Welcome to episode 350 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and Matt are this week?s hosts, and they?ve scoured the clouds for all the latest news and announcements, including that Mythos drop. Is it the AI apocalypse that everyone is claiming? We?ve also got news from DigitalOcean, an email from Space, Claude and even some Guardrails. There?s a lot to cover, so let?s get started!

Titles we almost went with this week

Two AIs Walk Into a Studio and Actually Sound Good  No More Idle GPUs Twiddling Their Tensor Cores  When AWS Availability Zones Become Unavailability Zones Token by Token Codex Pricing Finally Makes Cents Just Ask AWS Where All Your Money Went You?ve Got mTLS: Amazon SES Locks Down Email Security Cost Explorer Finally Speaks Plain English Missiles Make AWS Multi-Region Strategy Mandatory Shell Yeah Your Agent State Now Persists S3 Files Finally Lets You ls Your Bucket Claude Found Your Zero-Day Before Lunch One Guardrail to Rule All Your AWS Accounts Premium SSD Wins Azure VDI but Your Wallet Cries No More Amnesia: Your Bedrock Agent Keeps Its Memories Pay Per Claw Anthropic Sharpens Its Pricing Policy Even Astronauts Need IT Support for Microsoft Outlook AWS still can?t answer the question of what EC2 Other is AWS announces several new Unavailability Zones

A big thanks to this week?s sponsor:

There are a lot of cloud cost management tools out there, but only Archera provides insured commitments. It sounds fancy, but it?s really simple. Archera gives you the cost savings of a 1 or 3-year AWS Savings Plan with a commitment as short as 30 days. If you do not use all the cloud resources you have committed to, Archera will literally cover the difference. Other cost management tools may say they offer ?insured commitments?, but remember to ask: Will you actually give me my rebate? Because Archera will. 

Check out thecloudpod.net/archera to schedule a demo today. 

Follow Up

00:45 Ground control to Microsoft: Artemis 2 astronauts deal with Outlook hiccup in deep space

Artemis 2 astronauts aboard NASA?s Orion spacecraft encountered a common Outlook configuration issue on their first day in space, requiring remote IT support from Mission Control to resolve it by reloading the commander?s files. NASA uses commercial off-the-shelf software like Microsoft Outlook for crew scheduling and personal communications, while keeping primary flight systems on separate radiation-hardened hardware, illustrating a practical separation of concerns in mission-critical environments. The Outlook issue stemmed from the app having configuration problems when no direct network connection is available, which the flight director noted is not uncommon, raising questions about offline-readiness for software deployed in connectivity-constrained environments. This incident is a useful reminder for cloud and enterprise software users that applications heavily dependent on network connectivity can... Chapters (00:00:00) - Episode 350(00:00:51) - NASA: Outgoing Hiccup in Deep Space(00:03:36) - Iran Declares AWS, Google and Microsoft Data Centers as Military Targ(00:07:53) - Codex Only Pricing with Pay as You Go(00:09:50) - Will Bedrock prioritize its higher-priced plans?(00:16:04) - Anthropic Expands Cloud Hardware Partnership With Google, Broadcom(00:17:42) - Anthropic's Cloud Mythos Preview Announced(00:21:51) - Amazon SES adds managed daemons to Mail Manager(00:25:35) - Bedrock Guardrails 1.8 in AWS Cost Management(00:33:20) - Amazon's EFS Proxy for S3 Files(00:35:10) - NetApp: No S3Fs for AI & ML(00:39:09) - GK Inference Gateway now supports real-time and async workload(00:40:36) - Gemini API Documentation and Coding Agents(00:43:35) - Azure Network Watcher: Firewall Comparison vs. Standard SSD(00:50:33) - DigitalOcean Launches Cloud Security PAM(00:52:28) - Week in the Cloud: September 7, 2016(00:53:41) - A Top Microsoft Engineer Reveals How Microsoft Vaporized a Tr

Welcome to episode 349 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin and Jonathan managed to make it into the studio this week, and they brought a guest! Dave Garaway jas joined us, and brought some on-the-ground knowledge from GTC, plus a slew of supply chain attacks, Gmail username changes and Claude?s code debacle. We?ve got all this and more ? so let?s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week AWS Console Gets a Makeover Nobody Asked For From Eight Hours to 22 Seconds, Hackers Got Fast AWS Spring Cleaning Hits Nine Services Hard Trivy Pursuit Turns Into a 500K Credential Heist Skip the Consultant, AWS Security Now Hacks Itself AWS Pen Testing Agent Pokes Your Cloud Around the Clock Your Cringey Gmail Address Gets a Second Chance Stop Babysitting Servers, Let Google Handle MCP AI Agent Untangles Your Kubernetes Networking Spaghetti One Bad Actor Poisons a Hundred Million Downloads Lambda Finally Hits the Gym with 32 GB From GPU Hype to Production Inference Without the Hyperscaler Headache Follow Up

01:28 Hegseth, Trump had no authority to order Anthropic to be blacklisted, judge says

A US District Judge granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction blocking the Department of War?s blacklisting, ruling the designation was First Amendment retaliation rather than a legitimate national security action. The court found officials lacked authority to blacklist Anthropic without considering less restrictive alternatives or providing evidence of an urgent security risk, noting the designation was triggered by Anthropic?s ?hostile manner through the press.? The practical business impact was already substantial before the ruling, with three trade deals cancelled and other potential partners delaying negotiations, representing potentially billions in lost contracts over five years. Anthropic continues to balance the legal fight with maintaining its government relationships, publicly emphasizing alignment with the Department of War?s mission around safe AI deployment even while litigating against it. For cloud and AI vendors, this case establishes a notable precedent around government procurement decisions and First Amendment protections, with implications for how companies publicly challenge federal contracting positions.

02:35 Jonathan ? ?I?m guessing Anthropic is super busy with all the people coming to them for deals right now, because it seems to me that Anthropic is getting all the business customers and OpenAI are getting the personal customers.?  

04:08 Delve Announces Changes and New Customer Support Measures 

Delve has responded to allegations from an anonymous Substack post by denying claims of faked evidence, clarifying that independent AICPA-accredited auditors, not Delve, issue SOC 2 reports and ISO 27001 certifications.  The company published... Chapters (00:00:07) - The Cloud Pod(00:01:37) - Anthropic Wins Preliminary Injunction Against US Blacklist(00:04:14) - Delve: We're Not Filling Their Own Audits With(00:08:03) - Nvidia's GTC 2017 Announcement(00:16:21) - Will Microsoft Fill the Kubernetes Demand?(00:24:09) - Are Data Centers Bad for the Environment?(00:24:57) - Is the Cloud in a Bubble?(00:27:07) - Gmail Lets You Change Your Username Every 12 Months(00:28:56) - Supply Chain Hackers Hit(00:32:47) - Anthropic's Cloud Code Leaks(00:36:09) - Amazon's New Console Enhancements(00:37:48) - AWS Lambda: Up to 32 GB of RAM and 16(00:40:17) - AWS Security Agents and AWS DevOps Agent(00:44:35) - Amazon Bedrock Agent Core Evaluations(00:52:55) - Edge Computing: Custom AI Agents(00:55:01) - Amazon's Reference Architecture for Building a FinOps Agent Using Amazon Bed(00:58:23) - Google's TurboQuant Compresses LLM Data to 3 Bits(01:01:08) - Google's Open Source AI playbook for sustainability reporting(01:01:51) - Azure Launches AI Agent to Troubleshoot Kuber(01:03:12) - Week in the Cloud: Nvidia GTC 2017

Welcome to episode 348 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio this week to bring you all the latest news in AI and Cloud, inclduing Strykers troubles, AWS? birthday, Bedrock Agents, and Claude Code ? plus so much more. Let?s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week SOC 2 It to Me Delve Fires Back  Shell Yeah Bedrock Agents Just Got Command Line Powers When Your SOC 2 Report Is Just Fan Fiction uv, Ruff, and ty Walk Into an OpenAI Acquisition Hash Field Expiration Is Here, and It?s No Redis Herring Stop Paying Full Price for Tokens You Already Bought Fake It Till You Audit It Cache Me If You Can CNCF Sandbox Edition Microsoft Learns Consent Matters in Copilot Rollout Microsoft?s Stinky Cloud Gets Federal Seal of Approval When Your Audit Trail Leads to a Blog Fight Ping Your AI Agent on Discord Like a Millennial Twenty Years of AWS and the Bill Never Stops The LLM hack that feels a lot like Node Shift Left Package issues Claude Code Auto Mode Lets AI Work Unsupervised Stop Babysitting Your AI Claude Code Goes Solo Auto Mode Gives Claude Code the Keys to the Car Java comes to the coffee shop with AI General News 

01:21 Customer Updates: Stryker Network Disruption 

Stryker confirmed a cyberattack on March 11, 2026, that disrupted their internal Microsoft corporate environment, affecting order processing, manufacturing, and shipping, but notably not their connected medical devices or cloud-hosted products. The attack vector was specific to Stryker?s Microsoft environment, which meant products running on AWS (Vocera Edge, Vocera Ease) and Google Cloud Platform (care.ai) were architecturally isolated and unaffected, demonstrating a practical benefit of multi-cloud separation. Stryker explicitly stated this was not ransomware or malware, and government agencies, including CISA, FBI, and the White House National Cyber Director, were engaged, with domain seizures linked to threat actors already executed. The incident highlights how healthcare organizations can architect medical device and cloud product infrastructure to be independent of corporate IT environments, as every product from Mako to SurgiCount to LIFEPAK operated normally due to network segmentation. Real-world patient impact was limited but present, with some personalized implant cases rescheduled due to shipping delays, underscoring that even contained corporate IT incidents can have downstream effects on physical supply chains.

02:30 Justin ? ?HugOps to the entire Stryker team; I couldn?t imagine having to rebuild my entire Windows estate at a company the size of Stryker in the middle of trying to do business and everything else.? 

05:00

Chapters (00:00:00) - Episode 348(00:01:31) - Stryker Attack: How to Survive an Attack(00:05:09) - Critics: Microsoft Cloud Was a Pile of SHIT(00:06:50) - Dell Says Delve is a Fraudster and Should Be Removed(00:14:12) - Dell vs Delve: The Smear(00:18:50) - Light LLM: Supply Chain Attack(00:23:04) - Kubernetes: Open sourcing the GKE Cluster Autos(00:25:59) - Kubecon 2018: Azure Kubernetes Networking(00:27:48) - Snowflake Announces Project Snow AI Platform(00:29:36) - Codex to Acquire Astral(00:32:15) - Cloud Code 2.8: Connect to Telegram and Discord(00:34:54) - Cloud Cowork Launches Computer Use Capabilities(00:37:46) - OpenClaw: Auto-Mode for Cloud Code & Research(00:40:31) - Amazon Bedrock Agent Core: Invoke Agent Runtime with a Shell(00:42:03) - Amazon EC2 Scanning with Chain Guard(00:46:03) - AWS Turns 20 Years Old(00:47:36) - AWS MCP Server in Preview: CloudWatch 2.8(00:48:52) - GCP Cloud SQL Read Pools: Auto-Scaling(00:51:17) - How to Design with AI in 2020(00:53:48) - Microsoft at GTC 2017: Nvidia and Azure(00:56:34) - Microsoft Temporarily Halt Copilot App Deployment(00:58:12) - Microsoft's SQL Server Management Plan at SQLCon 2026(01:03:36) - Azure Skills Plugin: What's Included?(01:05:51) - Microsoft's Azure DevOps Remote MCP Server(01:07:56) - Java 26: AI Integration, More(01:09:01) - Oracle Announces AI-in-The-(01:10:19) - This Week in Cloud: AI News

Welcome to episode 347 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan are in the studio recording today, and thankfully, Jonathan hasn?t replaced us all with Skynet ? yet. This week, we?re discussing how old our tools (and us) are (hint: it?s really old), whether or not the SaasApocalypse is upon us, and whether or not the business or AI is responsible for the latest round of layoffs. 

Titles we almost went with this week S3 Bucket Names Finally Stop Being a Global Hunger Games One Million Tokens Walk Into a Context Window SLO Down and Smell the Reliability Metrics CloudWatch Finally Watches Your Whole Cloud Organization S3 Turns 20 and Still Buckets the Competition Azure SRE Agent Goes GA So You Don?t Have To Twenty Years of S3 and No Signs of Object Permanence One Rule to Monitor Them All Across AWS One Flag to Secure Them All on Cloud Run SaaSpocalypse Now Atlassian Layoffs Hit the Jira No More Bucket Name Bingo with S3 Regional Namespaces A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Claude Tokens One Command to Rule Your Autonomous AI Agents AI Fixes Your Incidents Before Your Boss Notices The CloudPod is only recording this week ?Because of AI? Amazon begs users to leave Simple DB with another migration tool Follow Up

00:54 Microsoft?s brief in Anthropic case shows new alliance and willingness to challenge Trump administration

Microsoft filed an amicus brief in Anthropic?s lawsuit against the U.S. Department of War, urging a federal judge to temporarily block the Pentagon?s designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, citing substantial costs to government contractors that rely on Anthropic models. The brief arrived one day after Microsoft launched Copilot Cowork, built on Anthropic?s Claude, and four months after Microsoft committed up to $5 billion in Anthropic as part of a deal requiring Anthropic to spend at least $30 billion on Azure, making the legal filing directly tied to concrete commercial dependencies. Microsoft highlighted a procedural inconsistency in the government?s approach: the Pentagon gave itself six months to transition off Anthropic?s models while making the supply chain designation effective immediately for contractors, creating an unequal compliance burden. Amazon, which has invested $8 billion in Anthropic, has not publicly responded to the lawsuit or the designation, creating a notable contrast in how two major cloud providers with similar financial exposure are handling the situation. OpenAI announced its own Pentagon deal on the same day the Anthropic designation was issued, and Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:00:54) - Podcasters: 17 Hours Long(00:01:09) - Microsoft's Amicus Brief in Anthropic Lawsuit(00:06:19) - Claude Launches In-App Visualization Feature(00:08:41) - Databricks Launches GENIE Code as a General Available Product(00:11:09) - 1. Million Context Window(00:17:31) - Code: Auto-Compaction(00:19:20) - GPT 5.4 Mini and Nano: Smaller Models for(00:22:19) - Amazon S3: 20 Years of Computing(00:24:56) - AWS S3: Regional Namespaces for General Purpose Bools(00:27:30) - Amazon CloudWatch(00:28:58) - Amazon SimpleDB now supports exporting domain data directly to S3(00:31:14) - Amazon CloudWatch: EC2: Detailed Monitoring Enablement(00:32:35) - Google Cloud's Sensitive Data Protection(00:35:57) - Google Completing Acquisition of Wiz Cloud Security Platform(00:40:24) - Google Cloud's Kubernetes Inference Gateway(00:45:40) - Azure S3 Agent(00:50:00) - Azure's Cloud Migration Agent and GitHub Copilot modernization agent(00:53:45) - Microsoft Merges Copilot into a Unified Organization(00:56:17) - Copilot: What's Next for the Service?(00:57:56) - Week in the Cloud: Microsoft(00:58:36) - Amazon AI Voice Service misconfiguration in Spanish

Welcome to episode 346 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Hold on to your butts, because Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio today, and they?re ready to bring you all the latest in Cloud and AI news, including the usual: Meta buying social networks, Amazon responding to outages, and OpenAI giving up another version of GPT. Let?s get into it! 

Titles we almost went with this week ?? Cloudflare Spent $1100 to Rewrite Next.js in a Week One Pipe to Rule All Your OpenTelemetry Data ?? Check Yourself Before Google Wrecks Your Cloud Config Copilot Takes Jira Tickets So You Don't Have To ??? GitHub Copilot Agent Joins Your Jira Workflow Uninvited When AI Agents Network, Meta Swipes Right on Moltbook ? Sixty Controls Walk Into a Terraform Repository One Security Console to Rule All Your Clouds AI Ate My Lock-In, and I Feel Fine ? Oracle Sees $90 Billion Future Cloudy With a Chance of GPUs Your API Has Trust Issues, and We Can Prove It Stop Running Three Pipelines Like a Telemetry Hoarder From Database Dinosaur to AI Cash Cow ?? Meta: Target acquired; must kill Moltbook Meta saw Moltbook and said, ?WE MUST OWN IT AND KILL.? Follow Up

00:51 Where things stand with the Department of War 

Anthropic has been designated a supply chain risk to US national security by the Department of War, a designation the company is challenging in court as legally unsound under 10 USC 3252. The practical scope of the designation is narrow, applying only to the use of Claude in direct Department of War contracts, not to all customers that hold such contracts or to unrelated business with Anthropic. Anthropic has stated that it will continue to provide its models to the Department of War and the national security community at nominal cost, with ongoing engineering support, during any transition period and for as long as permitted. The company's two stated exceptions to military use involve fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, and Anthropic has clarified these do not extend to operational decision-making, which it considers the military's domain. For cloud and enterprise customers, the key takeaway is that existing Claude deployments unrelated to Department of War contracts remain unaffected, though the legal dispute introduces uncertainty into federal procurement pipelines involving AI services. We will keep you updated on this in 12-18 months? AI Is Going Great - Or How ML Makes Money 

01:21 Introducing GPT-5.4

OpenAI released GPT-5.4 across ChatGPT, the API, and Codex, positioning it as their most capable reasoning model to date. It merges the coding strengths of GPT-5.3-Codex with general reasoning, professional knowledge work, and native computer-use capabilities in a single model. The computer-use capabilities are a notable technical step, with GPT-5.4 achieving a 75% success rate on OSWorld-Verified desktop navigation, surpassing the reported human benchmark of 72.4% and... Chapters (00:00:00) - Week 2: Iran War and More(00:01:26) - OpenAI GPT 5.4 Injection Into Chat(00:04:26) - OpenAI ChatGpt for Excel 5.4(00:06:07) - Carl(00:08:39) - Shift Left: OpenAI's Codec Security in Research Preview(00:12:16) - OpenAI Expands Into AI Security With PromptFu Acquisition(00:14:46) - Code Review: Databricks Launches Cazale, an(00:21:38) - Meta Superintelligence Labs Buys AI Agent Social Network(00:25:12) - Cloudflare's Complete Re-write of Next JS(00:31:00) - Cloudflare Launches OAuth Vulnerability Scanner(00:33:30) - Amazon's AI-Caused Outages(00:37:37) - Amazon OpenSearch and Neptune Analytics: 35% DB Savings Plan(00:39:24) - Amazon Bedrock(00:41:36) - Amazon Connect Health: A HIPAA-Eligible AI Agent(00:46:45) - Amazon EC2: Copilot CLI to End(00:49:18) - Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver Now Available(00:51:33) - Amazon ECS: Automating GitHub Actions to Container Deployment(00:53:59) - Google Cloud Security Checklist(00:56:00) - Google's Autonomous Data Steward for Telecoms(00:57:14) - Google Notebook LM now goes after YouTubers(00:59:05) - Google's first natively multimodal embedding model(01:01:07) - Google's Gemini in Docs, Sheets, and Drive(01:03:08) - Postgres as a managed serverless database with Azure(01:04:48) - Microsoft 365 Copilot to Integrate with Cowork(01:10:02) - OCI Cost Anomaly Detection(01:10:59) - Oracle Announces Q3 Earnings(01:12:53) - Week in Cloud: The Cloud and AI(01:13:32) - Xbox One: Project Helix(01:17:55) - Xbox One vs. Playstation 4

Welcome to episode 345 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio this week and are ready to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including what?s going on between Anthropic, the DOD, and OpenAI, what the war means for Middle East data centers (Spoiler ? I hope you have a good Disaster Recovery plan), and Transit Gateway pricing changes that are enough to make a grown man cry. And don?t bother waiting: Matt has completely forgotten almost two years of ?bye everybody? and now claims full amnesia as to what his outtro is. Oh well. Let?s get into today?s show. 

Titles we almost went with this week Claude Learned to Use a Computer Better Than Your Dad **OpenAI Amazon and OpenAI?s $138 Billion AI Bromance When Two AZs Go Dark the Cloud Gets Crispy Fifty Billion Reasons AWS Loves OpenAI Now **Anthropic Azure Still Wins Even When AWS Thinks It Did Fire, Water, and a Multi-AZ Assumption Goes Up in Smoke Claude Refuses to Go Full Skynet for the Pentagon GPT-5.3 Instant Finally Stops Lecturing You No Killer Robots Without Human Approval Please Terraform Finally Sees Your Forgotten Cloud Resources Stage Before You Rage Deploy Azure Firewall CrowdStrike to Zscaler AWS Wants Your Security Tab One Hub to Rule Your API Sprawl Transit Gateway Attachments Just Got Surprisingly Expensive Azure Container Registry Finally Has Room for Your AI Hoarding Bedrock Gets a Roommate OpenAI Moves In Azure Firewall Gets a Safety on the Trigger Stop Writing Scripts, Just Import the Dang Infrastructure Audit Your APIs Before March 2026 Bites You Damn it? my excuse not to DR is gone I?m Epically Furious about DR AI Is Going Great ? Or How ML Makes Money 

03:34 Anthropic acquires Vercept to advance Claude?s computer use capabilities 

Anthropic acquired Vercept, a team specializing in AI perception and interaction, to strengthen Claude?s computer use capabilities.  The Vercept founders, including Ross Girshick, bring deep expertise in how AI systems visually interpret and interact with software interfaces. Claude Sonnet 4.6 shows substantial improvement in computer use benchmarks, jumping from under 15% on the OSWorld evaluation in late 2024 to 72.5% today.  The model is now approaching human-level performance on tasks like navigating spreadsheets and completing multi-tab web forms. Computer use enables Claude to operate inside live applications the way a human would, handling multi-step workflows across tools that cannot be automated through code alone.  This is relevant for enterprise use cases involving document processing, browser-based workflows, and cross-application task management. This is Anthropic?s second acquisition in a short period, following the purchase of Bun, which was tied to the Claude Code milestone. The pattern suggests Anthropic is actively acquiring specialized engineering teams rather than just technology assets. For developers and businesses building agentic workflows on Claude, the improved computer use performance means more reliable automation of complex, real-world software tasks without requiring custom integrations or APIs for every application involved.

05:18 Justin ? ?It seems like every day I have to upda...

Chapters (00:00:00) - Foreign, Where the forecast is always cloudy(00:01:04) - Let's Talk Cloud(00:01:37) - Anthropic Expands Cloud's Computer Use Capabilities(00:07:17) - How to Write a Review in AI-Native(00:10:07) - Alexis Skill Creator Update & Cloud Agent(00:12:18) - Anthropic Banished from Supporting the Military(00:18:49) - Google AI's Gemini 3.1 & Nanobana(00:20:07) - Chat GPT 5.3: More Alikes, Less Dist(00:24:08) - Comments on the AI News(00:24:58) - Amazon AWS: Drone Strike in the Middle East Affects Infrastructure(00:30:52) - Azure vs. Google: The Distributed Data Center(00:34:06) - OpenAI Expands Cloud Deal to $100 Million(00:39:51) - Amazon Security Hub Extended: Full Stack Enterprise Security with Curated Partner(00:41:57) - Amazon's Encryption Controls: Starting Soon(00:44:17) - Amazon Cloud: Natural Language to Cedar Compliance(00:47:13) - API Specs: Combat Specs Sprawl(00:48:39) - Google Cloud's Polyglot Storage approach for Chatbot(00:52:53) - Matt's Azure Quotation(00:53:21) - Azure Monitor Pipeline: New Public Preview(00:55:30) - Microsoft Azure Local Disconnected and Large Model Support(00:58:39) - Azure Functions for Linux: Best Practices for Self-signed Cert(01:00:54) - Microsoft Azure Confidential VMs: Learning the Names(01:04:44) - Azure firewall policy: Two-Phase Draft and Deploy(01:05:51) - Azure container registry: 100 terabytes of storage(01:09:00) - Azure 2.8 Resource Limits(01:09:52) - This Week in the Cloud: OpenAI and the Trump Administration

Welcome to episode 344 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin is out of the office at a World of Warcraft Tournament (not really), and Ryan is pursuing his lifelong dream of becoming a roadie for The Eagles (maybe?), so it?s Jonathan and Matt holding down the fort this week, and they?ve got a ton of cloud news for you! From security to AI assistants, we?ve got all the news you need. Let?s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week Zero Bus, All Gas, No Kafka Brakes AI Coding Bot Bites the Hand That Runs It When Your Robot Developer Goes Rogue on AWS Kubernetes VPA Finally Stops Evicting Your Database Pods Google Trains 100 Million People, Still No One Reads the Docs  MCP Walks Into a Bar Not Enterprise Ready Yet No More Pod Evictions Kubernetes 1.35 Scales In Place No Keys No Drama Just IAM and Cloud SQL One Agent to Rule Them All in Kubernetes IAM Tired of Writing Policies Manually When Your AI Coding Tool Has Delete Permissions One Dashboard to Rule All Your GPU Clusters Serverless Reservations Prove Nothing Is Truly Free Range Kiro Takes the Wheel on AWS IAM Policies Stop Blaming Backups for Your Bad Architecture AI Agent Goes Rogue, Takes AWS Down With It Everything is Bigger in Texas Except the Water Usage OpenAI launches the college basketball of Inference. Pro service ? low cost General News 

1:05 Code Mode: give agents an entire API in 1,000 tokens

Cloudflare?s Code Mode MCP server reduces token consumption by 99.9% compared to a traditional MCP implementation, exposing the entire Cloudflare API (over 2,500 endpoints) through just two tools, search() and execute(), using roughly 1,000 tokens versus 1.17 million for a conventional approach. The architecture works by having the AI agent write JavaScript code against a typed OpenAPI spec representation, rather than loading tool definitions into context, with code executing inside a sandboxed V8 isolate (Dynamic Worker) that restricts file system access, environment variables, and external fetches by default. This approach addresses a fundamental constraint in agentic AI systems: adding more tools to give agents broader capabilities directly competes with the available context space for the task at hand.

