Welcome to episode 285 of the Explain it to me Like I’m 5 Podcast, formerly known as The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! We’ve got a lot of news this week, including the last of our coverage from re:Invent, ChatGTP Pro, FPGA, and even some major staffing turnovers.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Throw $200 dollars in a fire with ChatGPT Pro
Jeff Barr is wrapped up by Agentic AI
The Tribble with Trilliums
The Wind in the Quantum Willows
Rise of the dead instances FPGA and PowerPC
Jeff Barr is replaced by Nova
The Cloud Pod: Return of the dead instances types
After 6 year Jeff Barr hands over the reigns to the CloudPod
For our 6th birthday Jeff barr Retires
For our 6th birthday jeff barr delegates announcements to the cloud pod
6 years of meaningless PR drivel
6 years of cloud news and we still don’t know what Quantum computing is

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

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General News

HAPPY 6th BIRTHDAY!

2:00 HashiCorp at re:Invent 2024: Security Lifecycle Management with AWS

Hashi is a big sponsor of re:Invent, so of course they had some news of their own to release.
HCP Vault Secrets auto-rotation is now generally available.
Dynamic secrets are generally available via HCP Vault Secrets.
Secrets sync will help keep your secrets synced with AWS Secrets Manager. It still appears to be one direction, but you can now also view secrets in AWS Secrets Manager that are managed by vault.
HCP Vault Radar, now in beta, automates the detection and identification of unmanaged secrets in your code, including AWS infrastructure configurations

03:10 Matthew – “This qualifies under the category of things that I feel like we talked about so long ago, I just already assumed was GA. I’m surprised that it wasn’t.”

03:34 HashiCorp at re:Invent 2024: Infrastructure Lifecycle Management with AWS

Terraform AWS provider is now at 3 billion downloads.
The AWS Cloud Control Provider is also now generally available with the 1.0 release.
This is the provider built around AWS Cloud Control API to bring new services to Hashicorp Terraform faster.
In June, AWS and Hashi partnered to co-develop a comprehensive set of terraform policies in compliance with standards like CIS, HIPAA, FINOS and the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
In beta now, pre-written sentinel policy sets for AWS available via the Terraform Registry.
- Supported services include: EC2, KMS, Cloudtrail, S3, IAm, VPC, RDS, EFS
Terraform Stacks are now in public beta to simplify infrastructure provisioning and management at scale.
When deploying and managing infrastructure at scale, teams usually need to provision the same infrastructure multiple times with different input values, across multiple cloud provider accounts, regions and environments and landing zones.
Before stacks, there was no built-in way to provision and manage the lifecycle of these instances as a single unit in Terraform, making it difficult to manage each infrastructure root module individually.

05:43 Ryan – “I’m a big fan of doing policy evaluation at, you know, Terraform and VolkTime just to get that feedback directly to whoever’s executing that Terraform, rather than have it be a security ticket later or just blocked by permissions. I feel like it’s very good feedback. So having pre-built policies makes life easy, because developing those policies isn’t exactly fun, but that’s super cool.”

08:14 Terraform 1.10 improves handling secrets in state with ephemeral values

Terraform 1.10 is now generally available, with several new features, including:
Handling secrets. Ephemeral Values to enable secure handling of secrets.
Before secrets get persisted in the plan or state file. Since the secrets are stored in plaintext within these artifacts, any mismanaged access to the file would compromise the secrets.
To address this, ephemeral values. These values are not stored in any artifact. Not the plan file or the statefile. They are not expected to remain consistent from plan to apply, or from one plan/apply round to the next.
Ephemeral supports marking input and output variables as ephemeral. Within ephemeral blocks, which declare that something needs to be created or fetched separately for each terraform phase, then used to configure some other ephemeral object, and then explicitly closed before the end of the phase.

09:22 Ryan – “I’ve had to battle this with security teams who are looking at, you know, approving Terraform enterprise. I’ve had people pull secrets out of the state file and then use them inappropriately. This is a great feature to see. So pretty psyched about it.”

09:49 Intel CEO Gelsinger forced out after board lost confidence in turnaround

plan.

Interestingly on stage at AWS, they made the claim that 50% of new CPU capacity was on AWS Graviton. Note great for Intel.
CEO Pat Gelsinger has been forced out of Intel after 4 years, handing control to two lieutenants as they search for a successor.
Reports are that he left after a board meeting where the directors felt his plan was too costly and ambitious to turn Intel around – efforts so far weren’t working, and the progress of change wasn’t fast enough.
- Because yeah replacing the top guy is a sure fire way to ...