William: 0:00

If I was a dancing person, I would dance right now, but I don't dance.

Eyvonne: 0:04

Yeah, I'm not a dancer either. We didn't even dance at our wedding.

William: 0:08

The Cloud Gambit is getting adopted into the Packet Pushers family of podcasts. Welcome to another episode of the Cloud Gambit. And you know what's crazy, yvonne, I started this podcast back in August of 2023. And I think right around 2024, and I think it was in August. It was almost like exactly a year.

Eyvonne: 0:46

You joined as co-host, thank you, by the way yeah, it's been fun, and does it feel like it's been almost a year?

William: 0:54

it doesn't really feel. It's one of the few things in my life right now that doesn't feel like a year like everything else, like work and other stuff. It's like, oh, I feel like I've been doing this for 20 years. But yeah, it's been, it's been good, I really enjoyed it and it's so much nicer to have a podcast and not be alone, to have someone that you could talk to. Just different perspectives, different opinions. You know it's been great. Today's going to be kind of like a news episode. We have lots of news, by the way, both about the show and with some major news headlines as well. I guess, first things first, what's going on in the world of Yvonne? Are you staying cool?

Eyvonne: 1:44

No, not cool. Well, fortunately everybody's familiar with the shed at this point and it is air-conditioned and I even have some wonderful humidity controls, so you know workday is pretty comfortable. But we are in the midst of an eastern northeastern heat wave so it's been pretty warm here in the south midwest northeast so so it's been pretty pretty warm here in um in the south midwest northeast, so it's been a little toasty. Um. Lots of, lots of fun life stuff going on. I've got a kid who, by the who's getting married. It may be done by the time this comes out. So we've been in the throes of of wedding planning and summer fun and kid activities and got a lot coming up in the month of July, including with the podcast. So we're excited.

William: 2:34

There's a lot going on. Yeah, planning a wedding is no easy feat. That can be a very busy and very stressful time.

Eyvonne: 2:44

And it is something I can do. But it is not a skill set that comes naturally. So it has been, but it's been fun. You know, it's kind of a once in a lifetime thing, so we're embracing it for the fun that it is, and we'll look at the credit card bill later.

William: 3:01

Yeah, I love it. That's smart. So yeah, yesterday. So I'm kind of on a quasi vacation. I'm working from the northeast, uh, where my in-laws are, and I spent somewhere around like nine hours in the sun with my kids yesterday at this amusement park, hershey park in pennsylvania, and if you can't tell in the video, I'm, I'm, I'm cooked, uh, the heat index was like 105 and you know the sweat and steam that I produced personally probably power my home for a week. It was hot.

Eyvonne: 3:34

Sunscreen is your friend, william, and wear a hat Next time you may send me going on vacation. I'm screened. Yeah, I'm gonna. I going to have to start my uh, my worst sunscreen and wear a hat, mantra.

William: 3:48

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty bad. So my, my kid, he doesn't complain. He's nine years old and you know, this is like. The only thing he said all day was like it was probably about 15 minutes in and we were just walking through the park and he looks at me and he's like dad in. And we were just walking through the park and he looks at me and he's like dad. This is like a different kind of hot. This is really really hot, I guess it is. Let me tell you and it's.

Eyvonne: 4:13

it's been a very wet season, at least here, for us as well, and so the humidity is also, uh, through the roof, and we're, of course, trying to tend to the yard, because there's an outdoor wedding in our future, and, yeah, it's been a fun summer.

William: 4:28

So the first big piece of news that we have is the cloud game, but is getting adopted into the Packet Pushers family of podcasts. Now, for those of you that don't know about Packet Pushers, which it would be hard to believe, but they were founded in I think it was 2010, by Greg Farrow and Ethan Banks with the goal of really creating a platform where just technical professionals could discuss technology, share practical knowledge like real-world stuff and really, I guess, explore like industry type developments, and over the years, I think they've solidified, you know, their reputation as a uh, a leading voice in like enterprise it media, if you will. So their network of podcast has also evolved by adding, uh, lots of new shows over the years that specialize in different areas. So what does this mean, just at the top, for the cloud gamut, like what's going to happen?