01:41 Jonathan- ?It?s good. I?m not sure I could imagine 2 ½ thousand MCP tool definitions in a context window and still actually use it for anything.?   

AI Is Going Great ? Or How ML Makes Money 

03:58 OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI

Peter Steinberger, creator of viral AI assistant OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot), has joined OpenAI to lead development of next-generation personal agents.  OpenClaw gained attention for its ability to perform real-world tasks like calendar management, flight booking, and autonomous social network participation. OpenAI will maintain OpenClaw as an open source project through a foundation structure, allo... Chapters (00:00:07) - The Cloud Pod(00:01:00) - Cloudflare, OpenAI: The AI Assistant(00:10:04) - Cobalt vs. COBOL(00:17:16) - Databricks Connect: Single Sync vs. Kafka(00:20:06) - ChatGPT Pro Lite at $100 a month(00:21:53) - Packer Adds SBOM Vulnerability Scanning(00:24:17) - Kubernetes 1.35: Auto-Scale Pod Storage(00:29:22) - Amazon's AI Coding Bot Causes AWS Outage(00:33:49) - Amazon IAM policy Autopilot(00:34:28) - AWS IAM Policy Autopilot: Will It Increase Security(00:38:57) - Amazon Expands Serverless to AI-generated 'TikTok(00:39:44) - Google Cloud Expands MCP Server Coverage to Azure, Cloud,(00:46:40) - Google's $15 Billion Investment in AI Infrastructure(00:49:18) - Microsoft Azure Completing 100% Renewable Energy(00:54:32) - More Flexible Quotations on AWS(00:56:23) - Microsoft Sovereignty Cloud: When IT's Connected, Connected(00:58:08) - Kouser Command Center: Unified Operations Platform for AI(01:00:01) - AMD Instinct Mi 350X GPUs coming to DigitalOcean(01:00:43) - Week in Cloud: Chatting With Just Us

Welcome to episode 343 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio this week bringing you all the latest in Cloud and AI news, including some of the smaller clouds like Cloudflare and Crusoe Cloud, as well as announcements from the big guys like Google?s Gemini DeepThink, Anthropic?s big pay day, and Microsoft?s Notepad problem. We?ve got all this plus Matt screwing up his outro AGAIN, so let?s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week Chrome?s WebMCP Protocol: Teaching AI Agents to Stop Doom-Scrolling the DOM and Actually Get Work Done Claude Enterprise Self-Service: Because Sometimes You Just Want to Buy AI Without Small Talk AWS EC2 Goes Inception Mode: Now You Can Virtualize Your Virtualization Without Going Broke Amazon EC2 Nested Virtualization: Because Your Virtual Machine Was Lonely and Needed Its Own Virtual Machine CloudWatch Alarm Mute Rules: Because Your Deployment Doesn?t Need a Standing    Ovation at 3 AM Anthropic?s $380 Billion Valuation Proves AI Funding Has Gone Claude Nine AWS EC2 Nested Virtualization Finally Escapes the Expensive Hardware Jail Cloudflare Teaches AI Agents the Magic Words: Accept text/markdown and Save 13,000 Tokens Crusoe Cloud?s MCP Server: Teaching AI Assistants to Stop Asking for the Manager and Just Fix Your Infrastructure Azure?s New Agentic Copilot: Because Manually Clicking Through Dashboards Was So 2023 Chrome?s WebMCP Gives AI Agents a GPS for Websites Because Apparently They?ve Been Lost in the HTML This Whole Time  Anthropic Cuts Out the Middleman: Claude Enterprise Now Available Without the Enterprise Sales Dance AWS Gives CloudWatch the Silent Treatment: New Mute Rules Let Alarms Sleep Through Maintenance Windows AWS CloudWatch Hits Snooze: Mute Rules End On-Call Nightmares AWS Gives CloudWatch the Silent Treatment General News 

00:45 Bloat Risk? Microsoft?s Notepad Upgrade Also Introduced a Vulnerability | PCMag

Microsoft?s recent Notepad modernization introduced CVE-2026-20841, a vulnerability in the new Markdown support feature that allows malicious links in files to execute remote code.  The flaw has been patched in the February 2026 security updates, but it highlights the security trade-offs when adding features to historically simple applications. The vulnerability exploits Notepad?s Markdown rendering capability, which Microsoft added in May to support lightweight markup language formatting. When Notepad opens a specially crafted Markdown file, embedded malicious links can trigger unverified protocols that load and execute remote files on the system. This incident raises questions about feature bloat in core Windows utilities, particularly as Microsoft continues adding network-dependent capabilities like AI-powered text writing to Notepad. Security researchers are debating whether basic text editors should have network functionality at all, given the expanded attack surface. The vulnerability demonstrates how modernization efforts can introduce security risks in previously low-risk applications.  Organizations using Windows need to ensure t... Chapters (00:00:00) - AWS Cloudwatch Finally Learns to Hit Snooze(00:00:48) - Microsoft's Notepad Vulnerability(00:03:09) - WebMCP: The Standardization of AI Agents(00:07:17) - AI Completes 4% of GitHub Commits(00:09:32) - Cloud for Enterprise: Anthropic's Dominance(00:14:54) - Sonnet 4.6 Available for Cloud(00:16:34) - Coding Productivity: The Shift(00:25:37) - MacBook Pro: Should You Upgrade to the M5?(00:29:13) - Mac Studio: The M3 Ultra vs. Nvidia DGX Spark(00:31:00) - Alibaba Launches New Large Language Model(00:32:03) - Sea Dance Studio Launches Sealed Dance 2.0(00:35:27) - AMD EPYC, HPC 8A Instances Now Available on(00:38:05) - Kafka: Native AWS API for Topic Management(00:41:08) - Amazon Bedrock now supports six new Open Weight Models(00:50:32) - AWS: Supports nested virtualization on bare metal EC2 instances(00:52:24) - Amazon SageMaker Inference for Custom Nova Models now available(00:54:45) - Google's DeepThink Update to Gemini 3(00:57:32) - BigQuery: Cross-Region Queries in Preview(01:00:52) - Microsoft's Azure Copilot: Automating Cloud Operations(01:03:22) - Azure now offers instant access to incremental snapshots for premium SSD,(01:04:42) - Crystal Cloud and the AI-first Hypercloud(01:05:16) - Cloud Infrastructure Management: Bringing AI Agents to the Cloud(01:07:21) - Cloudflare to automatically convert HTML to Markdown for AI Agents(01:10:52) - Week in Cloud: The Cloud and AI

Welcome to episode 342 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio today to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news this week. How do you feel about ads? How do you feel about ads while using AI? We?ve got options! We?ve got a round-up of tech Super Bowl ads, AI ads, Earnings reports (who frankly need the ad revenue), and a plethora of Opus 4.6 announcements, plus more. Let?s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week ChatGPT Goes Full Mad Men: Your AI Assistant Now Comes With Commercial Breaks Heroku?s New Feature: No New Features AWS Gives EC2 Instances a Storage Growth Spurt: 22.8TB of Local NVMe Now Available Identity Crisis Averted: IAM Identity Center Learns to Replicate Itself JSON Schema Enforcement: Because Your LLM Needs Structure in Its Life From Zero to Admin in 480 Seconds: A Serbian Speedrun Story From Proof of Concept to Proof of Claw: DigitalOcean Tames AI Agent Infrastructure Azure?s Growth Hits the Clouds: Microsoft?s 39% Increase Still Not Enough for Wall Street One Lake to Rule Them All: Microsoft and Snowflake Finally Stop Fighting Over Your Data Free Lunch Officially Over: ChatGPT Learns That Servers Cost Money Claude Won?t Sell You Anything (Except Maybe Peace of Mind) IAM Identity Center Goes Multi-Regional: Because One Region to Rule Them All Wasn?t Enough Databricks Takes the Base Out of Database with Lakebase GA I?m a Chrome Tab hoarder General News 

01:30 Superbowl Ads of Note

OpenAI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCN9iCXNJqQ Microsoft CoPilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndj9Jk-tGKo Base44?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKEUWtqvsis  Gemini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1yGy9fELtE Anthropic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmnjDLwZckA  ai.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7I-D4YXbzg&t=3s

16:35 Justin -If you ever want to knowif there?s a bubble, spending dumb money on the Super Bowl on an ad that makes no sense is probably your number one clue.? 

16:53 It?s Earnings Time!

Microsoft (MSFT) Q2 earnings report 2026

Microsoft Q2 2026 earnings show Azure cloud growth slowing to 39% from 40% in the prior quarter, missing analyst expectations of 39.4% and causing shares to drop 7% in after-hours trading.  The company?s gross margin hit a three-year low at 68% due to substantial AI infrastructure investments totaling $37.5 billion in capital expenditures, up 66% year over year. OpenAI now represents 45% of Microsoft?s $625 billion remaining commercial performance obligation after the company committed to a $250 billion cloud services deal during the quarter.  This concentration raises questions about revenue dependence on a single customer, though Microsoft maintains that the remaining backlog is still larger and more diversified than most compet... Chapters (00:00:00) - Cloud Pod: Speed Run Your AWS Account(00:01:27) - Super Bowl LI Commercials(00:02:08) - The Super Bowl Commercials(00:04:40) - 15 Dumb Apps Built With No Code(00:06:30) - Top 10 Ads Using AI(00:07:40) - OpenAI vs Anthropic: The Chat(00:12:42) - A AI Startup Spends $70 Million On A Dumb Ad(00:15:50) - Microsoft Earnings: Down 7%(00:19:19) - Google Cloud Earnings Beat Estimates(00:21:39) - Amazon's 200 Billion Investment Plan for Cloud Infrastructure(00:28:04) - Heroku to Become a Sustaining Engineering Model(00:31:32) - AWS Security: The Last Minute Attack(00:35:28) - Cloud Business Model: How ML Makes Money(00:44:15) - OpenAI GPT5.3 Codex(00:46:21) - Facebook Testing Adverts on Free and Go Tier Users(00:47:18) - Claude Opus 4.6 on Cloud, More(00:48:17) - Snowflake and Databricks: Supervisor Agent(00:49:38) - HashiCorp Launches Agent Skills Pack(00:53:22) - Amazon's New massively big C8ID and R8ID Inst(00:55:49) - AWS IAM Identity Center: Multi Region Replication(00:59:00) - JSON Schema Compliance in Bedrock(01:00:35) - Amazon Redshift: Automatic Optimization now in place(01:02:05) - Google Cloud: Developer Knowledge API & MCP Server(01:06:27) - Bolt 2.8 in Python vs. Google Docs(01:08:49) - Google Cloud Expands Sovereign Cloud Portfolio(01:09:44) - Google's Gemini Enterprise Agent Ready Program(01:11:43) - Charlie Bell Retires as EVP of Security and Focus on Quality(01:17:40) - Azure Database for PostgreSQL at Ignite 2019(01:19:55) - Microsoft OneLake & Snowflake: Bi directional Iceberg Tables(01:21:58) - Azure Container Storage 2.10: Native elastic SAN Integration with(01:23:22) - SQLCon 2018(01:24:51) - This Week in the Cloud: Earnings

Welcome to episode 341 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Matt & Ryan are picking up Justin?s slack this week while he?s traveling for work, but don?t worry, because they have plenty of news! We?re talking about those mass layoffs over at AWS, a major security breach over at Notepad++, and some new slight of hand over at Elon?s companies. There?s a lot to cover, so let?s get into it! 

Titles we almost went with this week Finally, a Chatbot That Actually Knows Where Your Data Lives **Anthropic Microsoft Adds Security Analyzer to MSSQL Extension: Because Bobby Tables Jokes Are Only Funny Until They Happen to You From Sequential Sadness to Parallel Paradise: GKE Node Pools Get Concurrent From Vibe Coding to Production: AWS MCP Server Gets SOPs One Prompt to Deploy Them All: AWS MCP Server Automates Infrastructure AWS Layoffs: Scaling Down Instead of Scaling Out Mutual TLS: Because CloudFront and Your Origin Need Couples Therapy Claude Team Plan: Now With More Seats and Less Bills From Snowflake to Snowball: Rolling Data and Dev Into One Platform From Notepad++ to Notepad Pwned: A Six-Month Hosting Horror Story EventBridge Payload Capacity Gets a 4x Upgrade: No More Event Splitting Headaches CloudFront Finally Learns to Check ID Before Knocking on Origin?s Door General News 

01:30 SpaceX acquires xAI, plans to launch a massive satellite constellation to power it ? Ars Technica

SpaceX has acquired xAI to create a vertically integrated AI and space infrastructure company, with plans to deploy up to 1 million satellites as orbital data centers.  This represents a significant bet that space-based compute infrastructure can be cost-competitive with traditional ground-based data centers for AI workloads. The merger combines SpaceX?s launch capabilities and satellite manufacturing expertise with xAI?s Grok chatbot and X social platform.  The strategy assumes AI demand will continue to grow and that compute capacity, rather than other factors, is the primary bottleneck to AI adoption. The orbital data center concept raises questions about latency, power requirements, thermal management, and maintenance compared to terrestrial facilities.  Traditional cloud providers have invested heavily in ground-based infrastructure optimized for these factors. This consolidation of Musk?s companies creates potential conflicts between SpaceX?s established government and commercial contracts and xAI?s more controversial products.  The integration of a proven aerospace company with a newer AI venture introduces execution risk to SpaceX?s core business. The plan depends on several unproven assumptions, including sustained AI market growth, viable economics for space-based computing, and the ability to manufacture and launch satellites at unprecedented scale.  Cloud providers and enterprises will need to evaluate whether orbital compute offers advantages over existing multi-region terrestrial deployments.

03:22 Ryan ? ?I feel like this is a shell game con; taxes are over here ? no, now they?re over here!? 

06:49

Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Podcast(00:01:40) - SpaceX to Deploy 1 Million Satellites as Data Centers for(00:06:50) - Notepad Hacked by State Sponsored Hackers(00:14:52) - Amazon Layoffs: What They Mean for Product Development(00:18:34) - Google's Genie 3 AI World Model Available for Ultra Users(00:23:15) - OpenAI to Retire Older ChatGPT Models(00:27:06) - OpenAI Launches Codex on a Mac OS X App(00:33:46) - AWS: Automatically Promote Code to Production with AI Agents(00:38:59) - AWS STS: Validation of Provider Specific Claims (OID(00:44:10) - Amazon Cloudfront Announces Mutual TLS Authentication with Origin(00:50:30) - Amazon EventBridge: Increased 1 megabyte payload size for Machine Learning(00:56:31) - Google Cloud BigQuery: Conversational Analytics in 2020(00:57:59) - Google Cloud Launches Single Tenant Cloud HSM(01:02:53) - How to manage 15,000 keys on a single HSM with(01:05:47) - Microsoft Launches DLSV7, DSV7 and ESV(01:11:31) - This Week in the Cloud: The Cloud: AI & More

Welcome to episode 340 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! It?s a full house (eventually) with Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matt all on board for today?s episode. We?ve got a lot of announcements, from Gemini for Gov (no more CamoGPT!) to Route 52 and Claude. Let?s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week Claude?s Pricing Tiers: Free, Pro, and Maximum Overdrive GitHub Copilot Learns Database Schema: Finally an AI That Understands Your Joins SSMS Gets a Copilot: Your T-SQL Now Writes Itself While You Grab Coffee Too Many Cooks in the Cloud Kitchen: How 32 GPUs Outcooked the Big Tech Industrial Kitchens Uncle Sam Gets a Gemini Twin: Google?s AI Goes Federal Route 53 Gets Domain of Its Own: .ai Joins the Party Thai One On: Google Cloud Plants Its Flag in Bangkok NAT So Fast: Azure?s Gateway Gets a V2 Glow-Up Beware Azure?s SQL Assistant doesn?t smoke your joints. AI Is Going Great, Or How ML Makes Money  

30:10 Announcing BlackIce: A Containerized Red Teaming Toolkit for AI Security Testing | Databricks Blog

Databricks released BlackIce, an open-source containerized toolkit that bundles 14 AI security testing tools into a single Docker image available on Docker Hub as databricksruntime/blackice:17.3-LTS.  The toolkit addresses common red teaming challenges, including conflicting dependencies, complex setup requirements, and the fragmented landscape of AI security tools, by providing a unified command-line interface similar to how Kali Linux works for traditional penetration testing. The toolkit includes tools covering three main categories: Responsible AI, Security testing, and classical adversarial ML, with capabilities mapped to MITRE ATLAS and the Databricks AI Security Framework.  Tools are organized as either static (simple CLI-based with minimal programming needed) or dynamic (Python-based with customization options), with static tools isolated in separate virtual environments and dynamic tools in a global environment with managed dependencies. BlackIce integrates directly with Databricks Model Serving endpoints through custom patches applied to several tools, allowing security teams to test for vulnerabilities like prompt injections, data leakage, hallucination detection, jailbreak attacks, and supply chain security issues.  Users can deploy it via Databricks Container Services by specifying the Docker image URL when creating compute clusters. The release includes a demo notebook showing how to orchestrate multiple security tools in a single environment, with all build artifacts, tool documentation, and examples available in the GitHub repository.  The CAMLIS Red Paper provides additional technical details on tool selection criteria and the Docker image architecture.

04:30 Ryan ? ?It?s very difficult to feel confident in your AI security practice or patterns. I feel like it?s just bleeding edge, and I?m learning so much all the time. And so I spend a lot of time reading papers and talking to others and seeing what they?re doing and meeting with vendors trying to figure out strategy, and it just feels like I?m drinking from a fire hose, and it?s really difficult to feel confident. So I like tools like t...

Chapters (00:00:07) - The Cloud Pod: Episode 340(00:01:16) - Hello, How to Subscribe to our Podcast(00:03:20) - Black Ice: A Single Toolkit for AI Security(00:13:21) - OpenAI Launches Prism: a LaTeX workspace for scientific writing(00:16:03) - Amazon EC2: New Graviton 4 Instances, and More(00:21:54) - Amazon Workspaces: Advanced Printer Redirection(00:25:50) - AWS Network Firewall Adds URL Category Based Filtering(00:28:32) - The CEO's Executive Dinner(00:29:21) - Gemini CLI Learning Course Launch(00:32:43) - Google Cloud opens new Bangkok Region Asia Southeast 3(00:36:08) - Apache Airflow 3.1 on Cloud Composer(00:38:36) - Google's Gemini for Government Launches(00:43:32) - BigQuery: Integrating AI into SQL queries(00:45:46) - SQL Server Management Studio 2.22.1 New Features & Changes(00:53:08) - Azure NAT Gateway: Standard V2 GAUNCH(00:55:31) - Microsoft Announces Unified Socks & DORA Compliance Solutions in(01:03:01) - IOM Deny Policies(01:04:59) - Google's Gemini CLI for Outages & Compliance(01:07:58) - Google's MCP for Docs(01:10:49) - Super Bowl LII

Welcome to episode 339 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Matt are in the studio today to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI announcements, including more personnel shifts (and it doesn?t seem like it was very friendly), a new way to get much needed copper, and Azure marketplace advertising 4,000 different models. What?s the real story? Let?s get into it and find out! 

Titles we almost went with this week US-EAST-1: Still the Least Reliable Friend You Keep Inviting to Parties **OpenAI 0? From Zero to Inference: BigQuery Makes Open Models a Two-SQL Problem AWS Goes Full Brandenburg Gate: Sovereign Cloud Opens for Business Seven Ate Nine: AWS Skips G7 and Goes Straight to G7e Instances From Crawling to Calling: Cloudflare Buys Human Native to Fix AI?s Data Problem Finally, an AI That Actually Listens to Your War Room Panic Tag, You?re Governed: AWS Automation Takes the Wheel Cloudflare Reaches for the Stars: Astro Framework Acquisition Lands Gemini Gets Personal: Google AI Finally Reads Your Email (With Permission) AWS Strikes Ore: Amazon Cuts Out the Middleman in Copper Supply Chain When Your Region Goes Down More Often Than Your Kubernetes Cluster ChatGPT Go: OpenAI?s New Middle Child Gets $8 Allowance Cloudflare?s Space-Age Acquisition: Astro Gets Jetsons-Level Upgrade Rosie the Robot Fired: Cloudflare Brings Astro Framework Into the Family It took 5 years, and now we have ads in our AI.  AI now with Ads EU says hands off my data

 

General News 

00:50 Heather?s data is not unreliable 

Maybe it?s unreliable. I blame Matt for having screwed up his outtro (as he did today), in which case I no longer recognize his participation. 

01:11 Astro is joining Cloudflare

Cloudflare acquires The Astro Technology Company, bringing the popular open-source web framework in-house while maintaining its MIT license and multi-cloud deployment capabilities.  Major platforms like Webflow Cloud, Wix Vibe, and Stainless already use Astro on Cloudflare infrastructure to power customer websites. Astro 6 introduces a redesigned development server built on Vite Environments API that runs code locally using the same runtime as production deployment. When using the Cloudflare Vite plugin, developers can test against workerd runtime with access to Durable Objects, D1, KV, and other Cloudflare services during local development. The framework focuses on content-driven websites through its Islands Architecture, which renders most pages as static HTML while allowing selective client-side interactivity using any UI framework.  This approach addresses the complexity that made building performant websites difficult before 2021, providing a simpler foundation for both human developers and AI coding agents. Astro 6 adds stable Live Content Collections for real-time data... Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:02:52) - Vite 6 and Cloudflare: Everything You Need to Know(00:04:53) - Cloudflare to Acquire Human Data, Boost AI Data(00:06:34) - Anthropic Launches a Lab for AI Product Development(00:10:44) - Thinking Machine's Co-Founders Return to OpenAI(00:13:29) - OpenAI to Add 750 Megawatts of Inference Capacity to Chat(00:16:35) - Chat: More Adverts Coming to AI(00:18:41) - 1Password for AI-Powered Development(00:25:21) - EC2 X8i and G7E: The Bigger(00:28:02) - Amazon Launches the AWS European Sovereign Cloud(00:32:07) - Amazon to Become First Customer of Rio Tinto's Bio-Le(00:34:34) - Curo CLI Update to 1.24(00:37:21) - BigQuery adds SQL Native Inference for Open Models(00:39:28) - Google Translate Gemma, a New Translation Model(00:43:04) - Microsoft's AI Marketplace: Central Hub for AI Adoption(00:47:10) - It's All In The Cloud For Azure...(00:49:16) - Amazon's Outages for the Year 2025(00:51:30) - US East 1 vs. Oregon: Is it Worse?

Welcome to episode 338 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, Matt, and Jonathan are in the studio today to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including a bit of a buying spree (inlcuding whole power companies) Veo 3.1, Cowork, and more ? today in the cloud!  

Titles we almost went with this week Snowflake?s Ironic Timing: Buying Downtime Prevention Tool While Experiencing Downtime Flexera Buys ProsperOps and Chaos Genius, Promises Less Chaos and More Prosperity Flexera Goes Shopping: Two FinOps Acquisitions to Prosper and Reduce Chaos Token of Appreciation: Gemini CLI Now Tracks Every Penny of Your AI Spend Snowflake Buys Observe to Stop Its Own Services from Melting Down Google?s Veo 3.1 Goes Vertical: Finally Understanding How People Actually Hold Their Phones Alphabet?s New Power Move: Buying the Company That Literally Powers Data Centers Dashboard Confessional: Gemini CLI Gets Transparent About Its Usage Microsoft?s New Agent Works 24/7 and Never Asks for a Raise From Robot Vacuums That Climb Stairs to TVs You Can?t Feel: CES Gets Weird Agent Shopping: When Your AI Has Better Taste Than You Do The cloudpod hosts do not like any stories this week AWS took a nap on announcements this week Claude is my new co-worker Wake up, AWS, and give us some fun news The $200 Assistant: Is Cowork the End of Workplace Admins? Azure has more interesting announcements than AWS oh noooo If you can?t beat them in AI, just acquire everyone Notebook LM turns the Data Tables on you AI Is Going Great ? Or How ML Makes Money 

01:11 Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Code-like for general computing ? Ars Technica

Anthropic launches Cowork, a new feature in the macOS Claude desktop app that extends Claude Code?s agentic capabilities to general office work tasks.  Users can grant Claude access to specific folders and use plain language instructions to automate tasks like filling expense reports from receipt photos, writing reports from notes, or reorganizing files. Cowork lowers the technical barrier compared to Claude Code by making AI-assisted file operations accessible to non-developer knowledge workers, including marketers and office staff.  The feature was developed after Anthropic observed users already applying Claude Code to general knowledge work despite its developer-focused positioning. The tool provides similar functionality to what was possible through Model Context Protocol integrations, but offers a more streamlined interface with Claude Code-style usability improvements.  Users can submit new requests or modifications to ongoing tasks without waiting for the initial assignment to complete. Cowork represents a strategic expansion of Anthropic?s agentic AI approach beyond software development into broader productivity workflows. The feature demonstrates how AI agents with file system access can automate routine knowledge work tasks that previously required manual processing of documents and data.

02:15 Ryan ? ?This week is the first time I actually tried to use AI to generate a PowerPoint presentation. It did not go well. It did gener...

Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure Weekly(00:00:43) - Cloud Code Launches Cowork for iOS(00:06:53) - Google's Video Output (VO 3.1)(00:10:10) - Snowflake to Integrate Observe into its Data Platform(00:12:47) - Flexera Expands Cloud Commitment Management with Acquisitions(00:17:44) - AWS: Sleeping in Seattle(00:18:35) - GCP 10.2: Gemini CLI Monitoring with Google Cloud(00:20:58) - Alphabet to Acquire Data Center Company(00:23:14) - Google's Notebook LLM Adds Data Tables(00:27:53) - Google's T5 Gemma 2: Multodal Vision Models(00:31:30) - Google Launches Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) for AI Agents(00:37:36) - Microsoft's Dynamic Threat Detection Agent in Public Preview(00:40:20) - Azure Service Bus Premium: Cross-Regional Replication(00:44:41) - This Week in Cloud: Amazon Stories(00:45:32) - CES 2017: The Best Tech Gadgets(00:51:27) - How to Get Your Smoke Detector to Work(00:53:25) - Fooled by Apple's Fold Phone(00:55:42) - E Ink Poster and Raspberry PI(00:59:44) - Lawyers Use the Remarkable Notebook

 Welcome to episode 337 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan have hit the recording studio to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, from acquisitions and price hikes to new tools that Ryan somehow loves but also hates? We don?t understand either? but let?s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week Prompt Engineering Our Way Into Trouble The Demo Worked Yesterday, We Swear It Scales Horizontally, Trust Us Responsible AI But Terrible Copy (Marketing Edition) General News 

00:58 Watch ?The Thinking Game? documentary for free on YouTube

Google DeepMind is releasing the ?The Thinking Game? documentary for free on YouTube starting November 25, marking the fifth anniversary of AlphaFold.  The feature-length film provides behind-the-scenes access to the AI lab and documents the team?s work toward artificial general intelligence over five years. The documentary captures the moment when the AlphaFold team learned they had solved the 50-year protein folding problem in biology, a scientific achievement that recently earned Demis Hassabis and John Jumper the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  This represents one of the most significant practical applications of deep learning to fundamental scientific research. The film was produced by the same award-winning team that created the AlphaGo documentary, which chronicled DeepMind?s earlier achievement in mastering the game of Go. For cloud and AI practitioners, this offers insight into how Google DeepMind approaches complex AI research problems and the development process behind their models. While this is primarily a documentary release rather than a technical product announcement, it provides context for understanding Google?s broader AI strategy and the research foundation underlying its cloud AI services. The AlphaFold model itself is available through Google Cloud for protein structure prediction workloads.

01:54 Justin ? ?If you?re not into technology, don?t care about any of that, and don?t care about AI and how they built all the AI models that are now powering the world of LLMs we have, you will not like this documentary.? 

04:22 ServiceNow to buy Armis in $7.7 billion security deal ? The Register

ServiceNow is acquiring Armis for $7.75 billion to integrate real-time security intelligence with its Configuration Management Database, allowing customers to identify vulnerabilities across IT, OT, and medical devices and remediate them through automated workflows.  The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026 and aims to triple ServiceNow?s current $1 billion annual security revenue. The acquisition represents a strategic data play when combined with ServiceNow?s recent purchase of Data.World, giving the company both massive volumes of se... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure: Raising GPU Prices 15%.(00:00:51) - Homework for the Week(00:01:05) - Google's The Thinking Game Documentary(00:04:22) - ServiceNow Acquires Armis for $7.5 Billion(00:06:39) - What is the Cognizant Threat Management Platform?(00:08:29) - Google's 2025: The Year of TUNE (In Depth)(00:11:36) - MetaAcquires AI Agent Firm Manus(00:15:27) - Migration from AWS Security Hub to OCSF(00:21:10) - EC2 Spot Capacity for Containerized Apps(00:23:13) - Amazon EKS now supports DNS-based and Admin Network Policies(00:26:58) - Amazon Raises EC2 Capacity Prices(00:31:19) - Lookinger: Upload CSV and Excel Files Directly into the BI(00:34:01) - AlloyDB's AI Natural Language API(00:36:23) - Google's Vertex AI Agent Builder(00:38:05) - Google Cloud SQL for MySQL Enterprise+ Edition: Optimized Writes(00:42:26) - Microsoft Acquires OSMOS for Unified Data Platform(00:44:19) - Microsoft Deploys Nvidia's Next-Gen Arubin Platform(00:46:25) - Will Oracle Use Non-Evaporative Cooling at Their New(00:51:01) - Week in the Box: Cloud: More News?

Welcome to episode 335 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Welcome to the first show of 2026, and it?s a full house, too! Justin, Jonathan, Ryan,  and Matt are all here to reflect on 2025, plus bring you their predictions for 2026.

Let?s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week SQL Me Maybe: AlloyDB Gets Chatty With Your Database **OpenAI SELECT * FROM natural_language WHERE accuracy LIKE ?100%? **Anthropic etcd You Were Worried About Database Limits: CloudWatch Has Your Back CSV You Later: Looker Adds Drag-and-Drop Data Uploads AWS Spots an Opportunity to Manage Your Container Costs EKS Network Policies: No More IP Address Whack-a-Mole AWS Security Hub Splits: It?s Not You, It?s CSPM Spot On: ECS Finally Manages Your Cheapest Compute TOON Squad: DigitalOcean?s New Format Makes JSON Look Bloated The Price is Wrong: AWS Breaks Two Decades of Downward Pricing Tradition Show Your Work: Why AI-Generated Code Without Tests is Just Expensive Spam No More Agent Orange: Google Simplifies VM Extension Deployment AWS Discovers Prices Can Go Both Ways, Raises GPU Costs 15 Percent Sovereignty Washing: When Your European Cloud Still Answers to Uncle Sam Agent Builder Gets a Memory Upgrade: Google?s AI Finally Remembers Where It Put Its Keys Ctrl+F for the Future: A year-end Scorecard & Next-Gen Bets AI Agents, GPU Prices, and The best of the Cloud Pod 2025 Beyond the Hype: The Cloud Pods Definitive 2025 Year in Review Apocalypse Now? What? Our 2026 Forecast

 

Follow Up 

01:27 RYAN?S PREDICTIONS

Prediction Status Notes Quick LLM models for individuals ACCURATE Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, GLM-4-9B-0414, and Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct?each chosen for an outstanding balance of performance and computational efficiency, making them ideal for edge AI deployment. A new AI inference application called Inferencer allows even modest Apple Mac computers to run the largest open-source LLMs. AI at the edge natively (Lambda-esque) ACCURATE Akamai launched a new Inference Cloud product for edge AI using Nvidia?s Blackwell 6000 GPUs in 17 cities. AWS IoT Greengrass with Lambda functions for edge logic. ?Edge AI allows for instant decision-making where it matters most?close to the data source.? Cloud native security mesh multi-cloud UNCLEAR Service mesh technologies continue to evolve (Istio, Linkerd), but I didn?t find a breakthrough ?app-to-app at the edge? security mesh product announcement in 2025. This one needs more specific evidence.

Ryan Score: 2/3

02:25 MATTHEW?S PREDICTIONS

Prediction Status Notes FOCUS adopted by Snowflake or Databricks ACCURATE FOCUS version 1.2 was ratified on May 29, 2025. Three new providers announced support: Alibaba Cloud, Databricks, and Grafana. Databricks officially adopted FOCUS! AI security/ethical standard (SOC or ISO) ACCURATE ISO 42001 is the first international standard outlining requirements for AI governance. Major companies achieving certification in 2025: Automation Anywhere is among the first 100 companies worldwide to earn ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification. Anthropic also achieved ISO 42001 certification. Amazon deprecates 5+ services (WorkMail bonus) ACCURATE (no bonus) 19 services are mothballed, four are being sunset, and one is end of its supported life. Deprecated services include CodeCommit, Cloud9, S3 Select, CloudSearch, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline, QLDB, Snowball Edge, and more. WorkMail NOT deprecated ? WorkDocs was (April 2025), but WorkMail remains active.

Matthew Score: 3/3

03:22 JONATHAN?S PREDICTIONS

Prediction Status Notes Company claims AGI achieved ACCURATE Integral AI, founded by ex-Google veteran Jad Tarifi, claims to have built a world-first AGI mo... Chapters (00:00:00) - 2019: The New Prophecies(00:01:16) - 2018 Cloud Predictions: The Best Ever(00:06:21) - Cloud Provider Coverage on The Show(00:08:20) - Ryan on Host Participation(00:09:22) - AI Spelled Out 596 Times in 2025(00:10:51) - A Year in the Life of AWS(00:12:03) - A Year in the Life of AI(00:14:38) - How to Build an AI Chatbot(00:21:43) - Cloud Hub: Update the Website, Build a CMS(00:24:48) - Top 3 Stories From 2025(00:27:12) - Agent to Agent: The Technology Standard(00:29:26) - Amazon's Nova: Underused, but Solid(00:31:51) - GitHub's migration to Azure(00:35:29) - Cloud 2.8 & Cloud 4(00:40:34) - ECS 12. Quality of Life(00:46:09) - Top 10 Cloud Outages predicted for 2021(00:47:05) - Top 10 Predictions for 2021(00:47:54) - Predictions for the AI Industry in 2017(00:50:23) - Quantum Computing: A Step Forward in 2026(00:53:24) - I Predict the First AI Agent Security Breach(00:55:02) - 2026: Infrastructure as a Human Language(00:55:49) - Will AI End the SaaS Business?(00:59:26) - I Predict One More AI-Specific Cloud Hitter(01:02:00) - AI-First Design on Websites(01:03:00) - Top 4 Predictions for the Future of Content(01:05:56) - Last Year's Prediction: AI-Generated Podcast(01:07:38) - Week in the Cloud: January 1

Welcome to episode 335 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This pre-Christmas week, Ryan and Justin have hit the studio to bring you the final show of 2025. We?ve got lots of AI images, EKS Network Policies, Gemini 3, and even some Disney drama. 

Let?s get into it! 

Titles we almost went with this week From Roomba to Tomb-ba: How the Robot Vacuum Pioneer Got Cleaned Out **OpenAI From Napkin Sketch to Production: Google?s App Design Center Goes GA Terraform Gets a Canvas: Google Paints Infrastructure Design with AI Mickey Mouse Takes Off the Gloves: Disney vs Google AI Showdown From Data Silos to Data Solos: Google Conducts the Integration Orchestra No More Thread Dread: AWS Brings AI to JVM Performance Troubleshooting MCP: More Corporate Plumbing Than You Think GPT-5.2 Beats Humans at Work Tasks, Still Can?t Get You Out of Monday Meetings Kerberos More Like Kerbero-Less: Microsoft Axes Ancient Encryption Standard OpenAI Teaches GPT-5.2 to PowerPoint: Death by Bullet Points Now AI-Generated MCP: Like USB-C, But Everyone?s Keeping Theirs in the Drawer Flash Gordon: Google?s Gemini 3 Gets a Speed Boost Without the Sacrifice Tag, You?re It: AWS Finally Knows Who to Bill Snowflake Gets a GPT-5.2 Upgrade: Now With More Intelligence Per Query OpenAI and Snowflake: Making Data Warehouses Smarter Than Your Average Analyst GPT-5.2 Moves Into the Snowflake: No Melting Required AI Is Going Great, or How ML Makes Money 

01:06 Meta?s multibillion-dollar AI strategy overhaul creates culture clash:

Meta is developing Avocado, a new frontier AI model codenamed to succeed Llama, now expected to launch in Q1 2026 after internal delays related to training performance testing.  The model may be proprietary rather than open source, marking a significant shift from Meta?s previous strategy of freely distributing Llama?s weights and architecture to developers. We feel like this is an interesting choice for Meta, but what do we know?  Meta spent 14.3 billion dollars in June 2025 to hire Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang as Chief AI Officer and acquire a stake in Scale, while raising 2026 capital expenditure guidance to 70-72 billion dollars.  Wang now leads the elite TBD Lab developing Avocado, operating separately from traditional Meta teams and not using the company?s internal workplace network. The company has restructured its AI leadership following the poor reception of Llama 4 in April, with Chief Product Officer Chris Cox no longer overseeing the GenAI unit.  Meta cut 600 jobs in Meta Superintelligence Labs in October, contributing to the departure of Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun to launch a startup, while implementing 70-hour workweeks across AI organizations. Meta?s new AI leadership under Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman has introduced a ?demo, don?t memo? development approach, replacing traditional multi-step approval processes with rapid prototyping using AI agents and newer tools.  The company is also leveraging third-party cloud services from CoreWeave and Oracle while buil... Chapters (00:00:00) - A Year in Cloud(00:01:21) - Meta Developing New Frontier AI Model(00:03:15) - Disney Sues Google AI for Copyright Infringement(00:04:59) - OpenAI to License Disney's 'Sora' Characters(00:07:13) - OpenAI GPT Image 1.5 and 1.6(00:08:41) - ChatGPT 5.2 Release(00:10:45) - Cedar Open-Sourcing and CNCF(00:12:38) - AWS GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection(00:15:51) - Amazon EKS: Admin Network Policies and Application Network Policies for Ku(00:18:43) - Amazon Web Services: Thread dump analysis solution(00:22:16) - Amazon EC2: Automatic Cost Allocation based on User Attributes(00:25:47) - GCP's Gemini 3 Flash for Enterprises(00:27:19) - Google's MCP Server Integration into Anti Gravity(00:30:59) - Google's Application Design Center (GAA) Now General Availability(00:33:12) - Microsoft to deprecate RC4 Authentication by default(00:35:50) - Azure Storage: 50 Terabit Bucket Support(00:38:23) - Microsoft Expands Azure's Network for AI and Disaster Recovery(00:42:14) - This Week in Cloud: Looking Back & Looking Forward(00:43:29) - IRobot's bankruptcy throws a cloud spotlight(00:49:27) - RIP iRobot: Ben Kehoe(00:50:35) - Christmas wishes for everyone

Welcome to episode 334 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, we?re bringing you a jam-packed recap of re:Invent! We?ve got all the news, from keynotes to announcements. Whether you were there live or catching up on all the news, Justin, Matt, and Ryan are here to break it all down. Let?s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week EKS Gets Chatty: Natural Language Replaces Command Line Nightmares Harvest Now, Decrypt Later: Why Your RSA Keys Need a Quantum Makeover Before 2026 NAT So Fast: AWS Helps You Find Gateways Doing Absolutely Nothing AWS Finally Admits You Have Too Many Log Buckets AWS Finally Lets You Log In Like a Normal Human Lambda Gets a Memory: Checkpoint Your Way to Multi-Step Workflows Step Functions at Home: Lambda Durable Functions Let You Write Workflows in Actual Code No More Bucket List: S3 Public Access Gets Organization-Wide Lockdown AWS Hits Ctrl-Z on CodeCommit Deprecation AWS Puts a Cap on CloudFront: Unlimited Traffic, Limited Anxiety AWS Tells SQL Server to Take a Thread Off: Optimize CPU Cuts Costs by 55% Amazon Bedrock Gets a Bouncer: AgentCore Identity Checks IDs at the Door AI Brings on the Developer Renaissance Follow Up 

01:27 re:Invent 

Matt Garman- 14th Reinvent, which is weird, since we?ve been doing cloud stuff for 87 years? Warner ? Open Mind for a different View and nothing else matters T-shirt.

02:59 re:Invent predictions

Jonathan

Serverless GPU support (extension in Lambda or a different service), it?s about time we have a serverless GPU/Inference capability. It is talked about in the keynote with DeSantis. AI Agent with a goal/instructions that can run when they need to, periodically, or always, and perform an action (Agentic Platform that runs agents) ?  Garman ? Bedrock AgentCore and Kiro Autonomous Agent Werner will announce this is his last keynote and he will retire He retired from re:Invent Presentations

Ryan

New Tranium 3 chips, Inferentia, and Graviton chips Garman ? announced Tranium 3 Ultraservers. They brought the Rack Ryan Expand the number of models in or via bedrock Doubled the number of models and announced Gemma, Minimax M2, Nvidia Nemotron, Mistral Large, and Mistral 3 Refresh to AWS Organizations

Justin

New Nova Model & Sonic with Multi-modal Garman Nova 2 ? Lite, Pro, and Sonic (the lack of Sonic the Hedgehog/Sega reference is a shame) Nova 2 Omni Announce a partnership with OpenAI (likely on stage) Not announced as new, but said they?re running on AWS and that EC2 Ultraservers are in use.  Advanced Agentic AI Capabilities for Security Hub (Automate the SOC teams) Garman ? Advanced Agentic AI Capabilities for Security Hub ? with NEW AWS Security Agent

Matt

A model router to route LLM queries to different AI models Well-architected framework expansion  End user Authentication that doesn?t suck (not current Cognito)

Tie Breaker ? How many times w...

Chapters (00:00:00) - AWS + GCP: Kubectl Goodbye(00:01:31) - Reinvent Prediction: Who Won The PC World Awards(00:02:28) - AWS 10.2: Serverless and AI Agents(00:03:35) - Amazon Keynotes: Ryan Will Retire From Speaking(00:07:15) - AWS Security Hub: Advanced Agentic AI capabilities(00:08:06) - Treat Time: The AI Conference(00:11:04) - Matt Garmin's Conference Keynote(00:13:49) - Amazon Cloud Conference 2018: Highlights and Disclosures(00:19:05) - Swami's Keynote(00:20:33) - Peter Desantis at Reinvent:(00:21:55) - Peter Desantis's keynote(00:24:36) - Bedrock Reinforcement Learning Keynotes(00:29:23) - EC2 and Lambda: Computing with AWS, AI factories(00:30:43) - AWS Lambda Managed Instances(00:33:32) - AWS Lambda: Durable Functions Invite(00:37:37) - Amazon's Step Functions vs. AWS Lambda(00:40:40) - ECS x Kubernetes, NAT & More(00:47:16) - AWS: VPC Encryption Control (Nitro)(00:49:38) - AWS Network Firewall Proxy(00:50:58) - AWS S3: New Block Public Access Controls and More(00:54:19) - Amazon FSX for NetApp ONTAP Adds S3(00:55:56) - Database Enhancements in 2017(00:56:35) - AWS Adds Four New Features to SQL Server & Oracle RDS(00:57:30) - AWS Database Savings Plan Announcement(00:59:28) - RDS 10.2: SQL Server Resource Governor(01:00:41) - WAF and Security Identity(01:01:36) - Guardduty: Extended Threat Detection for Amazon EC2 & ECS(01:03:45) - AWS Security Agent: Automated Application Security Reviews, Code Scan(01:06:14) - Amazon IAM Policy Autopilot Release(01:08:36) - AWS data exports in the Focus 1.2 format and then(01:09:36) - AWS Compute Optimizer: Cost Efficiency and Cost Optimization(01:12:58) - Amazon Rescues CodeCommun from the AWS Cloud(01:17:10) - CloudWatch: Governance, Control Tower, and More(01:18:24) - AWS: AMI Ancestry(01:20:58) - Amazon Support Plans Reshuffled(01:25:29) - Amazon Cloud: Announcements #271

Welcome to episode 333 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are taking a quick break from re:Invent festivities. They bring you the latest and greatest in Cloud and AI news. This week, we discuss Norad and Anthropic teaming up to bring you Christmas cheer. Wait, is that right? Huh. We also have undersea cables, some Turkish region delight, and a LOT of Opus 4.5 news. Let?s get into it!

Titles we almost went with this week Boring Error Pages Not Found Claude Goes Native in Snowflake: Finally, AI That Stays Where Your Data Lives Cross-Cloud Romance: AWS and Google Make It Official with Interconnect Google Gemini Puts OpenAI in Code Red: The Tables Have Turned Azure NAT Gateway V2: Now With More Zones Than a Parking Lot From ChatGPT to Chat-Uh-Oh: OpenAI Sounds the Alarm as Gemini Steals 200 Million        Users **Anthropic Scheduled Actions: Because Your VMs Need a Work-Life Balance Too Finally, Your 500 Errors Can Look as Good as Your Homepage Foundry Model Router: Because Choosing Between 47 AI Models is Nobody?s Idea of Fun Google Takes the Scenic Route: New Cable Avoids the Sunda Strait Traffic Jam Azure Application Gateway Gets Its TCP/IP Diploma Google Cloud Gets Its Türkiye Dinner: 2 Billion Dollar Cloud Feast Coming Soon Microsoft Foundry: Turning AI Chaos into Compliance Gold AI Is Going Great, or How ML Makes Money 

02:59 Nano Banana Pro available for enterprise

Google launches Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image) in general availability on Vertex AI and Google Workspace, with Gemini Enterprise support coming soon. The model supports up to 14 reference images for style consistency and generates 4K resolution outputs with multilingual text rendering capabilities. The model includes Google Search grounding for factual accuracy in generated infographics and diagrams, plus built-in SynthID watermarking for transparency. Copyright indemnification will be available at general availability under Google?s shared responsibility framework. Enterprise integrations are live with Adobe Firefly, Photoshop, Canva, and Figma, enabling production-grade creative workflows. Major retailers, including Klarna, Shopify, and Wayfair, report using the model for product visualization and marketing asset generation at scale. Developers can access Nano Banana Pro through Vertex AI with Provisioned Throughput and Pay As You Go pricing options, plus advanced safety filters. Business users get access through Google Workspace apps, including Slides, Vids, and Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: This Week's News(00:03:02) - Google Launches Nano Banana Pro in Google Workspace(00:05:59) - Cloud Opus 4.5 Availability and Performance(00:10:41) - OpenAI Declares Code Red as Google's Gemini GPT G(00:14:00) - AWS 10: Prediction vs. Keynotes(00:14:49) - Google Cloud Region Coming to Turkey(00:18:52) - Google to Build New Subsea Cable Link Between Australia and Thailand(00:22:12) - Google Cloud Next(00:25:57) - Google Cloud VPN Flow Logs now support Cross-Cloud Networks(00:29:43) - Amazon Cloud Connects to Google Cloud(00:32:10) - Azure Application Gateway: TLS and TCP Protocol Termination(00:35:39) - Azure 2.8: Agent to Agent in Public Preview(00:37:02) - Microsoft Cloud Open Sport 5(00:39:10) - Azure DNS & Security: Threat Intelligence Feed Blocking(00:41:22) - NAT Gateway: Standard V2 SKU and Public Preview(00:45:23) - Azure app service: Custom Error Pages now in general availability(00:47:22) - Microsoft Foundry(00:51:02) - Microsoft's AI Orchestration Layer Gets Scheduled Tasks(00:56:18) - Week in the Cloud: AWS Extravaganza(00:57:06) - NORAD's AI-powered Holiday Tools(01:00:34) - Elf Photo Day(01:01:20) - Unifi: Printer v2 local

Welcome to episode 332 of The Cloud Pod ? where the forecast is always cloudy! It?s Thanksgiving week, which can only mean one thing: AWS Re:Invent predictions! In this special episode, Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matt engage in the annual tradition of drafting their best guesses for what AWS will announce at the biggest cloud conference of the year. Justin is the reigning champion (probably because he actually reads the show notes), but with a reverse snake draft order determined by dice roll, anything could happen. Will Werner announce his retirement? Is Cognito finally getting a much-needed overhaul? And just how many times will ?AI? be uttered on stage? Grab your turkey and let?s get predicting!

Titles we almost went with this week: Roll For Initiative: The Re:Invent Prediction Draft Justin?s Winning Streak: A Study in Actually Doing Your Homework Serverless GPUs and Broken Dreams: Our Re:Invent Wishlist Shooting in the Dark: AWS Predictions Edition We?re Never Good at This, But Here We Go Again Vegas Odds: What Happens at Re:Invent, Gets Predicted Wrong AWS Re:Invent Predictions 2025

The annual prediction draft is here! Draft order was determined by dice roll: Jonathan first, followed by Ryan, Justin, and Matt in last position. As always, it?s a reverse order format, with points awarded for each correct prediction announced during the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday keynotes.

Jonathan?s Predictions Serverless GPU Support ? An extension to Lambda or a different service that provides on-demand serverless GPU/inference capability. Likely with requirements for pre-warmed provisioned instances. Agentic Platform for Continuous AI Agents ? A service that allows agents to run continuously with goals or instructions, performing actions periodically or on-demand in the real world. Think: running agents on a schedule that can check conditions and take automated actions. Werner Vogels Retirement Announcement ? Werner will announce that this is his last Re:Invent keynote and that he is retiring. Ryan?s Predictions New Trainium 3 Chips, Inferentia, and Graviton Chips ? New generation of AWS custom silicon across training, inference, and general compute. Expanded Model Availability in Bedrock ? AWS will significantly expand the number of models available in Bedrock, potentially via partnerships or integrations with additional providers. Major Refresh to AWS Organizations ? UI-based or functionality refresh providing better visibility into SCPs, OU mappings, and stack sets across organizations. Chapters (00:00:02) - Episode 332: Reinvent Predictions For(00:01:26) - Reinvent: The Contest(00:03:35) - How to Predict the AI Announcement(00:04:23) - Serverless GPUs: First Step(00:05:58) - SageMaker vs. Amazon: The Fight(00:09:56) - What is the Future of AI Agents?(00:11:03) - Facebook is an Agent Platform, but...(00:11:38) - AWS: Bedrock Expansion & OpenAI Partnership(00:15:09) - Top Tech Speakers: ML, AI and the Warner Key(00:16:15) - Third and Final Prediction(00:17:15) - WSJDLive: Future of AWS IT refresh(00:18:18) - 3 of the Best Security Hub Features(00:19:22) - AWS: Cognito 2.0 or Agentic Identities?(00:21:27) - Tiebreaker: How Many Times Will AI Be Said?(00:23:28) - What to Do to Reinvent Yourself at Reinvent 2012(00:24:00) - Amazon's AI Wish List(00:29:50) - A Taste of Re Invent 2018

Welcome to episode 331 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Jonathan, Ryan, Matt, and Justin (for a little bit, anyway) are in the studio today to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news. This week, we?re looking at our Ignite predictions (that side gig as internet psychics isn?t looking too good) undersea cables (our fave!), plus datacenters and more. Plus Claude and Azure make a 30 billion dollar deal! Take a break from turkey and avoiding politics, and let?s take a trip into the clouds!   

