Cloud Providers are changing RAPIDLY [REUPLOAD]
MMaximilian Schwarzmüller
Computing/SoftwareSmall Business/StartupsInternet Technology
Transcript
00:00:00cloud providers like versell cloudflare but even aws to some extent are changing rapidly at least
00:00:08some of them rapidly and i think that's good for us developers it's also worth a closer look now
00:00:16cloud providers are changing because we are changing as developers because of course what's
00:00:22changing right now is what we're building and also how we're building both things are changing right
00:00:30now what we're building is of course to some degree what we built before software web apps and so on so
00:00:40that of course to some degree has not changed but we're building more because ai agents make it easier
00:00:49to build stuff and let's be honest there's a lot of stuff a lot of applications and demos in there
00:00:55that will or at least should never see the light of day but we're building more because ai agents make
00:01:02it easier wipe coding of course is a thing maybe not the thing you want to use primarily for serious
00:01:09projects for serious software which you plan on selling or distributing but of course wipe coding
00:01:16can be absolutely fine for your own little internal tools some throwaway software that solves specific
00:01:24problems where you don't care about covering all niche cases or about security or anything like that
00:01:29so we got that and therefore we are of course building more and then of course we are building ai
00:01:36agents and agentic apps whatever that means but in the end it means applications or
00:01:45tools workflows whatever you want to call it that wrap large language models that wrap ai and then do
00:01:52something potentially agentic where you potentially are building something where an ai can call tools
00:01:58dispatch tasks work with a file system and so on so that's the what part that is changing but of course
00:02:05the how is also changing because we are or at least many of us i guess no longer are writing the code by
00:02:14hand we're not doing that anymore at least not 100 of the code instead we are using ai agents like
00:02:23clod or codex or whatever you are using and of course we're letting those agents do more and more so
00:02:33you may use them to write code but maybe you also let them run all kinds of cli commands and tools on
00:02:40your system starting with git for committing and pushing which is relatively trivial and easy all the
00:02:47way up to deployment maybe you may not just be using those agents for generating the code you may also be
00:02:54using them using them to generate docker images or to use cli tools that push the code that push the
00:02:59applications to some hosting provider and that takes me back to the cloud and how cloud providers are
00:03:07changing versell itself rebranded itself to be all about agentic infrastructure if you visit versell.com
00:03:17that is the first thing you read right now and on the right you see four coding agents to ship apps and
00:03:24agents automated by agents so here we got the word agents in that box three times and they are clearly
00:03:33talking about being the platform for anything built by agents including agents themselves now it's pretty
00:03:41similar for cloudflare if i visit cloudflare.com right now i see this message where i learned that
00:03:48cloudflare is one platform for my apps agents and workforce so definitely a bit less agentic first or ai first
00:03:58but we got the word agents right here in the main messaging as well and we'll also see it when we take
00:04:05a look at the services offered by these cloud providers that are changing quickly now netlify is
00:04:13also mentioning ai but not the word agent here they are still mostly about serving your apps your web apps
00:04:22that may have been built with ai but not so much about running ai agents in the cloud and i'll get back
00:04:29to why that matters and if we take a look at aws as a last example here i also right now when i visit this
00:04:35have the word asian in the in the main message i see that i can move at the speed of agents now what is
00:04:42important here or what's interesting and what is of course related to what we're building and how we're
00:04:48building is that all these cloud providers i would say nowadays have three main pillars the the first
00:04:57pillar is about apps and that is of course what they were always about now a little side note of course
00:05:03aws is a bit hard to compare to verse sell and so on because it's more complex it's more about having
00:05:10tons of primitives and managed services it's about all those enterprise customers not to say that
00:05:16verse sell doesn't have enterprise customers but aws is all about giving you all the building blocks you
00:05:22could potentially ever want to build any kind of system in the cloud and therefore they were never
00:05:29primarily or only about running web apps or other pieces of software in the cloud they were about
00:05:36giving you the tools you need to do anything in the cloud to store any kind of data there run any kind