William: 5:34

So we will both stay aboard as hosts, yvonne and myself um, the the transition, like the final transition, happens July 23rd. So on July 23rd, that will be the first episode under the Packet Pushers family and the show will continue to be released on a bi-weekly basis. It does move to oh boy, wednesday, yes, wednesday, okay, so from Tuesday to Wednesday, thank you, yvonne, and the RSS feed will change, so you will need to resubscribe on your preferred catcher when the time comes, and we will send out a reminder as well. Am I missing anything?

Eyvonne: 6:27

I don't think so. It's exciting for me because Packet Pushers has been kind of a stalwart technology source of information for me since I started in enterprise IT. You know I started my first enterprise role in 2010 and then, you know, discovered the podcast within a year or two of that, met the Packet Pushers folks out at Cisco Live and got to be on the show back in the early days and really that community from you know, the 2010s really helped me grow and fuel my career, and so it's really exciting to to be part of their network and to be associated with everything from you know network break. They've got their heavy networking podcast. They also have strategy and leadership and operations conversations. So I think we you know our content fills a unique slot there. We both have networking backgrounds, but we are also both firmly entrenched in the cloud world these days, um and so just super excited about uh, uh, yeah, join, joining that network and being a part of the Packet Pushers world.

William: 7:55

Yes, If I was. If I was a dancing person, I would dance right now, but I don't dance.

Eyvonne: 8:02

I'm not a dancer either. We didn't even dance at our wedding. Like we're just.

William: 8:07

I didn't either.

Eyvonne: 8:08

Yeah, I sometimes look at my friends and colleagues who have a cultural background of dancing and body movement with envy and all. But yeah, that's not the world I came, came from and I'm too old to fix it now yeah, sometimes I dance.

William: 8:30

I guess I dance and sing in the shower, um, sometimes. But yeah, that's a shower. Time is reserved for my, my singing antics. Yeah, I try not to take it outside of the you know privacy of my own home definitely I'm an appreciator of music.

Eyvonne: 8:45

I'll say that. Said that way.

William: 8:48

So, yeah, again, we're excited and we will send out another reminder closer to the time when the transition happens. And that is not the only big news that has happened. Um, recently there's actually been a lot of stuff too much to talk about. I took three, I think, two or three stories that I think are uh, pretty, pretty noteworthy. I guess I'll go through the first one. This, basically and this is a big one this is actually something I called a while back, which I never call anything like lately, I feel like which I never call anything Like lately. I feel like I don't call anything correctly because the landscape is just very different. I feel like it's a surprise every week, to be honest. But Google Cloud has basically donated its agent to agent or 8A protocol to the Linux Foundation, which is a great place.

William: 9:44

I love this decision and it basically it's creating an independent project. You know, that's backed by other big names, other big tech giants, like you know, aws, cisco's, microsoft's, like Salesforce's of the world, and to me this is noteworthy. I mean, there's a lot of reasons. I could probably ramble. I'm going to try not to ramble, um, but I think the first is it really represents that crucial step towards, uh, I'd say like standardization, like in this emerging crazy ai centric agent based economy, ai-centric agent-based economy. So this A2A protocol, basically what it does is it provides a single or just a common language for AI agents to discover capabilities and exchange information and then allows them to coordinate very complex tasks across different third parties, platforms, vendors, et cetera, which is huge.

William: 10:52

And I think the second thing is it really again it breaks down the silos that I think have limited AI's potential I'll just say it that way Especially for enterprise adoption, because it creates an open standard under a neutral governance. So the industry is acknowledging that agent interoperability is far too important to be controlled, obviously, by a single company. And I think, third is probably the timing is just very strategic. So with, I mean, I'd say like over what? Like 50, 100 companies now supporting the protocol, like including AWS and Cisco, you know as it's, you know more recent validators, we're seeing the industry coalesce around a like a real standard, just as agent technology is beginning to really proliferate. So, yeah, I think it's the donation to the Linux Foundation ensures, you know, at this critical time, that this critical component remains, you know, vendor agnostic and community driven. Any thoughts from you, yvonne?