Titles we almost went with this week GPT-5.1 Gets a Shell Tool Because Apparently We Haven?t Learned Anything From Sci-Fi Movies The Great Ingress Egress: NGINX Controller Waves Goodbye After Years of Volunteer Burnout Queue the Applause: Lambda SQS Mapping Gets a Serious Speed Boost SELECT * FROM future WHERE SQL meets AI without the prompt drama MFA or GTFO: Microsoft?s 99.6% Phishing-Resistant Authentication Achievement JWT Another Thing ALB Can Do: OAuth Validation Moves to the Load Balancer Google?s Emerging Threats Center: Because Manually Checking 12 Months of Logs Sounds Terrible EventBridge Gets a Drag-and-Drop Makeover: No More Schema Drama Permission Denied: How Granting Access Took Down the Internet

Follow Up 

00:51 Ignite Predictions ? The Results 

Matt (Who is in charge of sound effects, so be aware) 

ACM Competitor ? True SSL competitive product AI announcement in Security AI Agent (Copilot for Sentinel) ? sort of (½)  Azure DevOps Announcement

Justin

New Cobalt and Mai Gen 2 or similar ? Check Price Reduction on OpenAI & Significant Prompt Caching  Microsoft Foundational LLM to compete with OpenAI ? 

Jonathan

The general availability of new, smaller, and more power-efficient Azure Local hardware form factors Declarative AI on Fabric: This represents a move towards a declarative model, where users state the desired outcome, and the AI agent system determines the steps needed to achieve it within the Fabric ecosystem. Advanced Cost Management: Granular dashboards to track the token and compute consumption per agent or per transaction, enabling businesses to forecast costs and set budgets for their agent workforce.

How many times will they say Copilot:

The word ?Copilot? is mentioned 46 to 71 times in the video.

Jonathan 45

Justin: 35

Matt: 40

General News

05:13 Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025

Cloudflare experienced its worst outage since 2019 on November 18, 2025, lasting approximately three hours and affecting core traffic routing across its entire network.  The incident was triggered by a database permissions change that caused a Bot Management feature file to double in size, exceeding hardcoded limits in their proxy software and causing system panics that resulted in 5xx errors for customers. The root cause reveals a cascading failure pattern, where a ClickHouse database query began returning duplicate column metadata after permission changes.  This resulted in a significant i... Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:01:04) - Matchbox: Microsoft's AI Announcement(00:05:04) - Cloudflare's Worst Outage Since 2019(00:07:32) - GPT 5.1 Release(00:11:21) - ChatGPT Launches Group Chat(00:14:53) - Microsoft Teams: Working in Teams with Copilot(00:16:16) - Gemini 3.0 Pro Launch at Google AI Conference(00:18:51) - Microsoft, Nvidia to Develop Cloud Models for Anthropic(00:22:45) - Ingress NGINX Controller to Be Retired(00:25:05) - Cloudflare Expands AI into the Edge with a Replicate(00:29:31) - AWS Lambda: Provisioned Mode for SQS(00:32:31) - Amazon EventBridge Expands Schema Aware with New Rule Builder(00:34:37) - Application Load Balancers support JWT Token Verification(00:37:51) - How Protective Reroute Improves Network Resilience(00:40:26) - Google Security Operations Launches Emerging Threat Center(00:46:48) - Google to Invest $7 Million in Subsea Cable Networks(00:50:17) - Microsoft's Azure AI SuperFactory(00:53:43) - Azure DB for Postgres Announces Private Preview(00:57:04) - Microsoft Defender for Cloud Integrates with GitHub Advanced Security(01:00:09) - Azure introduces Smart Tiering for Blob Storage(01:06:29) - How to lay a fiber cable in your house(01:10:02) - Microsoft's AI Agent Development Announcement(01:16:21) - How to Manage Ideas in the AI World(01:22:18) - The Project Narrative in the Machine Learning Code(01:23:38) - Week in Cloud: The Cloud Pod

Welcome to episode 329 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy (and if you?re in California, rainy too!) Justin and Matt have taken a break from Ark building activities to bring you this week?s episode, packed with all the latest in cloud and AI news, including undersea cables (our favorite!) FinOps, Ignite predictions, and so much more! Grab your umbrellas and let?s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Fastnet and Furious: AWS Lays 320 Terabits of Cable Across the Atlantic No More kubectl apply ?pray: AWS Backup Takes the Stress Out of EKS Recovery AWS Gets Swift with Lambda: No Taylor Version Required Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Microsoft Splits Teams from Office FinOps and Behold: Google Automates Your Cloud Budget Nightmares AMD Turin Around GCP?s Price-Performance with N4D VMs Azure Gets Territorial: Your Data Stays Put Whether It Likes It or Not AWS Finally Answers ?Is It Available in My Region?? Before You Build It  Getting to the Bare Metal of Things: Google?s Axion Goes Commando Azure Ultra Disk Gets Ultra Serious About Latency Container Size Matters: Azure Expands ACI to 240 GB Memory  Google Containerises Chaos: Agent Sandbox Keeps Your AI from Going Rogue AWS Prints Money While Amazon Prints Pink Slips: Q3 Earnings Beat Follow Up 

02:08 Microsoft sidesteps hefty EU fine with Teams unbundling deal

Microsoft avoids a potentially substantial EU antitrust fine by agreeing to unbundle Teams from the Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites for a period of seven years.  The settlement follows a 2023 complaint from Salesforce-owned Slack alleging anticompetitive bundling practices that harmed rival collaboration tools. The commitments require Microsoft to offer Office and Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: When You Can't Even Sit Down(00:01:37) - Nice Job Last Week With Jonathan and Elise(00:02:03) - Microsoft Settles Competition Lawsuit Over Teams(00:04:47) - Amazon, Google Cloud Deliver Record Earnings(00:08:13) - Microsoft Q1 Fiscal 2026 Earnings(00:09:06) - Azure Q4 Update, Microsoft(00:09:45) - Azure Front Door Incident Follow Up(00:13:53) - Azure Conference Prediction(00:14:52) - Microsoft Ignite 2017: What Do You Want From SSL?(00:16:28) - Microsoft's Next-Gen AI Accelerator(00:17:32) - Top Tech News: Apple's AI Announcement(00:19:12) - Microsoft's Azure DevOps Announcement, and More(00:20:59) - How Many Times Will They Say Co-Pilot in This Present(00:21:54) - Microsoft, Chat AI, and More(00:26:12) - IBM Cloud Ability Governance and Kubecast 3.0(00:28:06) - Amazon Rolls Out New Fastnet Cable(00:29:32) - AWS Cloud Planning Tool: Capabilities by Region(00:34:04) - Kubernetes: Agent Sandbox for AI(00:35:52) - Google's Ironwood TPU and Axion VM(00:37:38) - Google Cloud: FinOps Tooling in the Future(00:39:10) - Azure 3.8: Continuous Delivery & Cost Management(00:42:29) - Will the MCP help with deployment?(00:44:20) - Microsoft UltraDisk Gets Performance and Cost Update(00:46:46) - Azure Container Instances now supports 31 VCPUs and 240(00:48:04) - Azure 10.2: Geo Priority Replication(00:49:22) - Cloud Podcast: Predicting the Keynote

Welcome to episode 329 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and special guest Elise are in the studio to bring you all the latest in AI and cloud news, including ? you guessed it ? more outages, and more OpenAI team-ups. We?ve also got GPUs, K8 news, and Cursor updates. Let?s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Azure Front Door: Please Use the Side Entrance ? el -jb Azure and NVIDIA: A Match Made in GPU Heaven ? mk Azure Goes Down Under the Weight of Its Own Configuration ? el GitHub Turns Your Copilot Subscription Into an All-You-Can-Eat Agent Buffet ? mk, el Microsoft Goes Full Blackwell: No Regrets, Just GPUs Jules Verne Would Be Proud: Google?s CLI Goes 20,000 Bugs Under the Codebase RAG to Riches: AWS Makes Retrieval Augmented Generation Turnkey Kubectl Gets a Gemini Twin: Google Teaches AI to Speak Kubernetes I?m Not a Robot: Azure WAF Finally Learns to Ask the Important Questions OpenAI Puts 38 Billion Eggs in Amazon?s Basket: Multi-Cloud Gets Complicated The Root Cause They?ll Never Root Out: Why Attrition Stays Off the RCA Google?s New Extension Lets You Deploy Kubernetes by Just Asking Nicely Cursor 2.0: Now With More Agents Than a Hollywood Talent Agency Follow Up 

04:46 Massive Azure outage is over, but problems linger ? here?s what happened | ZDNET 

Azure experienced a global outage on October 29, affecting all regions simultaneously, unlike the recent AWS outage that was limited to a single region.  The incident lasted approximately eight hours from noon to 8 PM ET, impacting major services including Microsoft 365, Teams, Xbox Live, and critical infrastructure for Alaska Airlines, Vodafone UK, and Heathrow Airport, among others. The root cause was an inadvertent tenant configuration change in Azure Front Door that bypassed safety validations due to a software defect. Microsoft?s protection mechanisms failed to catch the erroneous deployment, allowing invalid configurations to propagate across the global fleet and cause HTTP timeouts, server errors, and elevated packet loss at network edges. Recovery required rolling back to the last known good configuration and gradually rebalancing traffic across nodes to prevent overload conditions.  Some customers experienced lingering issues even after the official recovery time, with Microsoft temporarily blocking configuration changes to Azure Front Door while completing the restoration process. The incident highlights concentration risk in cloud infrastructure, as this marks the second major cloud provider outage in October 2025.  Despite Azure revenue growing 40 percent in the latest quarterly report, Microsoft?s stock declined in after-hours trading as the company acknowledged capaci... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure Front Door(00:01:07) - Microsoft Azure's Front Door Outage: Update!(00:04:09) - Amazon AWS and OpenAI Announce Multi-Year Strategic Partnership(00:09:21) - OpenAI vs. Nvidia: Which One Will Win?(00:12:09) - Google removes Gemini AI models from AI Studio(00:20:40) - The New York Times' political model(00:21:35) - GitHub's Agent HQ: Orchestrating Multiple Agents with(00:25:53) - Cursor Launches Multi-Agent Interface with Composer(00:33:49) - Conversations with an AI(00:37:13) - Amazon.com Releases MCP Proxy for AWS(00:40:35) - Cloud Cost Management Tool(00:41:18) - ECS Now Supports Built-in Linear and Canary Deployments(00:44:27) - Amazon Route 53 Resolver now supports AWS Private Link(00:47:46) - Mount Points for S3(00:52:08) - Google Cloud's New Log Analytics Query Builder(00:54:40) - Google's Gemini CLI Adds Kubernetes to DevOps(00:58:13) - Google Launches Joules Extension for Gnome CLI(01:04:20) - Google Cloud: GA of Cost Anomaly Detection(01:09:07) - Microsoft and Nvidia expand AI partnership with Azure(01:11:23) - California data centers: How expensive is electricity?(01:13:02) - Microsoft: Azure Cloud: 1.2 Million Tokens a Second,(01:19:25) - Azure WAF: Capture Challenges for Bot Traffic(01:22:10) - Azure: Instant Access to Snapshots for SSD & Ultra Disk(01:27:47) - Week in Cloud: The Cloud Podcast

Welcome to episode 328 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are on board today to bring you all the latest news in cloud and AI, including secret regions (this one has the aliens), ongoing discussions between Microsoft and OpenAI, and updates to Nova, SQL, and OneLake -and even the latest installment of Cloud Journeys.  Let?s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week CloudWatch?s New Feature: Because Nobody Likes Writing Incident Reports at 3 AM DNS: Did Not Survive ? The Great US-EAST-1 Outage of 2025 404 DevOps Not Found: The AWS Automation Adventure mk When Your DevOps Team Gets Replaced by AI and Then Everything Crashes Database Migrations Get the ChatGPT Treatment: Just Vibe Your Schema Changes AWS DevOps Team Gets the AI Treatment: 40% Fewer Humans, 100% More Questions Breaking Up is Hard to Compute: Microsoft and OpenAI Redefine Their Relationship AWS Goes Full Scope: Now Tracking Your Cloud?s Carbon from Cradle to Gate Platform Engineering: When Your Golden Path Leads to a Dead End DynamoDB?s DNS Disaster: How a Race Condition Raced Through AWS AI Takes Over AWS DevOps Jobs, Servers Take Unscheduled Vacation PostgreSQL Scaling Gets a 30-Second Makeover While AWS Takes a Coffee Break The Domino Effect: When DynamoDB Drops, Everything Drops RAG to Riches: Amazon Nova Learns to Cite Its Sources AWS Finally Tells You When Your EC2 Instance Can?t Keep Up With Your Storage Ambitions AWS Nova Gets Grounded: No More Hallucinating About Reality One API to Rule Them All: OneLake?s Storage Compatibility Play OpenAI gets to pay Alimony Database schema deployments are totally a vibe AWS will tell you how not green you are today, now in 3 scopes General News 

02:00 DDoS in September | Fastly

Fastly?s September DDoS report reveals a notable 15.5 million requests per second attack that lasted over an hour, demonstrating how modern application-layer attacks can sustain extreme throughput with real HTTP requests rather than simple pings or amplification techniques. Attack volume in September dropped to 61% of August levels, with data suggesting a correlation between school schedules and attack frequency: lower volumes coincide with school breaks, while higher volumes occur when schools are in session. Media & Entertainment companies faced the highest median attack sizes, followed by Education and High Technology sectors, with 71% of September?s peak attack day attributed to a single enterprise media company. The sustained 15 million RPS attack originated from a single cloud-provider ASN, using sophisticated daemons that mimicked browser behavior, making detection more challenging than typical DDoS patterns. Organizations should evaluate whether their incident response runbooks can handle hour-long attacks at 15+ million RPS, as these sustained high-throughput attacks require automated mitigation rather than manual intervention. Listen, we?re not inviting a DDoS attack, but also?we?ll just turn off the website, so there?s that.  AI Is Going Great ? Or How ML Makes Money

04:41 Google AI Studio updates: More control, less friction

Google AI Studio introduces ?vibe coding? ? a new AI-powered develo... Chapters (00:00:00) - AWS vs. Azure: When Will Both Companies Have Outages(00:02:07) - DDoS Attacks Rise in September(00:04:43) - Google AI Studio Introduces Vibe Coding(00:09:20) - OpenAI's Company Knowledge for Chat GPT(00:13:59) - Microsoft and OpenAI Strike a New Deal(00:17:19) - Amazon Nova: General Availability of WebGrounding(00:18:58) - Athena Health Reporting's AI-Powered Database Migration Author(00:20:56) - Amazon Reportedly Replaces 40% of DevOps Staff With AI(00:23:58) - Amazon's DynamoDB Outage(00:28:11) - CloudWatch: Automated Incident Reporting with Scope 3(00:33:24) - Amazon's Secret West Region(00:39:31) - EC2: EBS IOPS exceeded and Volume level(00:42:52) - Google Cloud Parameter Manager(00:46:37) - Azure Key Vault vs AWS SSM: Feature Flag Management(00:48:32) - Citadel Cross-Site Interconnect with Google Cloud Platform(00:51:52) - BigTable Storage: Limited-Access Storage in Preview(00:54:38) - Google Cloud: 4x Max Nvidia NVL70 Instance(00:56:58) - Nvidia GB300 Envel 72 Instances(00:58:35) - Azure databases for PostgreSQL now with High Availability ( HA)(01:00:11) - OneLake + Fabric: What Could Go Wrong?(01:01:40) - 8 Platform Engineering Anti-Patterns(01:05:01) - The Second Anti-Pattern: Lack of Product Mindset(01:08:02) - 2. Give the team some ownership of the platform(01:11:56) - Building a Successful Platform: Tracking the Wrong Metrics(01:13:34) - Don't Copy the Kubernetes Platform(01:16:08) - 7 Pitfalls of Over Engineering on Day 1(01:19:14) - Platform Engineering: The Product Management Process(01:20:59) - This Week in the Cloud: Platform Engineering(01:21:41) - Next Week In The Cloud: Trip to the Bay

Welcome to episode 327 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan are here to bring you all the latest news (and a few rants) in the worlds of Cloud and AI. I?m sure all our readers are aware of the AWS outage last week, as it was in all the news everywhere. But we?ve also got some new AI models (including Sora in case you?re low on really crappy videos the youths might like), plus EKS, Kubernetes, Vertex AI, and more. Let?s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Oracle and Azure Walk Into a Cloud Bar: Nobody Gets ETL?d When DNS Goes Down, So Does Your Monday: AWS Takes Half the Internet on a Coffee Break 404 Cloud Not Found: AWS Proves Even the Internet?s Phone Book Can Get Lost DNS: Definitely Not Staffed ? How AWS Lost Its Way When It Lost Its People When Larry Met Satya: A Cloud Love Story Azure Finally Answers ?Dude, Where?s My Data?? with Storage Discovery Breaking: Microsoft Discovers AI Training Uses More Power Than a Small Country 404 Engineers Not Found ? AWS Learns the Hard Way That People Are Its Most Critical Infrastructure Azure Storage Discovery: Finding Your Data Needles in the Cloud Haystack EKS Auto Mode: Because Even Your Clusters Deserve Cruise Control Azure Gets Reel: Microsoft Adds Video Generation to AI Foundry The Great Token Heist: Vertex AI Steals 90% Off Your Gemini Bills Cache Me If You Can: Vertex AI?s Token-Saving Feature IaC Just Got a Manager ? And It?s Not Your Boss  From Musk to Microsoft: Grok 4 Makes the Great Cloud Migration No Harness.. You are not going to make IACM happen Microsoft Drafts a Solution to Container Creation Chaos PowerShell to the People: Azure Simplifies the Great Gateway Migration IP There Yet? Azure?s Scripts Keep Your Address While You Upgrade Follow Up

00:53 Glacier Deprecation Email

Standalone Amazon Glacier service (vault-based with separate APIs) will stop accepting new customers as of December 15, 2025.  S3 Glacier storage classes (Instant Retrieval, Flexible Retrieval, Deep Archive) are completely unaffected and continue normally Existing Glacier customers can keep using it forever ? no forced migration required.  AWS is essentially consolidating around S3 as the unified storage platform, rather than maintaining two separate archival services. The standalone service will enter maintenance mode, meaning there will be no new features, but the service will remain operational. Migration to S3 Glacier is optional but recommended for better integration, lower costs, and more features. (Justin assures us it is actually slightly cheaper, so there?s that.)  General News 

02:24

Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure vs. GCP(00:00:59) - Amazon's Glacier Storage Deprecation, and More(00:02:33) - Big IP Software Breach: Worrisome(00:04:56) - Claude Code Gets a Web Version(00:11:45) - Infrastructure as Code Management: Annoying Sales Pitch(00:14:26) - AWS: US East 1 Outage Causes Chaos(00:23:17) - EC2 Capacity Manager(00:25:39) - EC2 Auto-Mode for Kubernetes 1.29(00:28:44) - Amazon. EC2: CPU Optimization for License Included Instances(00:30:55) - AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager: Improved Security Protection(00:35:14) - Amazon ECS CLI Agent Orchestrator(00:40:37) - Google Cloud: BigQuery Update, New GPUs(00:46:11) - Google Cloud: Management of Suences in Vertex & AI SDK(00:47:58) - Gemini Code Assist on GitHub Enterprise(00:52:09) - Vertex AI Context Caching(00:54:25) - Cloud Armor Announces New Features(00:57:05) - Microsoft Firewall: New Capacity Metric(00:59:55) - Microsoft's Azure API Management introduces carbon aware features(01:04:14) - Azure Storage Discovery(01:07:45) - Two new AI models available in Azure AI Foundry(01:08:54) - Azure: Application Gateway V1 to V2 Migration Scripts(01:12:43) - Oracle's AI Agent Studio Expands(01:14:05) - Week in the Cloud

Welcome to episode 326 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Ryan are your guides to all things cloud and AI this week! We?ve got news from SonicWall (and it?s not great), a host of goodbyes to say over at AWS, Oracle (finally) joins the dark side, and even Slurm ? and you don?t even need to ride on a creepy river to experience it. Let?s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week SonicWall?s Cloud Backup Service: From 5% to Oh No, That?s Everyone AWS Spring Cleaning: 19 Services Get the Boot The Great AWS Service Purge of 2025 Maintenance Mode: Where Good Services Go to Die GitHub Gets Assimilated: Resistance to Azure Migration is Futile Salesforce to Ransomware Gang: You Can?t Always Get What You Want Kansas City Gets the Need for Speed with 100G Direct Connect. Peter, what are you up too Gemini Takes the Wheel: Google?s AI Learns to Click and Type  Oracle Discovers the Dark Side (Finally Has Cookies) Azure Goes Full Blackwell: 4,600 Reasons to Upgrade Your GPU Game DataStax to the Future: AWS Hires Database CEO for Security Role The Clone Wars: EBS Strikes Back with Instant Volume Copies Slurm Dunk: AWS Brings HPC Scheduling to Kubernetes The Great Cluster Convergence: When Slurm Met EKS Codex sent me a DM that I?ll ignore too on Slack General News 

01:24 SonicWall: Firewall configs stolen for all cloud backup customers

SonicWall confirmed that all customers using their cloud backup service had firewall configuration files exposed in a breach, expanding from their initial estimate of 5% to 100% of cloud backup users. That?s a big difference? The exposed backup files contain AES-256-encrypted credentials and configuration data, which could include MFA seeds for TOTP authentication, potentially explaining recent Akira ransomware attacks that bypassed MFA. SonicWall requires affected customers to reset all credentials, including local user passwords, TOTP codes, VPN shared secrets, API keys, and authentication tokens across their entire infrastructure. This incident highlights a fundamental security risk of cloud-based configuration backups where sensitive credentials are stored centrally, making them attractive targets for attackers. The breach demonstrates why WebAuthn/passkeys offer superior security architecture since they don?t rely on shared secrets that can be stolen from backups or servers. Interested in checking out their detailed remediation guidance? Find that here. 

02:36 Justin ? ?You know, providing your own encryption keys is also good; not allowing your SaaS vendor to have the encryption key is a positive thing to do. There?s all kinds of ways to protect your data in the cloud when you?re leveraging a SaaS service.?

