The Cloud Pod

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 developer

This week on The Cloud Pod, Justin is away so the rest of the team has taken the opportunity to throw him under the bus.     A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights The Pentagon has had enough of the kids fighting so no one gets the toy. Amazon has given developers the happy ending they’ve always wanted. Google is playing with fire and hopes no one gets burnt. JEDI: Play Nice Pentagon officials are considering pulling the plug on the star-crossed JEDI cloud-computing project. Reminds us of when we were kids and our parents took toys away when we couldn’t play nice together. Amazon Web Services: We’ve Made All the Money AWS announces a price reduction for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. That’s an awful lot of samples.   Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) announces pricing change for VPC Peering. Just get rid of the ridiculous data transfer fees!    AWS Organizations launches a new console experience. We’re excited to try this out! AWS announces IAM Access Control for Apache Kafka on Amazon MSK. This is great.  AWS Systems Manager now includes Incident Manager to resolve IT incidents faster. This might initially fall short of some of the other offerings on the market.  AWS Local Zones are now open in Boston, Miami and Houston. They’re continuing on the Oracle model of racks in random garages.  Amazon now lets you create Microsoft SQL Server Instances of Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts. A big hooray for people using Outposts.  Google Cloud Platform: Smells A Bit Google announces Agent Assist for Chat is now in Preview. Hopefully this is better than predictive

Justin and Jonathan kick off this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod by themselves, Peter joins the party late because he’s been fighting dinosaurs and Ryan is unable to attend as he can’t move from under the weight of the kitten on his lap.    A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Amazon will find any excuse to use GIFs just like the rest of us. Google has given Cardi B a headstart on a theme song for its new product. Azure sent the wedding invites out late but still expects you to show up. Amazon Web Services: Cheaper Than Healthcare Amazon RDS on VMWare no longer requires the use of a VPN tunnel back to AWS. Still cheaper than paying for healthcare.  Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces support for Asynchronous Search. This is really cool! Amazon EC2 now allows you to replace the root volume for a running instance. There are some great use cases for this.     Red Hat Enterprise Linux with High Availability is now available on Amazon EC2. Good to see IBM isn’t throwing up barriers.  AWS is releasing the new Amazon FSx File Gateway. Hopefully this is easy to implement.   AWS announces moving graphs for CloudWatch Dashboards. Also known as GIFs for CloudWatch.  Google Cloud Platform: Closet Fans of Cardi B Google announces PHP, a general purpose programming language, is now on Cloud Functions. Visit thecloudpod.net to see a live example of PHP, also known as the WordPress platform we built our website on.   GCP is launching Web App and API Protection (WAAP), which provides comprehensive threat protection for web apps and APIs. Do not confuse this with the Cardi B song.    Google has made the Doc AI

In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Bart Castle, an AWS and cloud computing trainer and media personality. Bart works with IT training company CBT Nuggets and also does cloud-migration consulting projects.  Bart shares the patterns he seems based on training demand and also advises how to decide which certification to go for next. He discusses the importance of solving business problems that will help achieve the business’ goals while retooling and transforming systems. “At this point in my career, every technical conversation that I have is always paired up with a business value conversation,” he notes. But how should a data team shift focus to better solve business problems? He suggests looking for patterns. Uncovering patterns can help determine actionable steps to maximize efficiency and enable new business opportunities. Bart also discusses cloud computing trends, CloudFormation stacking, hybrid deployments, and containers. Featured Guest Name: Bart Castle What he does: Bart is a cloud computing and AWS expert and technical trainer, as well as a consultant.  Key quote: “In the end, we’re still looking for those tools that will bridge gaps. This is why, for me, being an integrations professional and getting what integration means is skill number one across all different arenas. Everywhere you look, it’s an integration problem.”  Where to find him: LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube Key Takeaways When thinking about all the different training options, Bart suggests pursuing the certification that would help you land a specific job or role. If you’re not sure what your next job might be, look at SysOps administration first since it is closest to traditional network help desk operations support roles. Based on his training background, Bart sees a rising interest in network automation. Many teams are working with various vendors to address networking and connectivity and to make the transition from command line administration to Python automation.  “A lot of what I’m seeing here is the switch from real deep specialty to real broad generalization, and that can be an overwhelming bite to take when you look at how much information there is to consume,” says Bart.  Learning how the tools work is the easy part, but you have to dig deeper to make it work for your specific business use case. Bart recommends looking for white papers, as well as case studies and blog posts. Communities (like TCP!) can also point you in the right direction.   Bart says, “Once you get those examples of how a piece of input data with the right transformation with this pairing of reporting can solve this problem — now, you’re putting tools in your belt that are going beyond just using the tools, and how to actually solve business problems with them.” Here’s what was mentioned in the episode CBT Nuggets: provides in-demand training, primarily in IT, project management, and office productivity topics. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): a cloud object storage service.  “What is DevOps?“: an AWS blog explaining the DevOps