Eyvonne: 12:10

Well, I think it's a really important step and if you look back through the history of our technologies, you know if you go all the way back to the Internet of our technologies, you know if you go all the way back to the internet we've always had standards and public organizations that help dictate and drive interoperability of technology. And when that's happened, that's when we've seen the most rapid adoption and ubiquitousness of that technology, whether you're going back and talking about networking protocols, ieee and those types of organizations, or whether you're talking about Kubernetes and how it was open sourced and I believe that happened in 2014, if my notes are correct. Yes, the open source of Kubernetes and what we've seen there with the containers, cloud native technologies, container orchestration and I think the thing that we know is that even when a technology is open sourced, there's plenty of room in the marketplace for vendors to create add value, support that technology. You know, we've seen that. You know, in the decade plus since Kubernetes was released, you know we've got every major cloud provider has their own Kubernetes engine. We've got, you know, on-premises solutions for that as well. But also it provides a foundation for interoperability and also gives enterprises a firm foundation of understanding what that technology is going to look like and it solidifies it.

Eyvonne: 14:07

I think one of the things that Google donating A2A to the Linux Foundation is going to do is also going to solidify that that technology is here to stay, that it's a real thing, that it can be relied on, and it will become the central focal point for how AI agents and systems interact with one another, and that will go a long way to helping us advance the technology in a way that folks don't feel so locked in or beholden to one particular vendor, because I think right now that's a bit of what we've got right Like because the ages don't interoperate well and there's not yet an ecosystem. I've said a lot of words, but that's really what I'm getting to is that this is going to help an ecosystem build up around AI technology and agents so that they can interoperate and interact. There'll be bumps and there'll be challenges, but it's a great step.

William: 15:16

Yeah, those are all great points and the interoperability is so huge and I think before A2A and MCP specifically, you basically had a scenario where you had to create one-off If you wanted to integrate. It was like for each major LLM you had single integrations for whatever model, back to whatever technology. You're working with guardrails and the sort of locking things down and keeping things safe became very challenging and you had so much custom stuff. So these two really flip the script there and make AI broadly accessible and adoptable in a secure way that we expect to have to be able to adopt them with, I guess.

William: 16:04

On to the next thing thing, and this is another big one. So on to the next news story. Uh, I'm just gonna read the headline hold on, this is a big one. So, um, open ai taps google unprecedented cloud deal, despite ai rivalry sources say so. I thought this was interesting and many, many would call this a very surprising twist because you know, open ai well, let's just start here. So open ai, you know, has basically, according to the news, finalized a deal to use google cloud like services, kind of in the way that they used Microsoft Azure Compute for its growing compute needs, and anybody that knows any of these companies will know that Gemini, google, they're all kind of competing, if you could call it. I guess it is competing in the AI race right now. So there is some intense rivalry between some of these companies and this deal reportedly finalized in.

William: 17:07

May and marks a significant shift in competitive dynamics in the AI industry. So why does this matter? So just my thoughts on it is it really highlights just this staggering compute demand of building AI in 2025. So OpenAI's decision to really diversify beyond Microsoft Azure from its earlier days really underscores how absolutely massive these computing requirements for training and deploying AI models are sort of reshaping business relationships. So even on OpenAI's annualized revenue seven numbers here in my notes so it's surged to 10 billion. So its infrastructure needs continue to basically outpace what a single, you know cloud provider can probably deliver in the time that they need it, I would assume.

William: 18:12

Uh, and that the second thing is um and this is just something that comes top of mind is it kind of represents probably a strategic pivot for OpenAI to sort of reduce dependency on Microsoft at the end of the day? Since ChatGVT launched late 2022. Openai has sort of been making different moves to kind of diversify its infrastructure, like that computational substrate, including the I think it was like 500 billion Stargate data center project. I think SoftBank and Oracle were involved with that. One Deals with companies like CoreWeave and now Google Cloud. So you know, that screams to me just diversification, prevent lock-in and just kind of like trying to think ahead for future capacity demands. Any thoughts, yvonne?