04:43 Take this rob and shove it! Salesforce issues stern retort to ransomware extort

Salesforce is refusing to pay ransomware demands from criminals claiming to have stolen nearly 1 billion customer records, stating they will not engage, negotiate with, or pay any extortion dema... Chapters (00:00:00) - Cloud Pod: Oracle Explains The Dark Side(00:01:31) - Cloud Security: Sonicwall Hacking(00:04:44) - Salesforce Rejects Ransomware Demand(00:07:04) - OpenAI's AI Agent Kit and More(00:10:10) - Google's Gemini 2.5 for UIs(00:12:20) - Amazon Is Moving 19 AWS Services to Maintenance Mode(00:16:30) - AWS Direct Connect now offers 100 Gigabytes dedicated connections with Mac(00:17:37) - AWS Identity Center now supports customer-managed KMS Keys(00:18:56) - Amazon QuickSuite M8A New Instance Launch(00:22:31) - Amazon Hires Former Data Stack CEO as VP of Security Services and(00:26:43) - Amazon Bedrock Agent Core(00:28:35) - AWS Transports AI Inference to Custom Chips(00:30:07) - Amazon EBS Volume Clones(00:31:45) - Amazon EKS Adds Slurm to Kubernetes(00:32:48) - GCP Introduces Gemini Enterprise as a Unified AI Platform(00:35:44) - Google's LLM Eval Kit for Prompt Engineering(00:37:57) - Google Cloud : NetApp Files for Enterprise Storage(00:40:43) - GitHub to Move All Its Software to Azure(00:45:17) - Microsoft Deploys First Production Cluster with Nvidia GB300 GPUs(00:48:31) - Oracle's Dark Mode in Oci

Welcome to episode 325 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin is on vacation this week, so it?s up to Ryan and Matthew to bring you all the latest news in cloud and AI, and they definitely deliver! This week we have an AWS invoice undo button, Sora 2, and quite a bit of news DigitalOcean ? plus so much more. Let?s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week AWS Shoots for the Cloud with NBA Partnership Nothing But Net: AWS Scores Big with Basketball AI Deal From Courtside to Cloud-side: AWS Dunks on Sports Analytics PostgreSQL Gets a Gemini Twin for Natural Language Queries Fuzzy Logic: When Your Database Finally Speaks Your Language CLI and Let AI: Google?s Natural Language Database Assistant Satya?s Org Chart Shuffle: Now with More AI Synergy Microsoft Reorgs Again: This Time It?s Personal (and Commercial) Ctrl+Alt+Delete: Microsoft Reboots Its Sales Machine Sora 2: The Sequel Nobody Asked For But Everyone Will Use OpenAI Puts the ?You? in YouTube (AI Edition) Sam Altman Stars in His Own AI-Generated Reality Show Grok and Roll: Microsoft?s New AI Model Rocks Azure To Grok or Not to Grok: That is the Question Grok Around the Clock: Azure?s 24/7 Reasoning Machine Spark Joy: Google Lights Up ML Inference for Data Pipelines DigitalOcean?s Storage Trinity: Hot, Cold, and Backed Up NFS: Not For Suckers (Network File Storage) The Goldilocks Storage Strategy: Not Too Hot, Not Too Cold, Just Right NAT Gonna Cost You: DigitalOcean?s Gateway to Savings BYOIP: Bring Your Own IP (But Leave Your Billing Worries Behind) The Great Invoice Escape: No More Support Tickets Required Ctrl+Z for Your AWS Bills: The Undo Button Finance Teams Needed Image Builder Finally Learns When to Stop Trying Pipeline Dreams: Now With Built-in Reality Checks EC2 Image Builder Gets a Failure Intervention Feature MCP: Model Context Protocol or Marvel Cinematic Protocol? AI is Going Great ? Or How ML Makes Money 

00:45 OpenAI?s Sora 2 lets users insert themselves into AI videos with sound ? Ars Technica

OpenAI?s Sora 2 introduces synchronized audio generation alongside video synthesis, matching Google?s Veo 3 and Alibaba?s Wan 2.5 capabilities.  This positions OpenAI competitively in the multimodal AI space with what they call their ?GPT-3.5 moment for video.? The new iOS social app feature allows users to insert themselves into AI-generated videos through ?cameos,? suggesting potential applications for personalized content creation and social media integration at scale. Sora 2 demonstrates improved physical accuracy and consistency across multiple shots, addressing previous limitations where objects would teleport or deform unrealistically.  The model can now simulate complex movements like gymnastics routines while maintaining proper physics. The addition of ?sophisticated background soundscapes, speech, and sound effects? expands potential enterprise use cases for automated video production, training materials, and marketing content generation without separate audio post-processing. Chapters (00:00:00) - GCP 325(00:00:54) - OpenAI Sora 2: Creators of AI Videos(00:03:31) - Joules: New Tools and APIs for Developers(00:05:18) - OpenAI Doubles Down on Chip Diversity with AMD(00:07:52) - NBA Launches 'Inside the Game' Powered by AWS(00:14:27) - EC2 Image Builder Update(00:18:13) - AWS releases Open Source MCP Server for Amazon Bedrock Agent(00:22:57) - AWS Knowledge Based MCP Server(00:27:27) - AWS Service Quotations: Automatic Management(00:30:31) - Amazon RDS for DB2 Launches Native Database Backups(00:32:36) - GCP.com: Gemini CLI for PostgreSQL(00:37:34) - Google Announces $4 Billion Investment in Arkansas(00:42:06) - Microsoft Restructuring its Azure Commercial Organization(00:44:58) - Microsoft Bringing Xai Grok 4 to Azure AI Foundry(00:47:24) - Microsoft to Allow Personal Copilot in Corporate Environments(00:51:07) - Fabric Mirroring for Azure SQL Managed Instances(00:54:28) - Microsoft Firewall Update 1.8(00:56:32) - DigitalOcean: AI Storage, NFS, and More(00:59:58) - DigitalOcean Build smarter Agents with OpenAI and VPC(01:02:07) - DigitalOcean Brings Per Second Charges to Droplet Plans(01:04:40) - per second billing for Windows at DigitalOcean(01:06:15) - Snowflake Managed MCP Servers for Secure Governed Data(01:11:51) - Week in the Cloud: September 7, 2017

Welcome to episode 323 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt and Ryan are in the studio tonight to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news! This week we have a close call from Entra, some DeepSeek news, Firestore, and even an acquisition! Make sure to stay tuned for the aftershow ? and Matt obviously falling asleep on the job. Let?s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week When One Key Opens Every Door: Microsoft?s Close Call with Cloud Catastrophe Bedrock Goes Qwen-tum: Alibaba?s Models Join the AWS Party DeepSeek and You Shall Find V3.1 in Bedrock GPUs of Unusual Size? I Don?t Think They Exist (Narrator: They Do) Kubernetes Without the Kubernightmares Firestore and Forget: AI Takes the Wheel SCPs Get Their Full License: IAM Language Edition Do What I Meant, Not What I Prompted Atlassian Pays a Billion to DX the Developer Experience Entra at Your Own Risk: The Azure Identity Crisis That Almost Was Oracle Intelligence: The AI Nobody Asked For Wisconsin Gets Cheesy with AI: Microsoft?s Dairy State Datacenter  Azure Opens the Data Floodgates (But Only in Europe) PostgreSQL Gets a Security Blanket and Won?t Share Its TEEs Microsoft?s New Cooling System Has Veins Like a Leaf and Runs Hotter Than Your Gaming PC Azure Gets Cold Feet About Hot Chips, Decides to Go With the Flow AI Is Going Great ? Or How ML Makes Money 

00:58 Google and Kaggle launch AI Agents Intensive course

Google and Kaggle are launching a 5-day intensive course on AI agents from November 10-14.  This follows their GenAI course that attracted 280,000 learners, with curriculum covering agent architectures, tools, memory systems, and production deployment. The course focuses on building autonomous AI agents and multi-agent systems, which represents a shift from traditional single-model AI to systems that can independently perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with tools and APIs. This development signals growing enterprise interest in AI agents for cloud environments, where autonomous systems can manage infrastructure, optimize resources, and handle complex workflows without constant human intervention. The hands-on approach includes codelabs and a capstone project, indicating Google?s push to democratize agent development skills as businesses increasingly need engineers who can build production-ready autonomous systems. The timing aligns with major cloud providers racing to offer agent-based services, as AI agents become essential for automating cloud operations, customer service, and business processes at scale. Interested in registering? You can do that here.  Cloud Tools 

03:21 Atlassian acquires DX, a developer productivity platform, for $1B

Atlassian is acquiring DX, a developer productivity ana... Chapters (00:00:00) - Cloud Podcast: Databricks 1(00:01:11) - Google and Kegel Launch Five Day Training Course on AI Agents(00:03:34) - Atlasian Buys DX: Will It Hurt Their Business?(00:07:03) - Amazon Web Services: New Models for DeepSeek and DeepSe(00:08:42) - Amazon RDS: MySQL Innovation Release 9.4 in Database Preview(00:14:12) - QDeveloper CLI Adds Remote MCPs(00:15:56) - Amazon Nova Act Extension(00:18:08) - Google Cloud: Security Command Center Insights for Kubernetes(00:20:42) - Google's Firestore: MCP for AI Systems(00:22:59) - AI Adoption Among Software Developers Hits 90%, Says Google(00:24:00) - AI: Return on Investment?(00:31:05) - Microsoft's Entra ID Vulnerabilities(00:36:37) - Microsoft Unveils $100 Million AI Data Center(00:40:31) - Azure SQL Server 2020: Managed Instance(00:43:20) - AKS Automatic for Kubernetes + Azure Cloud(00:45:49) - Databricks 1.4(00:47:11) - Microsoft's HPC Infrastructure: HBV5 Series VMs(00:52:08) - NET (for Mobile, Desktop, and More)(00:53:12) - Azure Monitor Kubernetes: Higher throughput & more(00:54:56) - Microsoft SQL: Integrations with Grafana(01:01:59) - Microsoft Expands Fabric with New Features and Collaboration(01:05:21) - Azure Application Gateway: zero downtime upgrade capability(01:07:28) - Oracle's AI Strategy: Setting the Standard(01:10:42) - Week in Cloud: Exploring the Cloud(01:11:26) - The Need for Prompt Engineering in Cloud Software(01:18:28) - Image Generation with Google GPT5(01:22:04) - A Week in the Life

Welcome to episode 324 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Jonathan are your hosts, bringing you all the latest news and announcements in Cloud and AI. This week we have some exec changes over at Oracle, a LOT of announcements about Sonnet 4.5, and even some marketplace updates over at Azure! Let?s get started.  Titles we almost went with this week Oracle?s Executive Shuffle: Promoting from Within While Chasing from Behind Copilot Takes the Wheel on Your Legacy Code Highway Queue Up for GPUs: Google?s Take-a-Number Approach to AI Computing License to Bill: Google?s 400% Markup Grievance Autopilot Engages: GKE Goes Full Self-Driving Mode SQL Server Finally Gets a Lake House Instead of a Server Room Microsoft Gives Office Apps Their Own AI Interns Claude and Present Danger: The AI That Codes for 30 Hours Straight The Claude Father Part 4.5: An Offer Your Code Can?t Refuse CUD You Believe It? Google Makes Discounts Actually Flexible ECS Goes Full IPv6: No IPv4s Given Breaking News: AWS Finally Lets You Hit the Emergency Stop Button One Marketplace to Rule Them All BigQuery Gets a Crystal Ball and a Chatty Friend Azure?s September to Remember: When Certificates and Allocators Attack Shall I Compare Thee to a Sonnet? 4.5 Ways Anthropic Just Leveled Up AWS provides a big red button Follow Up 

01:26 The global harms of restrictive cloud licensing, one year later | Google Cloud Blog

Google Cloud filed a formal complaint with the European Commission one year ago about Microsoft?s anti-competitive cloud licensing practices, specifically the 400% price markup Microsoft imposes on customers who move Windows Server workloads to non-Azure clouds. The UK Competition and Markets Authority found that restrictive licensing costs UK cloud customers £500 million annually due to lack of competition, while US government agencies overspend by $750 million yearly because of Microsoft?s licensing tactics. Microsoft recently disclosed that forcing software customers to use Azure is one of three pillars driving its growth and is implementing new licensing changes preventing managed service providers from hosting certain workloads on Azure competitors. Multiple regulators globally including South Africa and the US FTC are now investigating Microsoft?s cloud licensing practices, with the CMA finding that Azure has gained customers at 2-3x the rate of competitors since implementing restrictive terms. A European Centre for International Political Economy study suggests ending restrictive licensing could unlock ?1.2 trillion in additional EU GDP by 2030 and generate ?450 billion annually in fiscal savings and productivity gains.

03:32 Jonathan ? ?I?d feel happier about these complaints Google were making if they actually reciprocated the deals they make for their customers in the...

Chapters (00:00:00) - GCP Alumni(00:01:35) - Microsoft's Cloud Licensing Practices(00:05:22) - Microsoft introduces Office Agent in Copilot Chat(00:08:13) - Claude Sonet 4.5 Launches(00:09:33) - Claude 4.5 New Feature Announcement(00:15:12) - Bill Gates on ChatGPT and Bots(00:16:10) - Snowflake, Cloud Sonnet 4.5, and SQL Server(00:17:39) - Amazon EC2, ECS now supporting IPv6 Only workloads(00:20:23) - Amazon Machine Image Governance (New Parameter)(00:25:42) - Easy to Auto-Scalping (New Feature)(00:29:23) - Amazon EC2: Managed Serverless Instances(00:33:28) - AWS Outposts: Third-Party Storage Integration(00:36:45) - Google's Flex Start VMS for AI & GKE Autop(00:41:48) - Google Launches Cloud SQL, BigQuery Extensions(00:45:11) - BigQuery and Google Analytics: AI Data Analysis & Forecast(00:47:02) - Microsoft Azure Migrate and Modernize: Cloud Code vs. Microsoft(00:53:22) - Microsoft's Azure Marketplace Unifying with AppSource(00:56:06) - Azure Compute Gallery: Soft Delete(00:57:49) - Microsoft Azure Outages: Lessons Learned(01:03:32) - Week in Cloud: A Week of Consistency

Welcome to episode 322 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! We have BIG NEWS ? Jonathan is back! He?s joined in the studio by Justin and Ryan to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including ongoing drama in the Microsoft/OpenAI drama, saying goodbye to data transfer fees (in the EU), M4 Power, and more. Let?s get started!   Titles we almost went with this week EU Later, Egress Fees: Google?s Brexit from Data Transfer Charges The Keys to the Cosmos: Azure Unlocks Customer Control Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Google Splits LLM Inference for Better Performance OpenAI and Microsoft: From Exclusive to It?s Complicated  Google?s New Model Has Trust Issues (And That?s a Good Thing) Mac to the Future: AWS Brings M4 Power to the Cloud Oracle?s Cloud Nine: Stock Soars on Half-Trillion Dollar Dreams ChatGPT: From Chat Bot to Hat Bot (Everyone?s Wearing Different Professional Hats) Five Billion Reasons to Love British AI NVMe Gonna Give You Up: AWS Delivers the Storage Metrics You?ve Been Missing Tea and AI: OpenAI Crosses the Pond The Norway Bug Strikes Back: A New YAML Hope

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AI Is Going Great ? Or How ML Makes Money 

01:33 Microsoft and OpenAI make a deal: Reading between the lines of their secretive new agreement ? GeekWire

Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding that will restructure their partnership, with OpenAI?s nonprofit entity receiving an equity stake exceeding $100 billion in a new public benefit corporation where Microsoft will play a major role. The deal addresses the AGI clause that previously allowed OpenAI to unilaterally dissolve the partnership upon achieving artificial general intelligence, which had been a significant risk for Microsoft?s multi-billion-dollar investment. Both companies are diversifying their partnerships ? Microsoft is now using Anthropic?s technology for some Office 365 AI features, while OpenAI has signed a $300 billion computing contract with Oracle over five years. Microsoft?s exclusivity on OpenAI cloud workloads has been replaced with a right of first refusal, enabling OpenAI to participate in the $500 billion Stargate AI project with Oracle and other partners. The restructuring allows OpenAI to raise capital for its mission while ensuring the nonprofit?s resources grow proportionally, with plans to use funds for community impact, including a recently launched $50 million grant program.

ALSO:

OpenAI and Microsoft sign preliminary deal to revise partnership terms ? 

Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:00:34) - Microsoft and OpenAI Restructuring(00:06:55) - OpenAI's ChatGPT 5.0 Update(00:12:33) - ChatGPT: How People Are Using the Technology(00:16:33) - OpenAI's Stargate UK Announcement(00:18:24) - LocalStack for Mac: New Instances Launch(00:25:06) - Amazon EC2: More NVME Performance Metrics with EFA(00:26:43) - AWS Launches R8GN(00:28:20) - AWS CDK Preview: Refactoring with Cloudformation(00:29:59) - Amazon CloudTrail: AI Security Analysis with a McP Server(00:33:44) - Amazon Web Services: Cloud Commitment Insurance(00:35:37) - Google Cloud Launches Multi-Cloud Data Transfer Essentials(00:40:13) - Kubernetes 1.34(00:44:17) - Google Cloud introduces new recipe for disaggregated AI Inferance(00:46:47) - Google's Data Science Agent Now Generates Code for BigQuery,(00:49:09) - Google Cloud Launches DNS Armor to Detect Cyberthreats(00:52:02) - Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)(00:54:32) - Google Cloud: Alloy DB on C4(00:56:42) - Google Cloud Trace now supports Open telemetry protocol (OTEL)(01:00:19) - Google's New 'Practical Guide to Data Science'(01:02:26) - Vault Gemma: The First Large Language Model with Privacy(01:06:05) - Customer Managed Keys(01:12:39) - Azure Logic Apps: Model Context Protocol Server (MCP)(01:14:46) - Microsoft's Kubernetes Storage v2(01:16:46) - Microsoft Fabric and AI Foundry: New Features, New Features(01:18:50) - Oracle Stock Jumping On Cloud Revenue Forecast(01:22:40) - Week in the Cloud: September 7, 2017

The Cloud Pod is in Tears Trying to Understand Azure Tiers    Welcome to episode 321 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are all on hand to bring you the latest in cloud and AI news, including increased metrics data (because who doesn?t love more data), some issues over at Cloudflare, and even bigger issues at Builder.ai  ? plus so much more. Let?s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Lost in Translation: Google Helps IPv6 Find Its Way to IPv4 BigQuery?s Soft Landing for Hard Problems CloudWatch Gets a Two-Week Memory Upgrade VM Glow-Up: From Gen1 Zero to Gen2 Hero Azure Gets Contextual: API Management Learns to Speak AI The Cloud Pod: Now Broadcasting from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea LoRA LoRA on the Wall, Who?s the Finest Model of Them All Azure Says MFA or the Highway for Resource Management Two-Factor or Two-Furious: Azure?s Security Ultimatum Agent 007: License to Build CUD You Believe It? Google?s Discounts Get More Flexible WAF?s New Deal: Free Logs with Every Million Requests Served SOC It To Me: Google?s AI Security Workshop Tour MFA mandatory in Azure, now you too can hate/hate MS Authenticator AWS AMIs no longer the Tribbles of cloud computing ECS Exec; Justin?s prediction from 2018 finally comes true General News

00:56 FinOps Weekly Summit 2025

Victor Garcia reached out and asked us to share the news about the FinOps Weekly Summit coming up on October 23rd, 2025.  A lot of great speakers; if you?re in the FinOps space, we recommend it.  Want to register? You can do that here. 

01:53 Ignite Registration Opens 

San Francisco, Moscone Center November 18?21, 2025 Need to convince your manager to pay for you to go? Find that letter here. 

02:45 Addressing the unauthorized issuance of multiple TLS certificates for 1.1.1.1

Some issues over at Cloudflare recently? Fina CA issued 12 unauthorized TLS certificates for Cloudflare?s 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver IP address between February 2024 and August 2025, violating domain control validation requirements and potentially allowing man-in-the-middle attacks on DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS connections. The incident highlights vulnerabilities in the Certificate Authority trust model where any trusted CA can issue certificates for any domain or IP without proper validation, though exploitation would require the attacker to have the private key, intercept traffic, and target clients that trust Fina CA (primarily Microsoft systems). Cloudflare failed to detect these certificates for months despite operating its own Certificate Transparency monitoring service because its system wasn?t configured to alert on IP address certificates rather than domain names, exposing gaps in its internal security monitoring. The certificates have been Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: Trying to Understand Azure tiers(00:01:04) - Two Up! Finops Weekly Summit and Ignite(00:02:56) - Cloudflare: Certificate Transparency is Critical Infrastructure(00:06:08) - AI is How ML Makes Money(00:08:44) - Visual Studio: August Update to Copilot(00:11:16) - Amazon.com: Regions and Zones in AWS Global View(00:14:19) - CloudWatch Metrics Insights: Extended to 3 Hours(00:16:19) - CloudWatch: Single Monitoring Alarms for Dynamic Resource Fleets(00:17:32) - AWS User Notifications now support centralized notification management across multi-(00:19:46) - ECS: Monitoring AMI usage with Cloud Shell(00:23:39) - AWS Terraform: Five Year Old Code(00:25:14) - AWS IAM: Network Parameter Controls for VPCs(00:27:56) - AWS WAF now provides 500 MB of free CloudWatch log(00:31:00) - WASP Config: Resource Tag Tracking for IAM Policies(00:33:01) - GCP: DNS64 and NAT64 for IPv6(00:34:28) - BigQuery Data Storage: Soft Failover(00:35:58) - Google Expands Cloud CUDs to Include HANA, Cloud(00:39:04) - Google Cloud Launches Society Operations Center Workshop(00:40:13) - Google Data Proc now supports multi-tenant cluster(00:41:37) - Google's Official Rust SDK(00:43:22) - Microsoft Azure: Upgrade to Gen2 with Trustful Launch enabled(00:45:34) - Azure API Management: New Features and Native Auto-Scaling(00:46:37) - Microsoft Launches GPT Real Time on Azure AI Foundry(00:50:47) - Azure AI Foundry(00:53:23) - Week in Cloud: September 7, 2018

Welcome to episode 320 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan are coming to you from Justin?s echo chamber and bringing all the latest in AI and Cloud news, including updates to Google?s Anti-trust case, AWS Cost MCP, new regions, updates to EKS, Veo, and Claude, and more! Let?s get into it.  Titles we almost went with this week: Breaking Bad Bottlenecks: AWS  Cooks Up Faster Container Pulls The Bucket List: Finding Your Lost Storage Dollars State of Denial: Terraform Finally Stops Saving Your Passwords Three Stages of Azure Grief: Development, Preview, and Launch Ground Control to Major Cloud: Microsoft Launches Planetary Computer Pro Veo Vidi Vici: Google Conquers Video Editing Red Alert: AWS Makes Production Accounts Actually Look Dangerous Amazon EKS Discovers the F5 Key  Chaos Theory Meets ChatGPT: When Your Reliability Data Gets an AI Therapist Breaking Bad (Services): How AI Helps You Find What?s Already   Broken Breaking Up is Hard to Cloud: Gemini Moves Back In Intel Inside Your Secrets: TDX Takes Over Google Cloud Lord of the Regions: The Return of the Kiwi  All Blacks and All Stacks: AWS Goes Full Kiwi Azure Forecast: 100% Chance of Budget Alert Storms Google Keeps Its Cloud Together: A $2.5T Near Miss Shell We Dance? AWS Makes CLI Scripting Less Painful AWS Finally Admits Nobody Remembers All Those CLI Commands Cache Me If You Claude Your AWS Console gets its Colors, just don?t choose red shirts Amazon Q walks into a bar, Tells MCP to order it a beer.. The Bartender sighs and mutters ?at least chatgpt just hallucinates its beer? Ryan?s shitty scripts now as a AWS CLI Library

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

00:57 Google Dodges A 2.5t Breakup

We have breaking news ? and it?s good news for Google.  Google successfully avoided a potential $2.5 trillion breakup following antitrust proceedings, maintaining its current corporate structure despite regulatory pressure. The decision represents a significant outcome for Big Tech antitrust cases, potentially setting a precedent for how regulators approach market dominance issues in the cloud and technology sectors. Cloud customers and partners can expect business continuity with Google Cloud Platform services, avoiding potential disruptions that could have resulted from a corporate restructuring. The ruling may influence how other major cloud providers structure their businesses and approach regulatory compliance, particularly around bundling services and market competition. Enterprise customers relying on Google?s integrated ecosystem of cloud, advertising, and productivity tools can continue their current architectures without concerns about service separation. You just KNOW Microsoft is super mad about this.  AI Is Going Great ? Or How ML Makes Money 

02:16 Introducing GPT-Realtime

OpenAI?s Chapters (00:00:07) - Cloud Pod: Azure vs GCP(00:01:01) - Google Stops Exploring a Breakup(00:03:49) - Terraform Cloud Provider 7.0 in general availability(00:06:13) - How to Query Gremlin's LLM with Chaos Engineering Data(00:08:32) - Amazon EKS: Parallel Polls for AI & Windows(00:15:52) - Amazon.com: Terraform Deployment for SFTP Connectors(00:19:11) - Amazon Q Developer Adds Central Admin Control for MCP Servers(00:21:04) - AWS i8ge and M8i Flex Instances(00:24:55) - Amazon M7i Flex Instances: Best Cloud Instances(00:27:53) - Wales: New AWS Region Launches in New Zealand(00:32:56) - Google Cloud: New Features and No Cost Option for Videos(00:37:11) - GKE Container Optimized Compute(00:38:42) - Intel TDX for Confidential Computing with Google(00:40:17) - GCP EventArc Advanced is Now Generally Available(00:42:31) - Azure AI Foundry: Comprehensive agent observability capabilities(00:46:59) - Microsoft's Planetary Computer Pro: An All-in-One for(00:50:56) - Microsoft's Migration From MOSP to Microsoft Accounts Causes False Budget Alert(00:52:49) - Microsoft to Make UltraDs More Affordable in Multiple Regions(00:54:00) - The Business Talk Podcast(00:55:00) - Week in Cloud: Exploring the Cloud

Welcome to episode 319 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan are in the studio to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news. AWS Cost MCP makes exploring your finops data as simple as english text. We?ve got a sunnier view for junior devs, a Microsoft open source development, tokens, and it?s even Kubernetes? birthday ? let?s get into it!  Titles we almost went with this week: From Linux Hater to Open Source Darling: A Microsoft Love Story 20,000 Lines of Code and a Dream: Microsoft?s Open Source Glow-Up Ctrl+Alt+Delete Your Assumptions: Microsoft Goes Full Penguin Token and Esteem: Amazon Bedrock Gets a Counter CSI: Cloud Scene Investigation The Great SQL Migration: How AI Became the Universal Translator Token and Ye Shall Receive: Bedrock?s New Counting Feature The Count of Monte Token: A Bedrock Tale ? mk Ctrl+Z for Your Database: Now with Built-in Lag Time IP Freely: GKE Takes the Pain Out of Address Management AWS CEO: AI Can?t Replace Junior Devs Because Someone Has to Fix the AI?s Code Better Late Than Never: RDS PostgreSQL Gets Time Travel The SQL Whisperer: Teaching AI to Speak Database DigitalOcean Goes Full Chatbot: Your Infrastructure Now Speaks Human Musk vs Cook: The App Store Wars Episode AI Firestore Goes Mongo: A Database Love Story GKE Turns 10: Now With More Candles and Less Complexity Prime Day Infrastructure: Now With 87,000 AI Chips and a Robot Army AWS Scales to Quadrillion Requests: Your Black Friday Traffic Looks Cute AWS billing now speaks human, thanks to MCPs The Bastion Holds: Azure?s New Gateway to Kubernetes Kingdoms The Surge Before the Merge: Azure?s New Upgrade Strategy CNI Overlay: Because Your Pods Deserve Their Own ZIP Code AI Is Going Great ? or How ML Makes Money 

00:46 Musk?s xAI sues Apple, OpenAI alleging scheme that harmed X, Grok

xAI filed a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI, alleging anticompetitive practices in AI chatbot distribution, claiming Apple deprioritizes competing AI apps like Grok in the App Store while favoring ChatGPT through direct integration into iOS devices. The lawsuit highlights tensions in AI platform distribution models, where cloud-based AI services depend on mobile app stores for user access, potentially creating gatekeeping concerns for competing generative AI providers. Apple?s partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iPhone, iPad, and Mac products represents a shift toward native AI integration rather than app-based access, which could impact how cloud AI services reach end users. The dispute underscores growing competition in the generative AI market, where multiple players, including xAI?s Grok, OpenAI?s ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Perplexity, are vying for market position through both cloud APIs and mobile distribution channels. For cloud developers, this case raises questions about AI service distribution strategies and whether direct device integration partnerships will become necessary to compete effectively against app store-based distribution models.

