrade path to production deployment. Autonomous Database for Developers Container Image: Gives customers the same fixed shape, flat hourly rate, and capabilities of Autonomous Database for Developers in the cloud, but in a convenient downloadable image. Developers continue to have a fully-managed database with a full suite of built-in tools but can run it directly on their laptops and conveniently use it in their CI/CD pipelines. Autonomous Database Select AI—Synthetic Data Creation: Enables customers to simplify and accelerate building development and test instances of Autonomous Database by enabling them to clone a production database and replace the data with realistic test data generated through AI. 1:06:49 Jonathan – “ I can see how there’s value in things like, you know, document stores, reference information, technical decisions, like a way of organizing the structure of projects so that the developer can better use the tool to reach the end goal. So I actually think this is probably a really good product aimed at helping kind of organize and like shepherd the whole process through because I mean, sure you can sit down in front of chat GPT and ask you to write some code, but with limited context window, you have to kind of keep copying stuff out or restarting the chat. You have to keep referring back to original design documents, which is kind of cumbersome. And so solving the usability of these systems to actually deliver applications is great. And I wish them well with it. I’d really like to play with it.” Closing And that is the week in the cloud! Visit our website, the home of the Cloud Pod where you can join our newsletter, slack team, send feedback or ask questions at theCloud Pod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #theCloudPod