Eyvonne: 19:12

Well, the winner in all this is NVIDIA. You know they continue to win right now and it's. You know we were talking early in the show about kind of our career trajectories and technically kind of our career trajectories and technically. And one of the things that you know, back in my very first job at a mom and pop ISP again, I was, you know, 19, 20, they made us build our own PCs, right, and so they ordered the hardware and, like part of us getting familiar with our environment was like you're going to assemble your own hardware, build your own PC.

Eyvonne: 19:55

And I remember, you know, there was a time when it was and there was a significant growth in hardware and hardware needs and then we shifted into a point in time in the industry where we didn't really care as much about hardware.

Eyvonne: 20:25

You know everything was pretty much standardized on x86.

Eyvonne: 20:27

You had some outliers there, you had your AS400s, you had your, you know, some customized compute systems, but we really just sort of ordered the next fastest thing. The next time the refresh cycle came around and it didn't really impact what we were building or how we were building. Well, now we've shifted the pendulumist one back again and now we really care about hardware and right now, compute processing power is really a rate limiting factor for everybody in the AI space, and I think you know what this move signals is how important that compute capacity is and how it's creating, maybe, relationships that we would not have imagined, you know, even 18 months ago, because there is such a dependence on powerful compute and what that's going to mean for the future of infrastructure. What's it going to mean for power generation, what's it going to mean for data centers, tooling, all of those things Like there's a. You know there's a five to 10 year trajectory, I think, where physical plant is going to again become incredibly important, where it's just been a thing you've had to have for the last decade.

William: 21:57

It's not going to be that way. Moving forward.

Eyvonne: 21:59

And so there's some significant strategic advantage to folks who figure that out and who are innovating in that particular space.

William: 22:09

Yeah, good points and I agree, nvidia is like one of these big casinos at this point.

Eyvonne: 22:16

Yeah, they're just backing up the money truck and that's going to continue for a while, it appears.

William: 22:24

Yeah, I mean, that's one thing in common with all of these different everybody that's running or in the like, if you will like, if we're thinking OSI model, like the layer one of AI infrastructure, like everything's got the commonality of needing GPUs. Um, yeah, it's interesting to see how that'll play out. Last thing that we that I have on on my list is so I just randomly came across this when I was what are they called? Dim scrolling the other yesterday, I think. Um, tech giants see 150 emission surge in three years amid ai boom, and all the links to these will be in the show notes if you want to go back and you know, read the. You know from the source what I'm, what I'm talking about here. But basically, this new uh un report basically goes into operational carbon emissions for the world's top uh tech companies and then looks at, like, how it rose an average of 150 percent between 2020 and 2023. And, of course, when you think about that much for rise, you're thinking, okay, cloud and ai data centers, so like. Aside from these numbers being staggering, it notes that amazon's operational emissions grew 182 percent, microsoft's by 155 percent, meta by 145 and alphabet by 138. Good on you, alphabet, um, and that's just three years. So the un's international telecommunication Union I think I'm getting that right Directly links this major uptick to recent breakthroughs in AI and demand for digital services like cloud computing, yada, yada, yada.

William: 24:20

So the big thing here, my big takeaway, is these data centers are driving like an unprecedented electricity demand surge. You know they consumed let me look at my notes 415 terawatt hours of electricity in 2024, about 1.5% of global power demand. At current growth rates, data center electricity consumption will hit 945 terawatt hours by 2030. And that surpasses Japan's entire annual electricity consumption, if you want to use that as a baseline. So what do you think, yvonne? How are we going to get more power?

Eyvonne: 25:22

How are we going to get more power, advanced deals or interest in startups that are doing small form nuclear, which scares a lot of folks initially, but when you hear about how it works, it's incredibly safe. There's also, you know, a lot of work going in on in solar. I think those are the two big areas that are being actively explored nuclear and solar. We're going to need more power. I think that's a reality. Also, I think even for organizations that have had a deep commitment to trying to be green or carbon neutral, to run environmentally conscious data centers, the demand has just been so great that we've not figured out how to do that 100% yet, and I think that will happen over time. I also think right now, we're in a political environment that is not as strongly incentivizing, you know, green initiatives, and I think that's going to have an impact as well.