01:55 Justin ? ?There?s always a potential for conflict of interest when you have a partnership like this, but also the app store ? there?s a...

Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:00:58) - Amazon's Grok Sues Apple Over App Store Distribution(00:04:19) - Amazon CEO: AI Replacing Junior Developers is the Dumbest Idea(00:11:10) - Amazon: Count Your Tokens With AWS AI(00:17:32) - Amazon RDS for Postgres: Delayed Read Replicas(00:22:41) - Amazon Prime Day: My Favorite Amazon Announcement(00:23:45) - Amazon's Prime Day 2022(00:25:15) - AWS: How AWS Met Prime Day(00:29:17) - Amazon's Databases Hit Record Highs During Prime Day(00:30:14) - CloudTrail: What Caches Do They Use? vs.(00:33:37) - Amazon's AWS Countdown(00:35:52) - Google's AI Developer Tooling: Which One to Use?(00:40:12) - Google Launches Gemini 2.5 Flash Image on Vertex AI(00:42:54) - Google Cloud Asset Inventory: Root Cause Analysis Tool(00:46:12) - Google's automated SQL Translation from Databrick Spark SQL to Big(00:48:10) - Google's White Paper on AI Inference Environmental Impact(00:52:23) - Google Cloud Compliance Manager: Integrated Security and Compliance Management(00:59:04) - Kubernetes: GK Auto IPAM(01:01:59) - GKE: Happy 10th Anniversary!(01:08:24) - Microsoft Azure News: Week Three(01:09:47) - Microsoft vs. AWS: Open Source and Scale(01:14:01) - Microsoft to Give DocumentDB to the Linux Foundation(01:15:57) - Azure Bastion now supports Private AKS Clusters via Tunnel(01:24:11) - Microsoft Migrate now enables direct migration to zone redundant storage disks(01:29:49) - Digital Ocean's MCP Server Now Available(01:35:33) - Week in the Cloud: September 7, 2017

 Welcome to episode 318 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! We?re going on an adventure! Justin and Ryan have formed a fellowship of the cloud, and they?re bringing you all the latest and greatest news from Valinor to Helm?s Deep, and Azure to AWS to GCP. We?ve water issues, some Magic Quadrants, and Aurora updates?but sadly no potatoes. Let?s get into it!  Titles we almost went with this week: You?ve Got No Mail: AOL Finally Hangs  Up on Dial-Up Ctrl+Alt+Delete Climate Change H2-Oh No: Your Gmail is Thirsty The Price is Vibe: Kiro?s New    Request-Based Model Spec-tacular Pricing: Kiro Leaves the Waitlist Behind SHA-zam! GitHub Actions Gets Its Security Cape Breaking Bad Actions: GitHub?s Supply Chain Intervention Graph Your Way to Infrastructure Happiness The Tables Have Turned: S3 Gets Its Iceberg Moment Subnet Where It Hurts: GKE Finally Gets IP Address Relief All Your Database Are Belong to Database Center From Droplets to Dollars: DigitalOcean?s AI Pivot Pays Off DigitalOcean Rides the AI Wave to Record Earnings Agent Smith Would Be Proud: Microsoft?s Multi-Agent Matrix Aurora Borealis: A Decade of Database Enlightenment Fifteen Shades of Cloud: AWS?s Unbroken Streak The Fast and the Failover-ious: Aurora Edition Gone in Single-Digit Seconds: AWS?s Speedy Database Recovery Agent 007: License to Secure Your AI

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 

01:02 AOL is finally shutting down its dial-up internet service | AP News

AOL is discontinuing its dial-up internet service on September 30, 2024, marking the end of a technology that introduced millions to the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s. Census data shows 163,401 US households still used dial-up in 2023, representing 0.13% of homes with internet subscriptions, highlighting the persistence of legacy infrastructure in underserved areas ? which is honestly crazy.  Here?s hoping that these folks are able to switch to alternatives, like Starlink. This shutdown reflects broader technology lifecycle patterns as companies retire legacy services like Skype, Internet Explorer, and AOL Instant Messenger to focus resources on modern platforms. The transition away from dial-up demonstrates the evolution from telephone-based connectivity to broadband and wireless technologies that now dominate internet access. AOL?s journey from a $164 billion valuation in 2000 to being sold by Verizon in 2021 illustrates the rapid shifts in technology markets and the challenges of adapting legacy business models.

02:30 British government asks people to delete old emails to reduce data centres? 

Chapters (00:00:00) - Week in the Cloud: GCP, Azure, VS Code Bind(00:00:57) - AOL to discontinue dial-up service(00:02:27) - UK Government Tells You to Deactivate Your Emails to Save Water(00:06:03) - UK's Data Center Problem(00:08:18) - GitHub Actions: SHA pinning and more(00:11:04) - Curo Pricing Plans Go Live for AWS(00:16:05) - Aurora DB Turns 10 Years Old(00:18:22) - Happy Birthday to My Sister!(00:18:36) - Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services(00:20:53) - Gartner's Strategic Cloud Platform Services(00:25:01) - Gartner's Cloud Assessment: Microsoft, Google, Azure(00:26:32) - Go Driver to Reduce Database Failover Times by 60%(00:28:23) - Amazon AWS Announces R8i Flex and R7i Flex(00:30:58) - GKE: Multi-Subnet Support for Kubernetes(00:33:51) - Database Center for Google Cloud: Unifying Database Fleet Management(00:35:59) - Google Cloud HSM: Client Side Encryption(00:38:06) - Google Cloud Announces Comprehensive AI Security Abilities(00:41:23) - Google LLM: Right Size for GPUs and TPUs(00:44:14) - Microsoft Terraform Adds Ms. Graph Provider in Public Preview(00:46:45) - Azure AI Foundry: Unifying OneLake and Agent Factory(00:52:03) - Gartner's Cloud: Oracle-Microsoft partnership(00:54:52) - DigitalOcean Announces SQL Stored Procedures Support(00:58:35) - Shifting Down: How Google Does It(01:04:19) - Back in the Cloud: Week Three(01:04:43) - Week in Cloud: The Cloud Podcast

Welcome to episode 317 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and an out-of-breath (from outrunning bears) Ryan are back in the studio to bring you another episode of everyone?s favorite cloud and AI news wrap-up. This week we?ve got GTP-5, Oracle?s newly minted AI conference, hallucinations (not the good kind), and even a Cloud Journey follow-up. Let?s get into it!  Titles we almost went with this week: Oracle Intelligence: Mission Las Vegas AI World: Oracle?s Excellent Adventure AI Gets a Reality Check: Amazon?s New Math Teacher for Hallucinating Models Jules Verne?s 20,000 Lines Under the C GPT-5: The Empire Strikes Back at Computing Costs 5?Five Alive: OpenAI?s Latest Language Model Drops GPT-5 is Alive! (And Ready for Your API Calls) From Kanban to Kan?t-Ban: Alienate Your User Base in One Update No More Console Hopping: ECS Logs Stay Put Following the Paper Trail: ECS Logs Go Live The Pull Request Whisperer Five?s Company: DigitalOcean Joins the GPT Party WireGuard Your Kubernetes: The Mesh-iah Has Arrived EKS-tending Your Reach: When Your Nodes Need a VPN Alternative Buttercup Blooms: DARPA?s Prize-Winning AI Security Tool Goes Public From DARPA to Docker: How Buttercup Brings AI Bug-Hunting to Your Laptop Agent 007: License to Query Compliance Manager: Because Nobody Dreams of Filling Out Federal Paperwork Do Compliance Managers dream of Public Sector sheep? Blob?s Your Uncle: Finding Lost Data in the Cloud Wassette: Teaching Your AI Assistant to Go Shopping for Tools Monitor, Monitor on the Wall, Who?s the Most Secure of All? Better Late Than IPv-Never VPC Logs: Now with 100% Less Manual Labor CloudWatch Catches All the Flows in Your Organization The Organization-Wide Net: No VPC Left Behind SQS Goes Super Size: Would You Like to Quadruple That? One MiB to Rule Them All: SQS?s Payload Growth Spurt Microsoft Finally Merges with Its $7.5 Billion Side Piece From Hub to Spoke: GitHub Loses Its Independence Cloud Run Forest Run: Google?s AI Workshop Marathon From Zero to AI Hero: Google?s Production Pipeline Workshop The Fast and the Serverless: Cloud Run Drift

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 

01:17 GitHub will be folded into Microsoft proper as CEO steps down ? Ars Technica

GitHub will lose its operational independence and be integrated into Microsoft?s CoreAI organization in 2025, ending its separate CEO structure that has existed since Microsoft?s $7.5 billion acquisition in 2018. The reorganization eliminates the CEO position, with GitHub?s leadership team reporting to multiple executives within CoreAI rather than a single leader, potentially impacting decision-making speed and product direction. This structural change could affect GitHub?s developer-focused culture and remote-first operations that have distinguished it from Microsoft?s traditional corporate structure. The integration into CoreAI suggests Micr...

Welcome to episode 316 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we?ve got earnings (with sound effects, obviously) as well as news from DeepSeek, DocumentDB, DigitalOcean, and a bunch of GPU news. Justin and Matt are here to lead you through all of it, so let?s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week: Lake Sentinel: The Security Data Monster Nobody Asked For Certificate Authority Issues: When Your Free Lunch Gets a Security Audit Slash and Learn: Gemini Gets Command-ing DigitalOcean Drops Anchor in AI Waters with Gradient Platform The Three Stages of Azure Grief: Development, Preview, and Launch E for Enormous: Azure?s New VM Sizes Are Anything But Virtual SRE You Later: Azure?s AI Agent Takes Over Your On-Call Duties Site Reliability Engineer? More Like AI Reliability Engineer Azure Disks Get Elastic Waistbands Agent Smith Would Be Proud: Google?s Multi-Agent Matrix Gets Real C4 Yourself: Google Explodes Into GA with Intel?s Latest Silicon The Cost is Right: GCP Edition Penny for Your Cloud Thoughts: Google?s Budget-Friendly Update DocumentDB Goes on a Diet: Now Available in Serverless Size MongoDB Compatibility Gets the AWS Serverless Treatment No Server? No Problem: DocumentDB Joins the Serverless Party Stream Big or Go Home: Lambda?s 10x Payload Boost Lambda Response Streaming: Because Size Matters GPT Goes Open Source Shopping GPT?s Open Source Awakening When Your Antivirus Needs an Antivirus: Enter Project Ire The Opus Among Us: Anthropic?s Coding Assistant Gets an Upgrade Serverless is becoming serverful in streaming responses General News 

02:08 It?s Earnings Time! (INSERT AWESOME SOUND EFFECTS HERE) 

02:16 Alphabet beats earnings expectations, raises spending forecast

Google Cloud revenue hit $13.62 billion, up 32% year-over-year, with OpenAI now using Google?s infrastructure for ChatGPT, signaling growing enterprise confidence in Google?s AI infrastructure capabilities. Alphabet is raising its 2025 capital expenditure forecast from $75 billion to $85 billion, driven by cloud and AI demand, with plans to increase spending further in 2026 as it competes for AI workloads. AI Overviews now serves 2 billion monthly users across 200+ countries, while the Gemini app reached 450 million monthly active users, demonstrating Google?s scale in deploying AI services globally. The $10 billion increase in planned capital spending reflects the infrastructure arms race among cloud providers to capture AI workloads, which require significant compute and specialized hardware investments. Google?s cloud growth rate of 32% outpaces its overall revenue growth of 14%, indicating the strategic importance of cloud services as traditional search and advertising face increased AI competition.

03:55 Justin ? ?I don?t know what it takes to actually run one of these large models at like ultimate scale that like a ChatGPT needs or Anthropic, but I have to imagine it?s just thousands and thousands of GPUs just working nonstop.?

04:31 Microsoft (MSFT) Q4 earnings report 2025

Microsoft reported Q4 fiscal 2025 earnings with revenue of $76.44 billion, up 18% year-ove... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure: Why Microsoft's New AI Agent Won't Work(00:01:17) - Earnings season(00:01:43) - Google Cloud Revenue Up 32%, Capital Spending Forecast Up(00:03:51) - Microsoft Reports Strong Cloud Growth, AI Investment(00:05:51) - Amazon's AI, Cloud Growth(00:10:24) - Google's DeepThink AI for Complex Reasoning(00:13:13) - OpenAI releases new GPT OSS120B and OSS(00:15:32) - Microsoft's AI-enabled Binary Analyzer(00:24:27) - Good Testing Practices in Cloud(00:25:59) - Claude Opus 4.1 Upgrade to Sonnet 4(00:27:46) - AWS G6F: Fractional GPU Instances(00:29:40) - Amazon DocumentDB DCU Scale(00:34:13) - Amazon's Region Switch(00:37:28) - AWS Lambda: 200 Megabyte Response Streaming Capacity(00:38:55) - Gemini CLI: Adding slash commands to Google Cloud Code(00:41:06) - Agent to Agent Protocol Upgraded to Version 3(00:42:57) - GK Cloud: C4 Bare Metal VM on the Intel Xeon(00:44:35) - Google Cloud Hub Optimization and Cost Explorer Expands to Public Preview(00:47:04) - Microsoft's Sentinel Data Lake Announcement(00:50:42) - Microsoft's New E128 & E1092 VM Sizes(00:54:17) - Azure SRE Agent Billing Model(00:57:02) - Azure 2.8 Live Resizing for Ultra NVMe disks(00:59:13) - Azure Backup now supports agentless multi-disk backups(01:02:05) - Digital Ocean Brings AI to a Unified Platform(01:03:50) - This Week in the Cloud: Ending

 Welcome to episode 315 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Your hosts, Justin and Matt, are here to bring you the latest in cloud and AI news, including news about AI from the White House, the newest hacker exploits, and news from CloudWatch, CrowdStrike, and GKE ? plus so much more. Let?s get into it!  Titles we almost went with this week: SharePoint and Tell: Government Secrets at Risk Zero-Day Hero: How Hackers Found SharePoint?s Achilles? Heel Amazon Q Gets an F in Security Class Spark Joy: GitHub?s Marie Kondo Approach to App Development No Code? No Problem! GitHub Lights a Spark Under App Creation GKE Turns 10: Still Not Old Enough to Deploy Itself A Decade of Containers: Pokémon GO Caught Them All Kubernetes Engine Hits Double Digits, Still Can?t Count Past 9 Pods Account Names: The Missing Link in AWS Cost Optimization Flash Gordon Saves Your VMs from the Azure-verse The Flash: Fastest VM Monitor in the Multiverse Ctrl+AI+Delete: Rebooting America?s Artificial Intelligence Strategy The AImerican Dream: White House Plots Path to Silicon Supremacy CrowdStrike?s Year of Living Resiliently Kernel Panic at the Disco: A Recovery Story The Search is Over (But Your Copilot License Isn?t) Ground Control to Major Tom: You?re Fired GPU Booking.com: Reserve Your Neural Network?s Next Vacation Calendar Man Strikes Again: This Time He?s Scheduling Your TPUs AirBnB for AI: Short-Term Rentals for Your Machine Learning Models  Claude?s World Tour: Now Playing in Every Region Going Global: Claude Gets Its Passport Stamped on Vertex AI SQS Finally Learns to Share: No More Queue Hogging The Noisy Neighbor Gets Shushed: Amazon?s Fair Play for Queues CloudWatch Gets Its AI Degree in Observability Teaching Old Logs New Tricks: CloudWatch Goes GenAI The Agent Whisperer: CloudWatch?s New AI Monitoring Powers NotebookLM Gets Its PowerPoint License Slides, Camera, AI-ction: NotebookLM Goes Visual The SSL-ippery Slope: Azure?s Managed Certs Go Public or Go Home Breaking Bad Certificates: DigiCert?s New Rules Leave Some Apps High and Dry Firewall Rules: Now with a Rough Draft Feature Azure?s New Policy: Think Before You Deploy General News 

00:50 Hackers exploiting a SharePoint zero-day are seen targeting government agencies | TechCrunch

Microsoft SharePoint servers are being actively exploited through a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-53770), with initial attacks primarily targeting government agencies, universities, and energy companies, according to security researchers. The vulnerability affects on-premises SharePoint installations only, not cloud versions, with researchers identifying 9,000-10,000 vulnerable instances accessible from the internet that require immediate patching or disconnection. Initial exploitation appears to be limited and targeted, suggesting that nation-states likely back advanced persistent threat (APT) actors. However, broader exploitation by other threat actors is expected as attack methods become public. Organizations running local Shar... Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: EC2 Shutdown Explained(00:01:08) - Microsoft SharePoint zero-day targeting government agencies(00:05:33) - Cloudflare Supports the White House AI Action Plan(00:10:04) - Trump's Anti-Woke AI Order(00:15:28) - NASA's AI Satellite Just Made a Decision Without Humans(00:21:14) - GitHub Launches Spark: A New Way to Build Micro(00:22:50) - Amazon AI Code Coding Assistant Hacked(00:26:01) - AWS Cross-Team Optimization Hub Update 1.4(00:27:50) - Amazon EC2: Auto-shutdown and more(00:30:44) - Amazon SQS Introduces Fair Queues to Prevent(00:34:11) - Amazon CloudWatch: Generative AI Observability in Preview(00:37:37) - GKE: Celebrating 10 Years in the Cloud(00:44:06) - Google's BigQuery for AI Agents(00:45:37) - Google Cloud: Global Endpoints on Vertex AI(00:50:21) - NotebookLM: Video Overviews in Cloud Documentation(00:52:22) - Azure VM Availability Monitoring(00:55:39) - Microsoft 365 copilot search: Unified Search with AI(00:57:42) - Azure App Service: Important Changes to Managed Certificates(01:02:29) - Azure Firewall: Draft and Deploy (Preview)(01:05:25) - Cloud Journey: Two Cloud Journey Stories(01:05:45) - IAM Identity Center vs. Cloud Shell: Best Authentication Solution(01:12:48) - 1Password Passkey(01:14:15) - CrowdStrike Expands Security Resilience Program

Welcome to episode 314 of The Cloud Pod, where your hosts, Matt and Ryan, are holding down the fort in Justin?s absence and bringing what?s left of our audience (those of you still here after the last time they were left in charge) the latest and greatest in cloud and tech news. We?ve got undersea cables, vector storage, and even some hobos ? but not the kind on trains. Plus AWS S3 Let?s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week: S3 Gets Direction: AWS Points to Vector Storage Vector? I Hardly Know Her! S3?s New AI Storage Play S3 Finds Its Magnitude and Direction Claude Goes to Wall Street Anthropic?s Bull Run Into Financial Services AI Assistant Gets Its Series 7 License Nova Scotia: AWS Brings Regional Flavor to AI Models The Fine-Tuning of the Shrew: Teaching Nova Models New Tricks Nova-caine: Numbing the Pain of Model Customization AgentCore Blimey: AWS Gives AI Agents Their License to Scale The Agent Infrastructure: Mission Deployable From Zero to Agent Hero: AWS Tackles the Production Problem SageMaker Gets Its Data Act Together From Catalog to QuickSight: A Data Love Story The Great Data Unification of 2024 AWS Free Tier Gets a $200 Makeover EKS-treme Makeover: Cluster Edition #?100K Nodes Walk Into a Cluster? S3 Gets Direction: Amazon Points to Vector Storage Amazon S3: Now with 90% Less Vector Bills and 100% More Dimensions Follow Up

01:03 SoftBank and OpenAI?s $500 Billion AI Project Struggles to Get Off Ground

The $500 billion AI effort unveiled at the White House has struggled to get off the ground and has scaled back its near-term plans.  It?s been six months since the announcement, where they said they would spend $100B almost immediately, but now they have a more modest goal of building a small data center by the end of the year in Ohio. Softbank committed to $30 billion earlier this year, and it is one of the largest ever startup investments by them, which led them to take on new debt and sell assets.   This investment was made alongside Stargate, giving them a role in the physical infrastructure needed for AI.  Altman, though, has been eager to secure computing power as quickly as possible and has proceeded without Softbank.  Publicly, they say it?s a great partnership, and they look forward to advancing projects in multiple states Oracle was part of Stargate, but the recent 30B deal just signed with includes a commitment of 4.5 gigawatts of capacity, and would consume the equivalent power of more than two Hoover Dams, or about 4 million homes.  Oracle was also named part of the deal with UAE firm MGX as a partner, but Oracle CEO Safra Catz said that Stargate hadn?t been formed yet, as of last month. 

02:31 Matthew ? ??everyone?s like, how hard can it be to build a data center? But it?s city zoning, power consumption, grid improvements, water for cooling? getting communities to approve ? and these things end up being a massive undertaking. And it takes the hyperscalers a long time to get these things up and operational. So it doesn?t surprise me that a small data center by the end of the year is probably something that was already in the works beforehand; they?re just taking over other plans. Most da...

Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure 1.8(00:01:04) - SoftBank and OpenAI's 500 Billion AI Project(00:04:53) - These Undersea Cable Sensors Could Aid Climate Change Monitoring(00:08:47) - AWS, Google Cloud AI for Financial Services(00:14:15) - Bedrock 12 Live Video Understanding Models now available in AWS(00:17:21) - Harness AI(00:20:06) - AWS New York City: AWS S3 Visions and More(00:22:56) - Elasticsearch + S3: Vector Search(00:24:47) - Amazon Nova Customization in SageMaker(00:27:40) - Amazon Bedrock Agent Core: Enterprise-grade Infrastructure for deploying AI(00:33:51) - Amazon SageMaker Catalog with Quicksight Integration(00:37:52) - WASP Introduces Free tier(00:40:01) - Amazon EC2 Budgeting Update(00:43:28) - Amazon EventBridge Locate & Debug Kinesis Data(00:47:29) - AWS S3 metadata: Complete metadata for all your S3(00:52:05) - Oh yeah, double-layer encryption with ON S3(00:52:54) - AWS Lambda: Direct to IDE and Remote Debugging(00:57:39) - ECS: Blue Green Deployments(01:00:57) - Amazon Bracket Adds New 54-Bit Qubit Quantum Processor(01:03:48) - Google CloudWatch and LibTPU for optimizing Google TPU resources(01:06:08) - Application Monitoring: Cloud Observation & Investigations(01:09:49) - Google Expands DeepSeen R1 to Microsoft Fabric(01:16:07) - AWS CLI for Migrating From Availability Sets and Basic Load Bal(01:18:42) - Microsoft's Cloud HSM(01:21:04) - Microsoft's New Hobo Model for ExpressRoute Gateways(01:23:02) - Azure Functions: Public Preview 2.8(01:26:09) - Azure WAF for Application Load Balancers for Kubernet(01:29:32) - Week in the Cloud

Welcome to episode 313 of The Cloud Pod, where your hosts, Matt, Ryan, and Justin, are here to bring you all the latest in Cloud and AI news. This week we?ve got an installation of Cloud Journey featuring Gartner and chaos AND an aftershow! We?ve got acquisition news, new tools, an undersea cable, and even a little chaos, all right now in the cloud. Let?s get into it! 

Titles we almost went with this week: From Vibe Check to Production Spec Node More Mr. Nice Guy: AWS Locks Down Access Until You Ask Nicely Grok?s New Feature: Ask Elon First The AI That Phones Home to Dad Musk-See TV: When Your Chatbot Needs Parental Guidance Oracle?s Federal Discount: 75% Off for Six Months (Terms and Conditions Apply) GameDay: Not Just for Sports Anymore Bob the Builder Center: Can We Fix AWS? Yes We Can! Bucket List: Google Cloud Storage Finally Lets You Pack Up and Move The Great Bucket Migration: No Forwarding Address Required Compose Yourself: Cloud Run Gets Docker-mented Survey Says: Your Team Needs a Performance Check-Up From Florida With Love: Google?s New Cable Has a License to Transmit Sol Train: Google Lays Track Across the Atlantic Finding the Right Gradient for Your AI Journey Google Cracks the Code on AWS?s Cloud Castle Breaking Cloud: Google?s Data Analytics Cook Up Market Share From Chat to Churn: The Great GPT Subscription Exodus AWS Finally Filters Out the Pricing Noise The Price is Right: AWS Edition Gets New Search Features Four Filters and a Pricing API Walk Into a Cloud Fee-fi-fo-fum who has a flash reasoning model Follow Up

02:01 Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO

Cognition acquired Windsurf?s IP, product, and remaining talent after Google hired away the CEO and senior staff, highlighting the intense competition for AI coding expertise among major tech companies. The deal follows a failed $3 billion acquisition attempt by OpenAI and Google?s $2.4 billion licensing and compensation package to secure Windsurf?s leadership, demonstrating the premium valuations for AI coding technology. Both companies develop AI coding agents designed to accelerate software development, with Cognition?s Devin agent and Windsurf?s tools representing the growing market for AI-powered developer productivity solutions. The acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees receive accelerated vesting and financial participation, addressing the disruption caused by the leadership exodus to Google. This consolidation in the AI coding space suggests smaller startups may struggle to retain talent and remain independent as tech giants aggressively pursue AI engineering capabilities. AI Is Going Great ? Or How ML Makes Money 

04:40 New Grok AI model surprises experts by checking Elon Musk?s views before

Chapters (00:00:07) - Breaking Things On Purpose(00:00:44) - Covid Has Hit(00:02:08) - OpenAI Buys Coding Startup Windsurf(00:04:34) - Grok 4: Elon Musk's Tweets Causes a Problem(00:06:50) - DigitalOcean Launches Unified AI Cloud Platform(00:08:58) - Enterprises Are Canceling ChatGPT Subscriptions(00:13:37) - DORA Survey Open Until July 18th(00:17:50) - GCP 2.8: Free to Use, Paid(00:21:23) - SSM: Free vs. Paid Features(00:24:33) - Kiro: AI-assisted Development with VS Code(00:31:29) - Curo: A New Way to Develop with Q IDE(00:34:14) - Amazon AWS Launches P6E GB200 Ultra for AI Training(00:37:09) - Wonders of AWS: Update to AWS Builder Center(00:42:01) - Amazon's AWS Pricing Server Open Source(00:42:48) - Amazon Cloud Portal: AI vs MCP(00:45:00) - Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility to 10 regions(00:49:41) - GCP Backup for Cross-Project Backup (In Preview)(00:51:15) - Cloud Storage Bucket Relocation(00:54:40) - Gentek and Cloud Run integrate with Docker Compose(00:56:40) - Google Launches Seoul, New Transatlantic Cable(00:57:47) - Google Cloud's Cloud Battle(01:01:54) - Azure 2.8 for Mini-Flash Reasoning(01:05:41) - Oracle to Cut Cloud Costs for the Federal Government(01:07:20) - Chaos Engineering for Cloud: Future of IT Security(01:11:17) - Week in Cloud: September 7, 2017(01:11:59) - Stop Force AI Tools on Your Engineers(01:19:48) - Cloud Computing: An Eye on the AI

Welcome to episode 312 of The Cloud Pod, where your hosts, Matt, Ryan, and Justin, are here to bring you all the latest in Cloud and AI news. We?ve got security news, updates from PostgreSQL, Azure firewall and BlobNFS, plus TWO Cloud Journey stories for you! 

