Welcome to episode 283 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Break out your crystal balls and shuffle those tarot decks, because it’s Re:Invent prediction time! Sorry we missed you all last week – the plague has been strong with us. But Justin and Jonathan are BACK, and we’ve got a ton of news, so buckle in and let’s get started!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Not My Snowcones!
Lambda at 10: Still Better Than Windows Containers

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

01:27 The voice of America Online’s “You’ve got mail” has died at age 74

Elwoods Edwards, the voice behind the online service AOL’s iconic “You’ve got mail” sound notification has died at the age of 74. He was just one day shy of his 75th birthday.
The “you’ve got mail” soundbite started in 1989 when Steve Case, CEO of Quantum Computer Services (which will later become America Online or AOL,) wanted to add a human voice to their Quantum online service.
Karen Edwards, who worked as a customer service representative, heard Case discussing the plan and suggested her husband Elwood, a professional broadcaster.
Edwards recorded the famous phrase and others (“Welcome” “File’s done” and “Goodbye” among them) on a cassette recorder in his living room.
He was paid $200 for the service.
His voice is still used to greet users of the current AOL service.

AWS

03:04 It’s Time for RE:Invent Predictions!

Matt

Large Green Computing Reinvent
LLM at the Edge
Something new On S3

Ryan (AI)

Improved serverless observability tools
Expansion of AI Driven workflows in datalakes
Greater Focus on Multi-Account or Multi-region orchestration, centralized compliance management, or enhanced security services

Jonathan

New Edge Computing Capabilities better global application deployment type features. (Cloudflare competitor maybe)
New automated cost optimization tools
Automated RAG/vector to S3

Justin

Managed Backstage or platform like service
New LLM multi-modal replacement or upgrade to Titan
Competitor VM offering to Broadcom

Honorable Mentions

Jonathan:

Deeper integration between serverless and container services

New Region

Enhanced Observability with AI driven debugging tool

Justin:

Multi Cloud management – in a bigger way (Anthos competitor)

Agentic AI toolings

New ARM graviton chip

How many times will AI or Artificial Intelligence be said:

Justin – 35

Jonathan – 72

And now it’s time for Pre:Invent announcements:

20:09 Introducing Express brokers for Amazon MSK to deliver high throughput and faster scaling for your Kafka clusters

Amazon is announcing the general availability of Express Brokers, a new broker type for Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK).
The new Express Broker is designed to deliver up to 3x more throughput per-broker, scale up to 20 times faster, and reduce recovery time by 90 percent – as compared to standard brokers running Apache Kafka.
Express Brokers come preconfigured with Kafka best practices by default.
They also support Kafka API’s and provide the same low latency performance that Amazon MSK customers expect, so they can continue using existing client applications without any changes.
Express Broker provided improved compute and storage elasticity for Kafka applications when using Amazon MSK provisioned clusters.
Some of the key features of the new express brokers include:
- Easier operations with hand-free storage management
- Fewer brokers with up to 3x throughput per broker
- Higher utilization with 20 times faster scaling
- Higher resilience with 90 percent faster recovery
Cost wise (Ohio)
- Express.m7g.4xlarge – 16 vcpu – 64gib – 3.264 per hour
- Standard Broker – 16 vcpu – 64gb – 1.632

21:10 Jonathan – “it seems like would be a no-brainer if you’re running enough single brokers to meet their capacity, then switching to these as long as you maintain your redundancy would be kind of a no-brainer. I wonder what they’ve done exactly to make this new class of instances. They’re not just bigger instances, surely.”

22:13 Amazon EBS now supports detailed performance statistics on EBS volume health

Amazon is really ticking off a ton of Justin’s requests for CloudWatch!
This week, CW gets detailed performance statistics for EBS volumes. This new capability provides you with real-time visibility into the performance of your EBS volumes, making it easier to monitor the health of your storage resources and take action sooner if things go south.
You can access 11 metrics at up to per-second granularity to monitor input/output statistics of your EBS volumes, including driven I/O and I/O latency histograms.

22:44 Justin – “So, you know, in the early days of auto scaling, one of the things that a lot of customers would do was they would create testing when the node would come up and they would actually test the IO throughput to the EBS volume because they were not always created equal. And so if you got a bad EBS volume, you create another one or rescale or kill that node and try again until you get one that performs to your specifications. So now, at least exposing this to you so you can actually just monitor it from CloudWatch, which is a much simpler way than running a bunch of automated tests.”

24:00 EC2 Auto Scaling introduces provisioning control on strict availability zone balance

Amazon EC2 auto scaling groups (ASG) introduce a new capability for customers to strictly balance their workloads across Availability Zones, enabling greater control over provisioning and management of EC2 instances,
Previously, if y...

283: You’ve Got Re:Invent Predictions