Eyvonne: 26:31

I don't think that'll be a long-term reality, but I think for the next four to eight years we're going to see that, and and so I, you know, I know a few young folks that are in this technology arena power energy again, like I was talking about physical plant and I think it is an incredible area for growth and expertise and innovation that we're going to see because there's a demand for it, like it's a problem we've got to solve. If we don't solve it, then you know the advancements we're seeing are just not going to be able to continue. And if there's anything that I believe in, it is the ability of capitalists to solve problems that are preventing them from increasing the revenue. So I think we will have solutions and we will develop them and then iterate them and improve on them over time.

William: 27:34

Kind of feels like we're trying to figure out how to power the plane, as we're taking off on the wrong way, right.

Eyvonne: 27:42

Yeah, I think so, but I think that's always how it is with innovation. That's always how it is with innovation. You know it's. If you look at the periods of rapid innovation that have happened throughout history, you know, from from the time the Wright brothers flew that first plane until we had commercial airlines, it was 50, 75 years. I mean it just wasn't that big of a delta of time. When you think about it, especially now looking at the innovations we've had at that space in the last 50 years, you know, yeah, there have been incremental improvements, but not the slope of the curve of the innovation that happened initially.

William: 28:27

I think that's always the case.

Eyvonne: 28:28

You know, you hear, see this rapid period of expansion and innovation, and then we kind of hit a plateau where we move to incremental improvement. We've seen that with cell phones, for example. You know, mobile devices exploded onto the scene with Steve Jobs and the iPhone in the 2000s, and then 2010s, 2000s it's all running together and we saw rapid expansion. And then we saw, you know, second order organizations, companies, be developed, you know, uber, lyft, all of those things. And, yes, now we see the AI innovation. But there are these huge expansions and then more incremental improvement, and that's typically the history of how innovation has happened, and I think we're going to see the same kind of thing. It's just right. Now AI is in that period of rapid expansion that requires more data, more power, period of rapid expansion that requires more data, more power. Five to ten years will will. That will stop and we will be in the incremental improvement arena again, and then there'll be the next thing like that's uh, it's kind of how these things go super, ai, super intelligence.

Eyvonne: 29:46

Well, we're gonna add super onto it, I think the question is do the robots come in this wave or the next wave? That's what I want to know, because that is I need. I need a robot in my house to do things, mostly laundry dishes, cooking. If I could, yeah.

William: 30:03

But the laundry and the dishes are like, seem very doable by some of the demonstrations I've seen, both out of some of the robotics in china and even like, uh, like tesla optimus, um, it's pretty, pretty wild what, what some of these robots can do, um, and honestly I think if you you can buy a robot for 15 grand, that does a lot, and it does a lot very well. That's huge.

William: 30:35

It changes the game right, it does change the game. It frees up a lot of time, but I don't know how I would feel about a robot walking around in my home. It just seems kind of I don't know.

Eyvonne: 30:47

I'm sure it might change, well, I mean we've all seen our robot, you know, and we don't want to have to terminate Vicky, I think that was the name of the hive mind computer in that movie. But I think we're we're a ways away, although we've seen some self-preservation out of our existing systems, reservation out of our existing AI systems. But you know, I am willing to take the risk if I can get a robot to help me with housework.

William: 31:17

Frankly, it's worth it. I would agree on that one. Okay, all right. Well, I guess we both have hard stops coming up and this is, yeah, exciting times. And remember to resubscribe when we do switch over on July 23rd. Anything else, yvonne, before we jump.

Eyvonne: 31:36

No, we'll be sure we share all those details on the socials. Please. If you haven't checked out the Packet Pushers Network, go check out their family of podcasts. There's all kinds of interesting information over there and great folks and