00:05:43of workflow versell netlify and also cloudflare of course were more about hey you got a web application
00:05:53run it here not just about that of course but that was definitely more of their focus so i'll primarily
00:06:00talk about apps here and when i mean apps i mean of course web apps websites whatever you want to call
00:06:05it so that is what we use these cloud providers for and that of course has not really changed you can and
00:06:11you will still use them for that and it doesn't really matter how you build those apps right if you use
00:06:17cloud code or codex the thing that maybe is a bit easier now and where i actually like ai a lot is
00:06:24that deployment gets easier because you can point cloud code or whatever at the relevant documentation
00:06:32pages you can install the clis you can install the versell cli the cloudflare wrangler tool and so on
00:06:39and if you got that installed if you give the agent some some hints at where to search for for deployment
00:06:45details and instructions it can do the deployment for you or at least it can prepare it for you it can
00:06:50write configuration files that all gets a bit simpler because let's be honest deployment can be a bit of
00:06:57a pain if it gets a bit more complex and ai can definitely help a bit there now just as with wipe coding
00:07:03obviously you still want to understand what's going on at least i want to understand what's going on but
00:07:09it can't help there so that pillar of course still exists now the second pillar which we now have
00:07:16however which is new is agents or ai agents that you run those in the cloud because of course
00:07:24we're at this point in time where we're for one still trying to figure out how exactly we'll work
00:07:30with ai as developers but we're also at this point where we're all or where all the companies are about
00:07:37building ai agents and it's sometimes hard to grasp what exactly you want to build and what exactly
00:07:44those agents should be doing for you but at least from the perspective of a ceo you might have an a
00:07:51marketing agent you might have an agent that does customer support a finance agent that helps out in
00:07:59your finance department and so on and as a developer you may have an agent that tackles open issues on
00:08:06your github repository you may have another agent that does research and these agents need to run
00:08:13somewhere now obviously they can run on your system that will be a bit harder if you're working in some
00:08:18bigger company where you don't have unlimited privileges and can't install everything you want
00:08:23on your system but even as a small developer running everything on your system has of course some
00:08:29security implications if you have an ai agent roam around on your system it can potentially do damage
00:08:35accidentally or because of prompt injections and so on so you may want an environment where it can
00:08:42safely operate or where it can't do as much damage now there are loads of different solutions out there
00:08:49you could look into tooling like just bash which is interestingly enough also by versell by the way
00:08:56they are releasing many tools uh that aim to make development with ai easier and just bash essentially
00:09:03is a sandboxing solution which you can run on your system to run an agent inside of a virtual bash with
00:09:10limited privilege and so on so you could use tools like that but of course you could also run those agents
00:09:16in the cloud or you could have a combination and have an agent that runs locally offload certain tasks
00:09:23to the cloud so the cloudflare sandbox sdk for example aims to simplify the process of running tasks
00:09:31agentic tasks with an ai agent doing its thing in the cloud where you can then potentially expose r2
00:09:39cloudflare r2 which is their s3 equivalent as a file system and so on so that you have a throwaway
00:09:46environment where an agent can do whatever you want to do if it breaks stuff it doesn't matter because you
00:09:51can just restart the sandbox and you don't expose your entire system and that of course therefore is a brand
00:09:57new category of things you want to deploy to the cloud or you want to run in the cloud and that is definitely
00:10:04where versell and sandbox are moving towards they want to not just make it easy for you and your
00:10:13agents to push web apps and apps to the cloud that's also something they want to do but not just but
00:10:19instead they also want to make it easy for you to run ai agents you may have built in the cloud and then
00:10:26there is a third pillar i think and that's the ai gateway pillar or however you want to call it you
00:10:34know we got all these ai providers we got proprietary providers obviously like open ai anthropic google and
00:10:42then we got some open source models which may be open source or open weight but running them on your
00:10:49system can be tricky depending on the size now i do have various courses obviously including on chat gpt
00:10:56the advanced guide cloud code but i also have a course about running local large language models because