Thanks for joining us this week in the cloud!  

Titles we almost went with this week: Git Happens: Why Your Database Pipeline Keeps Breaking PostgreSQL and Chill: Azure?s New Storage Options for Database Romance NVMe, Myself, and PostgreSQL Canvas and Effect: AWS Paints a New Picture for E-commerce Oracle?s $30 Billion Stargate: The AI Infrastructure Wars Begin Larry?s Last Laugh: Oracle Lands OpenAI?s Mega Deal AI Will See You Now (Couch Not Included) Purview and Present Danger: Microsoft?s AI Security SDK Goes Live The Purview from Up Here: Microsoft?s Bird?s Eye View on AI Data Security Building Bridges: Azure?s Two-Way Street to Active Directory Domain Names: Not Just for Browsers Anymore FUSE or Lose: Azure?s BlobNFS Gets a Speed Boost When Larry Met Andy: An Exadata Love Story Bing There, Done That: Azure?s New Research Assistant The Search is Over: Azure AI Foundry Finds Its Research Groove Memory Lane: Where AI Agents Go to Remember Things Elephants Never Forget, and Now Neither Do Google?s Agents Z3 or Not Z3: That is the Storage Question Local SSD Hero: A New Hope for I/O Intensive Workloads Azure?s Certificate of Insecurity KeyVault?s Keys Left Under the Doormat When Your Cloud Provider Accidentally CCs the Hackers AI Is Going Great ? Or How ML Makes Money 

03:09 RYAN DOES A THING FOR SECURING AI WORKLOADS

Ryan was recently invited to Google?s Headquarters in San Francisco as part of a small group of security professionals where they spent time hands-on with Google security offerings, learning how to secure AI workloads.  AI ? and how to secure it ? is a hot topic right now, and being able to spend time working with the Google development team was really insightful, with how they work with various levels of protections in place in dummy applications.  Ryan was especially interested in the back-end logic that was executed in the applications. 

05:32  Ryan ? ?I was impressed because there?s how we?re thinking about AI is still evolving, and how we?re protecting it?s gonna be changing rapidly, and having real-world examples really helped really flesh out how their AI services are, how they?re integrated into a security ecosystem. It was pretty impressive. And it?s something that?s near and dear. I?ve been working and trying to roll out Google agent spaces and different AI workloads and trying to get involved and make sure that we, just getting visibility into all the different ones. And that was, it was really helpful to sort of think about it in those contexts.?

10:13 OpenAI secures $30bn cloud deal with Oracle

OpenAI signed a $30 billion annual cloud computing agreement with Oracle for 4.5GW of capacity, making it one of the largest AI cloud deals to date, and nearly triple Oracle?s current $10.3 billion annual data center infrastructure revenue. The deal represents a major expansion of the Stargate data center initiative, a $500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi?s MGX fund aimed at building AI infrastructure across multiple US states, in... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure Firewall: Learning to Spell,(00:01:04) - Azure Bug in the Show Notes Bot(00:02:25) - How to Secure AI workloads with Threats(00:07:10) - GCP vs. AWS: Minimum-Viable Platforms(00:08:53) - Oracle to Buy 400,000 Nvidia GB200 Chips(00:15:54) - Google's New AI Tools for Mental Health(00:18:23) - Oracle Database at AWS(00:23:56) - Google Cloud's New Lustre Storage: General Availability(00:27:44) - Vertex AI Memory Bank Now in Public Preview(00:30:17) - Google Expands Z3 Storage Optimized VM Family(00:33:04) - Azure Adds Postgres to Kubernetes Database(00:35:42) - Kubernetes in the Wild: Data, Security, Continuous(00:39:22) - Kubernetes in the Wild: What is GitLab?(00:41:30) - Microsoft Purview SDK and APIs Announced(00:46:45) - Microsoft Entre Domain: Two Way Forest Trust(00:51:05) - Microsoft's Cloud Ranting(00:51:31) - Azure AD is Not Built for Cloud Ranting(00:52:48) - Azure Firewall GA: Fully Qualified Domain Name filtering(00:56:12) - Azure NFS for BLOB 3.0 Preview(00:58:36) - Azure AI: Deep Research(01:00:35) - Microsoft's Cloud Certificate Validation Validation Failure(01:08:21) - Database DevOps: Fix Git Before It Breaks Your Production Environment(01:13:32) - The Need for Test Drive Development in the Cloud(01:17:18) - How to Write Automated Tests with AI(01:24:36) - Test Coverage for a Large Codebase

Welcome to episode 311 of Two Old Men Yelling at Cloud ? aka The Cloud Pod, featuring Matt and Ryan who absolutely, definitely did NOT record an aftershow. 

This week, they?re talking about Cloudflare?s new Pay Per Crawler, a new open-source Terraform provider from mkdev, and lots of fabric news that Ryan doesn?t understand ? plus so much more. Let?s get into it!  

Titles we almost went with this week:

(Show Editor note: There are more show titles than emojis. I give up.) 

FSx and the City: When File Systems Meet Object Storage The Great Data Lake Escape: No Movement Required OpenZFS Gets an S3 Degree Without Leaving Home Kernel Sanders: Microsoft?s Recipe for Avoiding Another Fried System Windows Gets a Restraining Order Against Overly Attached Security Software Microsoft Builds a Fence Between Windows and Its Rowdy Security Neighbors Windows Gets a Kernel of Truth After CrowdStrike Meltdown Microsoft Kicks Security Vendors Out of the Kernel Clubhouse The Great Kernel Divorce: When Windows Said ?It?s Not You, It?s Your Access Level? Google?s Environmental Report Card: A+ for Effort, C- for Supply Chain The Cloud Pod Goes Green: Google?s 10th Annual Carbon Confession Watts Up Doc? Google?s Energy Efficiency Bugs Bunny Would Approve Terminal Velocity: Google?s AI Gets a Command Performance Ctrl+Alt+Gemini: Google?s New CLI Companion The Prompt and the Furious: Tokyo Terminal AI See What You Did There: Google?s New Compliance Framework Control Yourself: Google Cloud Gets Serious About AI Auditing The Audit-omatic: Teaching Old Compliance New AI Tricks Veo 3: Now Playing in a Cloud Near You Google?s Video Dreams Come True (Audio Included) Lights, Camera, API Action: Veo 3 Takes the Stage Prometheus Unbound: Azure Finally Sees What It?s Been Missing VS Code Gets Fabric-ated: Now With 100% More Workspace Management Ctrl+S Your Sanity: Fabric Items Now Created Where You Code The Extension Cord That Connects Your IDE to the Data Cloud Logic Apps Gets Its Template of Doom (But in a Good Way) Copy-Paste Engineering Just Got an Azure Upgrade Microsoft Introduces the IKEA Model for Workflow Assembly WAF?s Up Doc? Security Copilot Now Speaks Firewall The Firewall Whisperer: When AI Meets Web Application Security WAF and Peace: Microsoft?s Treaty Between Security Tools Azure Goes Wild(card) with Certificate Management Front Door Finally Gets Its Wild Side Microsoft Deals Everyone a Wildcard IP Freely: Azure Takes the Guesswork Out of Address Management No More IP Envy: Azure Catches Up to AWS?s Address Game Azure?s New Feature Has All the Right Addresses Terraform and Chill: When Infrastructure Meets AI DynamoDB Goes Global: Now with 100% Less Eventually The Consistency Chronicles: Return of the Strong Read Breaking: DynamoDB Achieves Peak Table Manners Across All Regions Follow Up

00:47 Microsoft changes Windows in attempt to prevent next CrowdStrike-style catastrophe ? Ars Technica

Microsoft is creating a new Windows endpoint security platform that allows antivirus vendors to operate outside the kernel, preventing catastrophic system-wide failures like the CrowdStrike incident that g... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure 1.3(00:00:54) - Microsoft Is Changing Windows to Prevent the Next Crisis(00:04:07) - Cloudflare: Pay Per Crawl(00:08:36) - Terraform Provider for OpenAI(00:14:01) - Amazon FSX for OpenZFS: Integrating with S3(00:20:29) - Amazon EC2 C8GN Nitro Card Instances(00:25:13) - DynamoDB now supports Multi Region Strongly Consistent(00:30:11) - Google's 2025 Environmental Report(00:35:07) - Google Announces Gemini CLI as an AI Agent(00:39:47) - Google Cloud: Introducing recommended AI Controls Framework(00:46:03) - Azure Monitor + Prometheus Metrics Integration in VS Code(00:52:45) - Microsoft Logic Apps: Public Preview (Security Copilot)(01:01:38) - Azure Front Door: Managed Certificate for Wildcard Domains(01:04:50) - Azure Virtual Network Manager IP Address Management Feature

Welcome to episode 310 of The Cloud Pod ? where the forecast is always cloudy! Matt, Ryan and Justin are here to bring you all the latest and greatest in cloud and AI news. 

Literally. 

All of it. 

This week we have announcements from re:Inforce, Manual Testing, GuardDuty, Government AI (what could go wrong?) Gemini 2.5 and, in a flash from the past, MS-DOS Editor. All this and more, this week in the cloud! 

Titles we almost went with this week: ACM Finally Lets Its Certificates Leave the Nest Breaking Free: AWS Certificates Get Their Export Papers Certificate Manager Learns to Share Its Private Keys Skynet?s Origin Story: We Bullied It Into Existence Claude and Present Danger: When AI Fights Back Breaking Up is Hard to GPU EKS Marks the Spot for GuardDuty?s New Detection Powers Kubernetes Security: GuardDuty Connects the Dots Hub, Hub, Hooray for Unified Security Security Hub 2: Electric Boogaloo All Your Security Findings Are Belong to One Dashboard GuardDuty?s EKS-cellent Adventure in Attack Detection Shield Me From My Own Bad Decisions AWS Plays Network Security Whack-a-Mole Your VPC Called ? It Wants Better Security Groups Permission Impossible: Your Express App Will Self-Authorize in 5 Minutes Breaking the Glass: AWS Backup Gets a Multi-Party System Gemini 2.5: Now With More Flash and Less Cash AI Goes to Washington GPT-4: Government Property Taxpayer-funded DDoS and Don?ts: A 45-Second Horror Story Google?s AI Models Get a Flash-y Upgrade (Lite on the Wallet) Flash Gordon Called ? He Wants His Speed Back From Flash to Flash-Lite: Google?s AI Diet Plan Looker?s Pipeline Dreams Come True MS-DOS Editor: The Reboot Nobody Asked For But Everyone Needed Control-Alt-Delete Your Expectations: Microsoft Brings DOS to Linux Microsoft?s Text Editor Time Machine Now Runs on Your Toaster Copilot Gets Its Agent License Visual Studio?s AI Agent: Now Taking Orders The Bridge Over Troubled Prompts Azure?s Managed Compute Gets More Coherent Bring Your Own GPU Party: Cohere Models Join the Azure Bash Function Telemetry Gets Open Sourced (Kind Of) Azure Functions: Now Speaking Everyone?s Language (Except Java) Bucket List: AWS Makes S3 Policy Monitoring a Breeze The Policy Police: Keeping Your S3 Buckets in Check CDK Gets Its Own Town Hall (Infrastructure Not Included) Breaking: AWS Discovers Zoom, Plans to Use It Twice Per Quarter AWS and 1Password: A Secret Love Affair Keeping Secrets Has Never Been This Public Nano Nano: AWS Brings Alien-Level Time Precision to EC2 Time Flies When You?re Having Nanoseconds WorkSpaces Core: Now With More Cores to Work With Mount Compute-ier: AWS Builds AI Training Peak Making it Rain(ier): AWS Showers Anthropic with 5x More Compute Cache Me If You Can: Google?s Plugin Play CSI: Cloud Services Investigation General News 

01:09 Defending the Internet: How Cloudflare blocked a monumental 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack

Cloudflare blocked a record-breaking 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack in May 2025, which delivered 37.4 TB of data in just 45 seconds ? equivalent to streaming 7,480 hours of HD video or downloading 9.35 million songs in under a minute. The attack originate... Chapters (00:00:08) - Cloud Pod: Episode 310(00:01:25) - Cloudflare Blocks World's Biggest DDoS Attack(00:07:06) - Matt Appears Out Of The Blue(00:08:07) - OpenAI's Fight With Microsoft Over Stake(00:12:06) - OpenAI Launches Dedicated Government Cloud(00:14:05) - Visual Studio: June 7, 2018: AI Assistant with MCP(00:17:41) - Terraform Provider 6(00:21:16) - Microsoft's Edit: Old School Text Editor (In Rust)(00:26:35) - Learning to use a cloud computer(00:27:20) - VI vs VIM(00:29:23) - All About Security(00:29:50) - Amazon IAM Access Analyzer New Uplead Dashboard(00:33:44) - AWS Certificate Manager: Export Public SSL Certificates(00:39:19) - Certificate Industry: The Future of Automation(00:39:56) - AWS Now Requiring MFA for Root Users(00:44:51) - Amazon's AWS Network Firewall Now Includes Active Threat Defense(00:53:55) - AWS WAF(00:54:58) - AWS SHIELD Network Security Director: In Preview(00:58:18) - GuardDuty Expands Kubernetes Threat Detection Coverage to(01:05:14) - Windows Defender: Is It Windows Defender?(01:05:40) - Microsoft's Security Hub: V2, Not the New One(01:07:07) - Amazon S3 Bucket Authorization with EC2 in Express JS(01:13:53) - Amazon CDK Community Meetings Launch(01:16:08) - 1Password Integrates with AWS Secrets Manager(01:18:22) - Amazon Time Sync: Nanosecond Timestamps for Financial Services(01:20:51) - AWS VPC(01:24:59) - How many routes do you have in a Kubernetes V(01:25:21) - Amazon Building the World's Most Powerful Computing Center for AI Training(01:28:56) - Another GCP vs. Azure Story(01:29:33) - Google Cloud Backup: New Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro(01:33:36) - Google's Looker Introduces Continuous Integration(01:37:33) - Google Cloud CDN: Edge Extensions Plugins(01:38:59) - Microsoft's Q1 Quantum Computing Update(01:40:29) - Azure DevOps MCP Server and Azure AI Connect(01:42:41) - Azure Functions finally Support OTEL or OpenTelemetry in Preview(01:43:55) - Azure SQL Database: Data Virtualization & More(01:46:13) - Microsoft Ignite 2025 Early Bird Registration: $2,300(01:49:03) - Oracle Expands GROK Services to OCI(01:50:17) - Week in Cloud: What's the Cloud?

Welcome to episode 308 of The Cloud Pod ? where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Matt are on hand and ready to bring you an action packed episode. Unfortunately, this one is also lullaby free. Apologies. This week we?re talking about Databricks and Lakebridge, Cedar Analysis, Amazon Q, Google?s little hiccup, and updates to SQL ? plus so much more! Thanks for joining us. 

Titles we almost went with this week: KV Phone Home: When Your Key-Value Store Goes AWOL When Your Coreless Service Finds Its Core Problem Oracle?s Vanity Fair: Pretty URLs for Pretty Penny From Warehouse to Lakehouse: Your Free Ticket to Cloud Town 1?Databricks Uno: Because One is the Loneliest Number Free as in Beer, Smart as in Data Science Cedar Analysis: Because Your Authorization Policies Wood Never Lie Cedar Analysis: Teaching Old Policies New Proofs Amazon Q Finally Learns to Talk to Other Apps Tomorrow: Visual Studio?s Predictive Edit Revolution The Ghost of Edits Future: AI Haunts Your Code Before You Write It IAM What IAM: Google?s Identity Crisis Breaks the Internet Permission Denied: The Day Google Forgot Who Everyone Was 403 Forbidden: When Google?s Bouncer Called in Sick AWS Brings the Heat to Fusion Research Larry?s Cloud Nine: Oracle Stock Soars on Forecast Raise OCI You Later: Oracle Bets Big on Cloud Growth Oracle?s Crystal Ball Shows 40% Cloud Growth Ahead Meta Scales Up Its AI Ambitions with $14 Billion Investment From FAIR to Scale: Meta?s $14 Billion AI Makeover Congratulations Databricks one, you are now the new low code solution.  AWS burns power to figure out how power works AI Is Going Great ? Or How ML Makes Money 

02:12 Zuckerberg makes Meta?s biggest bet on AI, $14 billion Scale AI deal

Meta is finalizing a $14 billion investment for a 49% stake in Scale AI, with CEO Alexandr Wang joining to lead a new AI research lab at Meta.  This follows similar moves by Google and Microsoft acquiring AI talent through investments rather than direct acquisitions to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Scale AI specializes in data labeling and annotation services critical for training AI models, serving major clients including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.  The company?s expertise covers approximately 70% of all AI models being built, providing Meta with valuable intelligence on competitor approaches to model development. The deal reflects Meta?s struggles with its Llama AI models, particularly the underwhelming reception of Llama 4 and delays in releasing the more powerful ?Behemoth? model due to concerns about competitiveness with OpenAI and DeepSeek. Meta recently reorganized its GenAI unit into two divisions following these setbacks. Wang brings both technical AI expertise and business acumen, having built Scale AI from a 2016 startup to a $14 billion valuation. His experience includes defense contracts and the recent Defense Llama collaboration with Meta for national security applications. For cloud providers and dev... Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: Episode 309(00:01:16) - Meta Completes $14 Million Investment in Scale AI(00:06:34) - Databricks Free Edition, SQL Migration and More(00:09:28) - WAF and Q&D: Cloud Computing(00:17:52) - AWS Power Tools for AWS Lambda(00:22:39) - Google IAM System Failure Causes widespread Outage(00:27:00) - Cloudflare Outage Highlights Storage Provider's Failure(00:31:14) - Google's Credential Scanner for Open Source(00:33:45) - Google Cloud Location Finder: Single API for Cloud Regions(00:35:33) - Google Cloud G4VMS and G4S: New Inst(00:37:23) - Microsoft Cross Tenant Customer Managed Keys for SSD v2 &(00:39:48) - Microsoft Cloud: Azure Cost Management, Next Edit suggestions in Visual Studio(00:43:41) - Oracle's Cloud Services: Growing 16%(00:46:53) - Oracle to Offer AMD Instinct GPUs on OCI(00:48:03) - Oracle Allows Custom Domains for Autonomous Database(00:50:01) - Cloud: Episode 1

Welcome to episode 308 of The Cloud Pod ? where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt and Ryan are in the house today to tell us all about the latest and greatest from FinOps and SnowFlake conferences, plus updates from Security Command Center, OpenAI, and even a new AWS Region. All this and more, today in the cloud! 

Titles we almost went with this week: I Left My Wallet at FinOps X, But Found Savings at Snowflake Summit Snowflake City Lights, FinOps by the Sea The Two Summits: A Tale of FinOps and Snowflakes Crunchy on the Outside, Snowflake on the Inside  AWS Taipei: Because Sometimes You Need Your Data Closer Than Your Night Market  AWS Plants Its Flag in Taipei: The 37th Time?s the Charm AWS Slashes GPU Prices Faster Than a CUDA Kernel Two Writers Walk Into a Database? And Both Succeed AWS Network Firewall: Now With Windows! The VPN Connection That Keeps Its Secrets Transform and Roll Out: Pub/Sub?s New Single Message Feature SAP Happens: Google?s New M4 VMs Handle It Better Total Recall: Google?s 6TB Memory Machines The M4trix Has You (And Your In-Memory Databases) DeepSeek and You Shall Find? on Google Cloud Four Score and Seven Vulnerabilities Ago ? mk The Fantastic Four Security Features MCP: Model Context Protocol or Master Control Program from Tron? No SQL? No Problem! AI Takes the Wheel Injection Rejection: How Azure Keeps Your Prompts Clean General News 

05:09 FinOps X 2025 Cloud Announcements: AI Agents  and Increased FOCUS Support

All major cloud providers announced expanded support for FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) 1.0, with AWS already in general availability and Google Cloud launching a BigQuery export in private preview.  This signals an industry-wide standardization of cloud cost reporting formats. AWS introduced AI-powered cost optimization through Amazon Q Developer integration with Cost Optimization Hub, enabling automated recommendations across millions of resources with detailed explanations and action plans for cost reduction. Microsoft Azure launched AI agents for application modernization that can reduce migration efforts from months to hours by automating code assessment and remediation across thousands of files, while also introducing flexible PTU reservations that work across multiple AI models. Google Cloud unveiled FinOps Hub 2.0 with Gemini-powered waste detection that identifies underutilized resources (like VMs at 5% usage) and provides AI-generated optimization recommendations for Kubernetes, Cloud Run, and Cloud SQL services. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure added carbon emissions reporting with hourly power-based calculations and GHGP compliance, plus new cost anomaly detection and rules-based cost allocation features for improved financial governance.

06:11 Justin ? ?I mean, if I?m modernizing my application, typically it?s off .NET and Azure, but ok?? 

07:20 Broadcom reboots CloudHealt...

Chapters (00:00:00) - Don't Buy Software Named After Fuzzy Creatures(00:04:00) - FinOps X: Ranting About Finops Tooling(00:05:17) - Cloud Cost Reporting Standards 1.2 Spec(00:07:19) - CloudHealth's New Look for Finops(00:11:05) - FinOps and the dual-role(00:12:37) - Snowflake Summit 2018: Big Data, Intelligence & Security(00:17:29) - Snowflake Adds Postgres to its Cloud Platform(00:20:05) - OpenAI Adds Google Cloud to Its Infrastructure(00:23:34) - Mistral AI Releases Magistral, Their First Language Model(00:26:07) - Amazon Launches 37th Global Region in Taipei(00:31:25) - Wonders of AWS: Smithy API Models(00:37:34) - AWS to Lower GPU Prices for AI-based Instances(00:41:01) - AWS Open-Sourcing PG Active(00:44:43) - AWS Network Firewall: Monitoring Dashboard(00:48:35) - AWS Site to Site VPN: New Features and Best Practices(00:51:41) - Google Pub Sub: JavaScript Transforms (New Feature)(00:54:51) - Google Cloud: New SAP HANA M4 VMs with In(00:56:50) - What Sharding a Database Is Really Like(00:59:41) - Google Cloud Announces Optimized Deployment Recipes for DeepSeq(01:01:27) - BigQuery: reservation fairness and predictability,(01:06:19) - SEC Cybersecurity Command Center 2018: Four new capabilities(01:07:18) - Squid vs. Splunk(01:07:36) - Cloud Run Threat Detection(01:08:22) - SCC automatically detects connections to known malicious IPs by analyzing V(01:09:32) - Google Cloud's Natural Language Data Manipulation (MLDB)(01:11:31) - Google Cloud and Datadog: An AI Match(01:14:21) - Google Cloud Serverless for Apache Spark & BigQuery(01:16:40) - Microsoft: Azure Prompt Shields & More(01:20:08) - Jazz: Microsoft's Cloud J(01:23:45) - FinOps Tooling: The End of an Era(01:31:05) - Will Kelly: Cloud Vendors Are Screwed(01:37:18) - Will Cloud Health and Cloudability Help Your Finops?(01:41:16) - The Future of FinOps: Unit Economics(01:45:44) - Week in Cloud: The Cloud Podcast

Welcome to episode 307 of The Cloud Pod ? where the forecast is always cloudy! Who else is at a conference? Justin is coming to us this week from sunny San Diego where he?s attending FinOps ? so we have that news to look forward to for next week. Matt and Ryan are also on hand today to share the latest news from Kubernetes, Salesforce acquisitions, and the strange case of Azure making AWS more cost effective.

