New Travel Season | ✉️ #53

Illustration of a man with glasses and curly hair for "MKDEV DISPATCH #53 - NEW TRAVEL SEASON" with paper airplane graphics on an orange and gray background.

Hey! 👋 This week marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter for us, as we resume our event tour, taking us to cities like Copenhagen, Dublin, Berlin, Munich, Lisbon, Turin, Madrid, Helsinki, Valencia, Novi Sad, and San Sebastián. Beyond the places we visit, what truly excites us is the opportunity to meet new people, share what we do, and reconnect with old friends and collaborators.

In each of these cities, we’ll be showcasing what we do best: our expertise in cloud and AI consulting. This autumn and winter, mkdev will be demonstrating how we help businesses transform digitally, optimizing their cloud infrastructures and leveraging artificial intelligence to solve real-world problems. Our approach goes beyond technology; we aim to create solutions that make an impact, simplify processes, and, above all, bring tangible value to the teams and organizations we work with.

Each event is an opportunity to inspire others, listen to their challenges, and share our vision of how cloud and AI can be key tools to help them achieve their goals. There is no greater satisfaction than seeing how our solutions help turn ideas into reality, and that is the driving force behind our continuous growth and learning.

We also know that teamwork and human connections are fundamental in our industry. That’s why, every time we pack our bags, we are filled with excitement knowing that, beyond talking about technology, we’ll have the chance to reconnect with amazing people, learn from their experiences, and strengthen the relationships we’ve built over the years.

So, as we embark on this new season of events, we do so with energy, with the confidence that we are offering our best in every presentation, every conversation, and every interaction. And most importantly, with the certainty that each step brings us closer to new opportunities for growth and collaboration.

We’re ready for what’s to come, and we hope you’ll join us on this adventure.

What We've Shared

Before anything else we continue to explore FinOps and how our industry embraces the things we've been talking a lot on our YouTube channel and our blog. We've dedicated an entire episode of our DevOps accents reviewing the recent Flexerea repost on state of the cloud:

State of the Cloud Report, Cloud Waste, FinOps and Multi-Cloud | DA #45
Who benefits the most from DevOps Community? A video version of the previous DA episode where we discuss the importance of being part of the community. If you prefer watching rather than listening.

And on the website we have two new articles! Can you guess the topic? That's right! FinOps and how you can optimize your cloud costs:

AWS Compute Savings Plans: Are They Right for You?: In this one Kirill explains everything you need to know about AWS Compute Savings Plans and help you decide if they are a good fit for your organization.
On the GCP side Pablo covers everything about use of GCP FinOps, cost management and how to setup Direct VPC egress to reduce Cloud Run costs. Learn from here: GCP FinOps Hub: The Key to Mastering Your Finances on Google Cloud

What We've Discovered

Enhancing Kubernetes workload isolation and security using Kata Containers. Apparently you can run Kata containers EKS. Isolation and security wise, this could be a great option for many regulated environments. Check this one!
Shipt’s Algorithm Squeezed Gig Workers. They Fought Back. Researchers from NYU explored the use of GPT-4 to create puzzles for Connections, a word-matching game by The New York Times. They found that while LLMs have strong linguistic knowledge, they lack metacognition to fully grasp the human perspective in puzzle-making. By breaking tasks into smaller workflows, the researchers improved puzzle quality. Human players rated GPT-4-generated puzzles as comparable to those from the Times, showing AI’s potential as a puzzle-assistant. However, human creativity still outperforms AI in originality.
Will the "AI Scientist" Bring Anything to Science? Another one on AI. An international team created an "AI scientist" (a new replacement for British Scientists apparently) capable of generating hypotheses, running experiments, and writing papers. The AI was compared to an early Ph.D. student, generating creative but often flawed ideas. It struggled with coherently writing results and occasionally made things up. While AI for science, popularized by tools like AlphaFold, shows promise, critics argue that such tools may not yield truly valuable discoveries. The AI scientist could still aid researchers in domains where simulations are feasible, like quantum computing.

A small promotion

If you still struggle with your cloud costs or uncertain if your money still going down the drain even after all our efforts with FinOps videos and articles, it's about time to apply for our Free Cloud Cost audit program. This one has a guaranteed effect! I guarantee it!

The 54th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, September 27th. See you next time!