00:11:03i'm a big fan of those open weight models where you can really just run them with olama or lm studio or
00:11:09other tools on your system but of course for most systems at least you are limited to the smaller
00:11:16models which can still be helpful as i show in this course but if we're talking about bigger models you
00:11:21will still likely want some provider that hosts them for you so that you can access them through the cloud
00:11:30and no matter if we're talking about those open models which you can't or don't want to run on your
00:11:35system or if we're talking about many of the proprietary models these providers like cloudflare but also
00:11:41versell and also aws they offer services that could be called ai gateway in the case of cloudflare or for
00:11:50aws it's amazon badrock but these are simply services that are all about accessing ai through one uniform api
00:12:00where you can basically just switch one value and switch to a different provider where billing is done
00:12:06through cloudflare or aws and where it's therefore easier to access a broad variety of ai models which
00:12:13are easy to monitor easy to switch where you don't need to create tons of accounts with open ai with
00:12:19anthropic with google with whatever other provider you want think of it as open router essentially open router of
00:12:27course is a service that makes it easy to switch between different models and cloudflare versell aws
00:12:33they essentially have their own open router like solution you could say there are some differences
00:12:40because open router is really just a router which is about funneling your request to different providers
00:12:47whereas cloudflare and aws for example they also provide hosting for these models so with amazon badrock
00:12:56for example you can access anthropic models that are hosted on aws infrastructure where as a customer
00:13:04you can control in which region it should be hosted where you have greater uh control over where your data
00:13:11gets stored or who gets access to your data and that of course can matter to enterprise customers so it's
00:13:17actually a combination of things here it's convenience obviously because it's easier to switch between
00:13:23different models you can even set up routing rules where different requests may get different models
00:13:29automatically you have a unified billing experience but besides the convenience it's also about more
00:13:36more control over where the model is hosted and so on at least for some of these providers
00:13:41and i think therefore these are the main pillars we see right now for these major cloud providers and i
00:13:50find it quite interesting that for example netlify is still mostly about that first pillar here it's
00:13:58their decision their strategy whereas cloudflare and bursell and aws and many others by the way are of
00:14:05course branching out and are trying to cover all three pillars now i think as a developer no matter if
00:14:12you're building ai agents or not or and no matter if you're working with ai or not these are great
00:14:19developments because one nice side effect is that these cloud providers in their effort to make it easier for
00:14:27ai agents to use them are giving us more ways of accessing their services they are improving their
00:14:36cli tools their documentation to provide all that information to agents which spoiler you as a human
00:14:43can also read so that's pretty nice and they're building more useful primitives i mean cloudflare
00:14:49alone and just to be super clear this is not some paid advertisement or anything like that these are
00:14:55really just services i'm using but cloudflare alone they released so many new nice services like dynamic
00:15:04workers where one worker which is like a serverless solution provided by them where you can execute code
00:15:10in the cloud where one worker can spin up more workers to offload certain tasks no matter if you're
00:15:16you're building ai agents or not this can be a useful feature if you're building any kind of service or
00:15:22tooling where your customers can maybe share some data or code with you or where you want to execute some code
00:15:30that involves customer data or customer code it's nice to have primitives where you can securely do so
00:15:37in throwaway environments and therefore these new capabilities are pretty nice to have even if you
00:15:44don't care about ai at all even if you're not building ai agents and that's why i'm pretty excited about
00:15:50these changes in cloud providers and why i think it's more interesting than ever to play around with different
00:15:57providers if you've used netlify forever maybe give vercel or cloudflare a try and dive back into their docs
00:16:05maybe together with ai to understand what they offer and how you can build on top of them
00:16:11anyways that's just something i'm observing something i'm pretty excited about and as always i'm interested
00:16:16in hearing your perspective on that and what i maybe missed or what you think about this transformation
00:16:22of cloud providers and where we're heading to.