Titles we almost went with this week: The Great Redis Escape: One Year Later, Valkey is Living Its Best Life Cache Me If You Can: How Valkey Outran Redis?s License Policies Tier Today, Gone Tomorrow: AWS?s New Storage Class That Moves Your Data So         You Don?t  Hey AI, Deploy My App: AWS Makes It Actually Work AWS Finally Calculates What You?ll Actually Pay The Price is Right: AWS Edition From List Price to Real Price: AWS Gets Transparent Red Hat and AWS Sitting in a Tree, R-H-E-L-I-N-G Dockerfile? More Like Dockefile-It-For-Me with Amazon?s New MCP Server Elementary, My Dear Watson: Amazon Q Becomes Sherlock Holmes for AWS CUD You Believe It? Red Hat Gets the Discount Treatment Committed Relationship Status: It?s Complicated (But 20% Cheaper) RHEL Yeah! Google Drops Prices on Enterprise Linux Disk Today, Gone Tomorrow: Azure?s Vanishing OS Storage ATL1: Where GPUs Meet Sweet Tea and Southern Hospitality AWS Launches Operation Cloud Sovereignty The Great Firewall of Europe: AWS Edition Amazon Builds a GDPR Fortress in Germany General News 

01:46 What Salesforce?s $8B acquisition of Informatica means for enterprise data and AI | VentureBeat

Salesforce just dropped $8 billion to acquire Informatica.  This purchase was really about building the data foundation needed for agentic AI to actually work in enterprise environments ? we?re talking about combining Informatica?s 30 years of data management expertise with Salesforce?s cloud platform to create what they?re calling a ?unified architecture for agentic AI.? This acquisition fills a massive gap in Salesforce?s data management capabilities, bringing in critical pieces like data cataloging, integration, governance, quality controls, and master data management ? all the unsexy but absolutely essential plumbing that makes AI agents trustworthy and scalable in real enterprise deployments. The timing here is fascinating, because Informatica literally just announced their own agentic AI offerings last week at Informatica World, so Salesforce is essentially buying a company that?s already pivoted hard into the AI space ? rather than trying to build these capabilities from scratch. There?s going to be some interesting overlap with MuleSoft, which Salesforce bought for $6.5 billion back in 2018, but analysts are saying Informatica?s data management capabilities are more comprehensive and updated ? this could mean some consolidation challenges ahead as they figure out how to integrate these overlapping technologies. For enterprise customers, this could be a game-changer because it promises to automate those painful, time-consuming data processes that typically take days or weeks. These AI agents can handle data ingestion, in... Chapters (00:00:00) - Will GCP's Gemini Understand Kubernetes?(00:01:08) - Fooled by Conference(00:01:45) - Salesforce Buys Informatica for GenTech AI(00:05:02) - Valky Turns One(00:07:42) - Harness Unveils MCP Server(00:13:23) - Terraform 2.8: Security in the Cloud(00:16:21) - Amazon Launches FSX for Lustre Intelligent Tiering(00:18:56) - Amazon AI System Development with ecs, EKS and Serverless(00:21:15) - AWS Pricing Calculator Gets a Long-Needed Feature(00:28:19) - Amazon to Launch a European Sovereign Cloud(00:36:10) - Google's Cloud-based Red Hat Discount(00:38:06) - Google Launches Vertex AI Ranking API(00:42:41) - Google Cloud Run: Bringing GPUs to Serverless(00:45:17) - Kubernetes: Volume Populator for Machine Learning(00:47:48) - Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry: Turn Every Software Developer Into an(00:51:59) - C Scripts in C(00:55:32) - Azure: General Availability of Ephemeral OS Disks(01:01:08) - Azure AI Gateway Expands Support for AWS Bedrock Model End(01:04:50) - DigitalOcean Making a Serious Play for GPUs(01:10:23) - Week in Cloud: Finops X

Welcome to episode 306 of The Cloud Pod ? where the forecast is always cloudy! 

This week, we have a bunch of announcements concerning the newest offering from Anthropic ? Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4, plus container security, Azure MySQL Maintenance, Vertex AI, and Mistral AI. Plus, we?ve got a Cloud Journey installment AND an aftershow ? so get comfy and get ready for a trip to the clouds!

Titles we almost went with this week: ECS Failures Now Have 4x the Excuses Nailing Down Your Container Security, One Patch at a Time HashiCorp?s New Recipe: Terraform, AI, and a Pinch of MCP Teaching an Old DNS New IPv6 Tricks Dash-ing through the Klusters, in an AWS Console Google?s Generative AI Playground Gets a Glow-Up Vertex AI Studio: Now with 200% More Darkness! Like our souls Claude Opus 4 Strikes a Chord on Google Cloud Sovereign-teed to Please: Google Cloud?s Royal Treatment Google?s Cloud Kingdom Expands its Borders Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer?s AI? Anthropic Drops Sonne(t) 4 Knowledge on Vertex Mistral AI Chats Up a Storm on Google Cloud Google Cloud?s Vertex AI Gets a Dose of Mistral Magic .NET Aspire on Azure: The App Service Strikes Back Default Outbound Access Retires, Decides Florida Isn?t for Everyone  AI Is Going Great ? or How ML Makes Money 

01:52 Introducing Claude 4

Claude has launched the latest models in Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, setting new standards for coding, advancing reasoning and AI agents. Maybe they?ll actually follow instructions when told to shut down? (Looking at you, ChatGPT.) Claude Opus 4 is ?the world?s best coding model? with sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows.  Opus 4 has 350 billion parameters, making it one of the largest publicly available language models.  It demonstrates strong performance on academic benchmarks, including research.  Sonnet 4 is a smaller 10 billion parameter model optimized for dialogue, making it well-suited for conversational AI applications.  Alongside the models, they are also announcing: Extended thinking with tool use (beta): Both models can use tools ? like web search ? during extended thinking, allowing Claude to alternate between reasoning and tool use to improve its responses. New Model Capabilities: Both models can use tools in parallel, follow instructions more precisely, and when given access to local files by developers ? demonstrate significantly improved memory capabilities, extracting and saving key facts maintain continuity and build tacit knowledge over time Claude code is now generally available: After receiving extensive positive feedback during our research preview, they are expanding how developers can collaborate with Claude.  Claude code now supports background tasks via github actions and native integrations with VS code and jetbrains, displaying edits directly in your files for seamless pair programming.  New Api capabilities: Four new capabilities on the API that enable developers to build more powerful AI agents including Code Execution tool, MCP connector, Files API and the ability to cache... Chapters (00:00:00) - Cloud Pod: Azure's Maintenance Makeover(00:00:38) - Gemini Power Glasses at IO 2017(00:01:58) - Claude Turns 4 and More(00:07:51) - Claude 4.2 and Silent Models(00:08:38) - OpenAI's Language AI Response API Update(00:11:14) - Docker: Hardened Images(00:15:30) - Terraform MCP Server Released for AI Integration(00:17:50) - Amazon Serverless SQL with GMAX(00:21:43) - Amazon ECS: Extended Container Exit Reason Message(00:23:55) - Dynamodb Local in AWS Cloud Shell(00:26:21) - EC2 DNS now supports IPv6(00:28:52) - EKS Dashboard: Kubernetes Cluster Management(00:33:50) - Vertex AI Studio: Going Dark(00:34:59) - Google's Gemma 3n AI Model for Mobile(00:37:03) - Google's Intelligent Agent Platform Update(00:39:24) - Google Cloud's Sovereign Cloud: Data Sovereignty(00:43:10) - GCP 2.5: Unstructured Data with Vertex(00:44:48) - Google Cloud AI: Lechat Enterprise and OCR(00:48:08) - Azure FX V2 series with 5th Gen Intel Xeon(00:49:33) - Red Hat OpenShift VM Virtualization on Azure(00:52:15) - Microsoft SQL Server: Maintenance Experience for MySQL(00:55:49) - Microsoft's NET Aspire Integration with Azure App Service(00:59:42) - Azure: Retiring Implicit Outbound Connectivity for V(01:03:19) - How to Code With AI in Visual Studio(01:08:25) - Building a serverless bot in Python(01:13:43) - Claude 2.8(01:19:07) - Google Docs: AI in the Show Notes document(01:25:27) - Building a DevOps team with AI(01:29:16) - Black FLP02 PC Case

Welcome to episode 305 of The Cloud Pod ? where the forecast is always cloudy! How did you do on your Microsoft Build Predictions? As badly as us? Plus we?ve got news on AWS service changes, a lifecycle catch up page for all those services that bought the farm, tons of Gemini news (seriously, like a lot) and even some AI for .NET. 

Welcome to the cloud pod- and thanks for joining us! 

Titles we almost went with this week: Google?s Jules: An AI Gem for Cloud Devs   Autonomous Agents of Code: Jules? Excellent Adventure in the Google Cloud Gemini 2.5 Shoots for the Stars with Cosmic-Sized AI Upgrades Resistance is Futile: OpenAI Assimilates Your Codebase  AWS Transformers: Rise of the Agentic AI  Teaching an old .NET dog new Linux tricks CodeBuild Puts Docker Builds in Hyperdrive Inspector Gadget?s New Trick: Mapping Container Vulnerabilities Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like Scanning Containers? Google Cranks AI to 11 with New Ultra Plan I, For One, Welcome Our New AI Ultra Overlords The Inference Engine That Could: llm-d Chugs Ahead with Kubernetes-Native        Scaling Scaling Inference to Infinity and Beyond with Google Cloud?s llm-d Google Cloud and Spring AI: A Match Made in Java-n The Fast and the Serverless: Cloud Run Drifts into AI Studio Territory SQL Server 2025: A Vector Victor, Not a Scalar Failure AI will solve my life problems of having money in my pocket I used to scan all the containers but now I will just scan yours AI Is Going Great ? or How ML Makes Money 

01:50 Jules: Google?s autonomous AI coding agent

Jules is an autonomous AI agent that can read code, understand intent, and make code changes on its own.  It goes beyond AI coding assistants to operate independently. It clones code into a secure Google Cloud VM, allowing it to understand the full context of a project. This enables it to write tests, build features, fix bugs, and more. Jules operates asynchronously in the background, presenting its plan and reasoning when complete. This allows developers to focus on other tasks while it works. Integration with GitHub enables Jules to work directly in existing workflows without extra setup or context switching. Developers can steer and give feedback throughout the process. For cloud developers, Jules demonstrates the rapid advancement of AI for coding moving from prototype to product. Its cloud-based parallel execution enables efficient handling of complex, multi-file changes. While in public beta, Jules is free with some usage limits. This allows developers to experiment with this cutting-edge AI coding agent and understand its potential to accelerate development on Google Cloud.

02:56 Ryan ? ?More and more, as new tools get released, it?s just going to change the way anything gets written? it?s getting more and more capable.? 

05:45 Introducing Flow: Google?s AI filmmaking tool designed for Veo

Flow is an AI-powered filmmaking tool custom-designed for Google?s advanced video, image and language models (Veo, Imagen, Gemini). It allows creators to generate cinem... Chapters (00:00:00) - Cloud Pod: AWS Breaks Up With unpopular Services(00:01:02) - Google's Joules: A Code Editing Agent for Cloud Developers(00:04:54) - Google's AI Filmmaking Tool, Flow(00:08:45) - Gemini 2.5 Large Language Models Update(00:10:33) - Google's Alpha Evolve: The AI Coding Agent(00:12:50) - OpenAI's Codex AI Agent for Cloud Development(00:14:44) - HashiCorp Validated Patterns for Cloud-based IT(00:16:49) - Amazon AWS: End Support for Several Services(00:21:12) - Amazon's New Strands AI Agent SDK(00:28:01) - Cloud Cost Management: The Right Step for IT Pros(00:31:36) - AWS Code Build: New Docker Server Capability(00:33:18) - Amazon Inspector for Docker & ECR(00:34:51) - Google AI Ultra: A Premium Subscription Plan(00:39:10) - Database Center(00:40:32) - PostgreSQL on GKE(00:43:32) - Google Cloud Introduces LLM-D for Large Language Inference(00:47:00) - Spring Boot: AI in Java 1.0(00:49:33) - Google Cloud: Bringing AI Studio to Cloud Run(00:51:12) - Google's Vertex AI for Creative Content Generation(00:52:30) - Two Gemini Stories In One Week(00:52:46) - Microsoft's Build 2020 Prediction(00:55:14) - Microsoft's App Services Platform Announcement(00:57:24) - Microsoft's Cloud Announcement(00:59:25) - Azure AI Foundry: New Features, Changes(01:01:58) - Microsoft Fabric and Azure Data Portfolio: Powering the Next AI(01:04:22) - Microsoft Discovery: Accelerating Research and Development (New Platform)(01:06:35) - Microsoft, GitHub Copilot: Agentic DevOps(01:09:33) - Oracle Launches E6 Cloud Compute(01:11:32) - Week in the Cloud: Starting Late

Welcome to episode 304 of The Cloud Pod ? where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan and Matt are in the house tonight to bring you all the latest and greatest in Cloud and AI news, including AWS new Chilean region, the ongoing tug of war between Open AI and Microsoft, and even some K8 updates ? plus an aftershow. Let?s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week: Open AI gets a COO delivered Things get Chile with new regions Observability and AI, I Q-uestion the logic Cloud Pod tries to Microsoft Build predictions K8 resizes pods on the fly Microsoft strongly reinforces the AI Foundry The Cloud Pod renegotiates the hosts? contracts ? we now have to pay the Cloud Pod to be on it  Follow Up 

01:53 DOJ?s extreme proposals will hurt consumers and America?s tech leadership 

We previously talked about the DOJ and Google Antitrust lawsuit ? and now the DOJ has wrapped up their remedies hearing, and Google has *not* been quiet about it. One of the claims is that the remedies would hurt browser choice, putting browsers like Firefox out of business completely.  Google also claimed that data disclosure mandates would threaten user?s privacy ? it would be MUCH safer if they could just sell it to you via their marketplace.  We do agree that divesting Chrome would make things more complicated for people living in the Google Cloud.  Really, what comes down to is that Google claims DOJ?s solutions are the wrong solutions ? although to us, Google?s solutions aren?t much better.  AI ? Or How ML Makes Money 

09:20 OpenAI Expands Leadership with Fidji Simo 

OpenAI Hires Instacart CEO Simo For Major Leadership Role 

OpenAI is hiring Fidji Simo as the CEO of applications, representing a major restructuring of leadership at the company.  She was the CEO at Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:02:05) - Google Lashes Out Over DOJ's Antitrust Proposal(00:06:19) - Does a Google Divested Chrome Affect the Internet?(00:09:17) - OpenAI Expands Leadership Team(00:10:22) - OpenAI's Nonprofit Status(00:11:34) - OpenAI Announces OpenAI for Countries and Data Residency for(00:13:58) - OpenAI in Tough Negotiations With Microsoft(00:16:48) - Terraform's AWS Provider Hits 4 Billion Downloads(00:17:41) - Amazon Terraform Provider 6.0 in Public Beta(00:23:14) - Amazon Launches New AWS Region in Chile(00:24:29) - Amazon Q Developer support to OpenSearch(00:27:04) - Kubernetes 1.33 Release Notes(00:31:23) - Does AWS have cloud commitment insurance?(00:33:25) - Google's Gecko Tool for Generative AI(00:35:54) - First Build Prediction: GitHub Copilot(00:37:04) - Microsoft's LLM for OpenAI(00:38:11) - Intel Announces New Quantum Computing Chip(00:39:17) - Third Choice: Microsoft Office PC Updates(00:40:30) - Top Three Office Products for 2020(00:42:07) - Google, Microsoft's AI Competitor(00:42:46) - The Number of Times Copilot Is Invited to Microsoft's Conference(00:46:15) - Microsoft Giving Virtual Data Center Tours(00:49:21) - Azure Storage Actions(00:52:15) - How many storage accounts can I have in a subscription?(00:54:46) - Azure Storage Actions(00:59:41) - "Oh, I can't handle that!"(01:00:14) - Red Hat Summit 2025 & Azure Migrate(01:02:57) - Azure AI: Reinforcement Fine-tuning (RFT(01:05:48) - Cloud Podcast: Week 3(01:06:40) - Linux Kernels to Drop 486 CPUs(01:09:29) - Can I Run Linux on a 486?(01:14:07) - AMD vs Intel: Which Is The Best?(01:16:21) - 486 compatibility in the Linux kernel

Welcome to episode 303 of The Cloud Pod ? where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan and exhausted dad Matt are here (and mostly awake) ready to bring the latest in cloud news! This week we?ve got more news from Nova, updates to Claude, earnings news, and a mini funeral for Skype ? plus a new helping of Cloud Journey!

Titles we almost went with this week: Claude researches so Ryan can nap The best AI for Nova Corps, Amazon Nova Premiere JB If you can?t beat them, change the licensing terms and make them fork, and then       reverse course? and profit Q has invaded your IDE!! Skype bites the dust 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.  Follow Up 

02:50 Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we?re doing about it

OpenAI wrote up a blog post about their sycophantic Chat GPT 4o upgrade last week, and they wanted to set the record straight.  They made adjustments at improving the models default personality to make it feel more intuitive and effective across a variety of tasks.  When shaping model behavior, they start with a baseline principle and instructions outlined in their model spec.  They also teach their models how to apply these principles by incorporating user signals like thumbs up and thumbs down feedback on responses.  In this update, though, they focused too much on short-term feedback and did not fully account for how users? interactions with ChatGPT evolve. This skewed the results towards responses that were overly supportive ? but disingenuous.  Beyond rolling back the changes, they are taking steps to realign the model behavior, including refining core training techniques and system prompts to explicitly steer the model away from sycophancy.  They also plan to build more guardrails to increase honesty and transparency principles in the model spec. Additionally, they plan to expand ways for users to test and give direct feedback before deployments. Lastly, OpenAI continues to expand evaluations building on the model sync and our ongoing research. 

04:43 Deep Research on Microsoft Hotpatching:

Yes, they?re grabbing money and screwing you. Basically. 

07:06 Justin ? ?I?m not going to give them any credit on this one. I appreciate that they created hotpatching, but I don?t like what you want to charge me for it.? 

General News

It?s Earnings time ? cue the sound effects!

08:03 Alphabet?s Q1 earnings shattered analyst expectations, sending the stock soaring. Google?s CEO credits its AI efforts

Alphabet Q1 2025 earnings call: CEO Sundar Pichai?s remarks

Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:00:54) - Manto Man's 3 Kids Announcement(00:02:40) - Microsoft Hot Patching: Changes Coming soon to the Model(00:07:36) - Before the Earnings, How to Prepare(00:07:54) - Good Quarter for Microsoft, Google, and Amazon(00:10:47) - Amazon AWS Sales Up 17%(00:16:32) - Skype Is Dead(00:18:18) - Claude's Cloud Research: How ML Makes Money(00:20:22) - OpenAI Rescues Plan to Split Off and Become for Profit(00:22:56) - Anthropic's $61.5 Million Stock Offer(00:25:00) - Redis: Moving back to the SSPL(00:30:19) - HP Terraform Premium(00:33:09) - Amazon Nova Premiere Announced at AWS Revamp(00:34:09) - Amazon's Cloud Commitment Insurance(00:35:36) - Amazon Q Developer Introduces in VS Code(00:37:27) - Amazon Q Developer in GitHub(00:39:45) - EC2 Image Builder(00:42:44) - Amazon EBS Snapshot: Fast Provisioned Rate for Volume Initial(00:46:58) - Google Cloud: Vertex AI Prediction Dedicated Endpoints(00:48:28) - Microsoft Copilot for Azure in April(00:52:57) - Alexa's Small Language Models(00:53:56) - OpenAI Announces New 5.4(00:55:21) - Azure Portal(00:59:01) - How to really become a Windows admin with Terraform(01:03:44) - Microsoft Virtual Network Terminal Access Point (VNTAP) Public Preview(01:07:01) - Oracle Touts the Cloud on the Sphere(01:09:41) - Why Your Tagging Strategy Matters for the Cloud(01:11:36) - Cloudsecurity: Tagging our Services(01:19:16) - Amazon vs. GCP: Service Management & Tagging

Welcome to episode 302 of The Cloud Pod ? where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin and Ryan are on hand to bring you all the latest in Cloud (and AI news.) We?ve got hotpatching, Project Greenland, and a rollback of GPT-4.o, which sort of makes us sad ? and our egos are definitely less stroked. Plus Saas, containers, and outposts ? all of this and more. Thanks for joining us in the cloud! 

Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod was never accused of being sycophantic 2nd Gen outposts!?! I didn?t even know anyone was using Gen 1 AWS Outposts 2nd Gen? not with AI (GASP) If you?re doing SaaS wrong, Google & AWS have your back this week with new Features  Patching, so hot right now Larger container sizes for Azure?.  You don?t say AWS Green reporting detects hotspots? surprisingly close to Maryland?.. Visual pipeline for Opensearch? I want to like this? but I just can?t 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 

01:37 Sharing new DORA research for gen AI in software development

The DORA team at Google has released a new report, ?Impact of Generative AI In Software Development.? The report is based on data and developer interviews, and the report aims to move beyond hype to offer a proper perspective on AI?s impact on individuals, teams and organizations.  Click on the link in our show notes to access the full report. However, Google has highlighted a few key points in the blog post. AI is Real ? A staggering 89% of organizations are prioritizing the integration of AI into their applications, and 76% of technologists are already using AI in some part of their daily work.  Productivity gains confirmed: Developers using Gen AI report significant increases in flow, productivity, and job satisfaction.  For instance, a 25% increase in AI adoption is associated with a 2.1% increase in individual productivity. Organization benefits are tangible: Beyond individual gains, Dora found strong correlations between AI adoption and improvements in crucial organizational metrics. A 25% increase in AI adoption is associated with increases in document quality, code quality, code review speeds and approval speeds.  If you are looking to utilize AI in your development organization, they provide five practical approaches for both leaders and practitioners. Have transparent communications Empower developers with learning and experimentation Establish clear policies Rethink performance metrics Embrace fast feedback loops

045:06 Ryan ? ?Those are really good approaches, but really difficult to implement in practice. You know, in my day job, watching the company struggle to get a handle on AI from all the different angles you need to, from data protection, legal liability ? just operationally ? it?s very hard. So I think having a mature program where you?re rolling that out with intent and being very specific with your AI tasks I think will go a long way with a lot of companies.?  

AI Is Going Great ? Or How ML Makes Its Money 

08...

Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:01:51) - A New Report on AI in Software Development(00:02:57) - How to Use AI in the Development Organization(00:08:37) - A Code Team's Journey(00:09:04) - How OpenAI Is Making Money With AI(00:12:13) - ChatGPT: The Chatbot's Syncophantic(00:14:38) - Cloudflare: DDoS Attacks reached 1 TB per second(00:18:22) - Cloudflare: Best DDoS Protection for $30 a month(00:20:09) - Amazon's US East 1 Availability Zone Announcement(00:25:41) - AWS AppSync Events(00:30:23) - EKS Cluster Node Monitoring and Auto-Repair(00:34:11) - Amazon Bedrock: Prompt Optimization (General Availability)(00:36:50) - Amazon Q Business Integrations for Microsoft Word and Outlook(00:39:05) - Amazon Serverless Reservations: New Discount for Analytics(00:42:25) - Amazon OpenSearch Injection Pipelines(00:44:50) - Amazon Announces Second Generation AWS Outpost Racks(00:48:09) - Amazon Cloudfront SaaS Manager: Multi-Termite Webs(00:52:34) - Amazon VPC Endpoints: 10 years too late(00:54:06) - SaaS Runtime: Fully Managed by Google Cloud(01:01:04) - On the Cloud: The IMS Blueprint(01:03:44) - Google Cloud Database and LangChain Integrations now support Go Java and(01:04:22) - OpenAI Unveils GPT Image 1 at Microsoft(01:06:16) - How to Stop restarting your Windows Servers for Patching(01:06:44) - Microsoft Hot Patching for Windows Server 25(01:13:27) - Let it go.(01:13:42) - Azure Confidential VMs(01:16:43) - Azure: Large Container Sizes for ACI(01:19:14) - DigitalOcean Launches Managed Caching for Valky(01:20:28) - How Amazon Rescued Its GPU Crunch(01:22:15) - Amazon's GPU Priority Process(01:24:01) - NVIDIA GPUs, Storage, and Collaboration(01:24:46) - Efficiency and confidentiality in the R&D environment(01:26:31) - Amazon's GPU Orchestration System(01:31:34) - Week in the Cloud: Longest Episode Yet

Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:01:07) - How to Write a 300-Episode Recap With AI(00:03:05) - We're Turning 300 Episodes Down(00:07:39) - Reinventing: The Future of the Podcast(00:13:52) - Google Wins Antitrust Case vs. DOJ(00:21:18) - Google's Proposal for the Antitrust Case(00:24:29) - OpenAI Launches OpenAI03 and O4 Mini(00:30:27) - GPT 4.1 and 4.0 Mini(00:34:25) - GitHub Cloud and Copilot Announcements(00:35:37) - Copilot for Business vs. Personal: Should You Buy Pro+(00:38:50) - Amazon VPC Route Server(00:42:32) - AWS Security Reference Architecture Code Examples for Generative AI(00:45:08) - Amazon Nova Sonic: New Gen AI Model for Voice-enabled Applications(00:46:55) - Thank You or No Thank You?(00:47:40) - Novasonic's Nova Real 1.1 security video(00:51:03) - Amazon AWS S3 Express 1 Zone Price Cut(00:53:07) - AWS STS now automatically serves all requests to the global endpoint in(00:56:13) - Gemini Cloud Assist: Spring Cleaning with FinOps Hub(00:58:23) - Google's New VM Store for Valkey(00:59:36) - Microsoft releases new capabilities to Azure AI(01:01:15) - Azure Storage Driver Update & New Capabilities for AI(01:02:06) - Llama 4 models now available in Azure AI(01:03:31) - Microsoft Azure OpenAI: GPT 4.1, 4.(01:04:43) - Copilot in Azure Announces General Availability(01:06:41) - Azure Cloud's Hybrid Connection Manager in Public Preview(01:07:38) - One-Bit AI Models Won't Need Supercomputers(01:09:46) - Microsoft's SQL Server Migration to hyperscale(01:12:42) - Oracle: My Public Cloud Was Hacked(01:14:49) - Oracle's PR for the Hacking(01:18:20) - A Week in the Cloud(01:18:57) - Week in Cloud: Cloud Apps