Your hosts see a new cloud on the horizon and anticipate a flood on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights HashiCorp enters the ring with HashiCorp Cloud Platform. Microsoft offers free AI classes. Bayer Crop Sciences pushes cluster size to new heights. General News: A Challenger Approaches HashiCorp has launched the HashiCorp Cloud Platform featuring managed Consul as the single initial service. HashiCorp is currently soliciting feedback on the alpha version of HashiCorp Cloud Platform and is planning on releasing Vault next. AWS: Let it Snow The AWS Snow family of devices is now joined by AWS Snowcone, a four-and-a-half pound eight terabyte data storage and transfer device, both the most storage and least weight yet. Don’t lose it though — this little guy runs around $2,000. Aurora Global database now supports write request forwarding for low latency global data reads. This is fantastic news for lazy devs like us.  Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Groups now support the Instance Refresh feature, eliminating the need for custom scripts and systems. This is a long-anticipated feature for TCP. We can’t believe it’s taken until 2020! The new Lambda Powertools library within the Serverless Lens for the Well Architected Framework features Tracer, Logger and Metrics as its three core utilities. Using these tools to get yourself set up will save you a lot of strife down the line. Azure: An ‘Udacious’ Plan Azure and Udacity are partnering to launch a scholarship program and the free Azure Machine Learning course to address the growing demand for AI specialists. We’ve had good experiences with Udacity so this offering appeals directly to us. Azure is catering to users new to ARM templates with new features including a template Quickstart gallery and Azure Resource Manager Tools in Visual Studio Code. How did we ever get by without this? Google: Seeds and Nodes G

Josh Stella (twitter: @joshstella) joins us to talk about the state of cloud security. We discuss Fugue’s new report, the complexity and challenges of IAM, and the most common cloud misconfiguration aren’t always the ones you would expect. Fugue ensures cloud infrastructure stays in continuous compliance with enterprise security policies. Our solution identifies cloud infrastructure security risks and compliance violations and ensures that they are never repeated. Fugue provides baseline drift detection and automated remediation to eliminate data breaches, and powerful visualization and reporting tools to easily demonstrate compliance.

Jacques Chester author of Knative In Action and Principal engineer at Pivotal joins us to educate us on Knative.  Knative is an open-source tool to run functions as a service on top of Kubernetes and is gaining popularity in Kubernetes deployments.  Learn all about Knative, Kubernetes maturity, Googles involvement in Knative, and more. If you are are interested in checking out Knative in Action, I have a coupon code for you to save today on any Manning press publication including Knative in Action! https://www.manning.com/books/knative-in-action?query=Knative%20in%20Action  Code: podcloud20

Your hosts talk about AWS Lambda, Azure’s Cybersecurity of Things and Google’s loquacious AI on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data —  no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.  This week’s highlights AWS Lambda sees savings and supports Dart. Your kitchen appliances are safer with developments in the Internet of Things. It’s the last week of our trial of the new Lightning Round format. Comedy’s hard. TCP News ICYMI, check out our second episode of TCP Talks: Finops in the cloud with Rob Martin. We learned some things about financial operations, and we’re sure you will too. AWS Lambda Updates AWS Compute Savings Plans now apply to your AWS Lambda workloads. That’s nice, but even a decent percentage of such a cheap service probably won’t impact your expenses all that much. In addition, those Lambda workloads now support Dart, an open-source programming language made by Google. If you’re making mobile apps, you’ll be happy to use this. If you’re not making mobile apps, you probably didn’t need to read this paragraph. AWS Identity and Access Management now allows you to control access for requests made on your behalf by AWS services. It’s a great security feature. We’re looking forward to AWS taking this a step further at this year’s re:Inforce conference. Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports previous Secrets Manager versions and can read keys directly from JSON objects. It’s going to be much more convenient now that you can use one key instead of, say, 10. AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr outlined a laundry list of updates to Amazon FSx for Lustre in this blog post. All these changes add up to SageMaker integration, to make SageMaker more attractive to customers. Spherical Things At this yea

We follow continuing stories with the JEDI contract, GigaOM and our new Lightning Round format on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data —  no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.  This week’s highlights Amazon makes progress contesting the JEDI contract. AWS and Azure introduce shared cloud block storage. Google shows signs of shifting priorities. Arrested Development United States judge Patricia Campbell-Smith has granted Amazon’s request to temporarily halt work on the JEDI contract by Microsoft. She also ordered Amazon to post $42 million in the event the injunction was issued wrongfully.  AWS Not First to Share Blocks CloudFormation StackSets users can now manage multiple AWS accounts. We recommend you get your organizational units structured properly now so you’re ready for when that must-have feature for your organization is added. AWS customers running Linux on Ec2 can now attach provisioned IOPS (io1) EBS volumes to Multiple Ec2 instances. Be careful though: wielding fine control over your data means taking responsibility for your data losses, as well. This news comes a day after Azure announced their own Azure Shared Disks, which was, for those sweet brief hours before AWS’s announcement, the industry’s only shared cloud block storage. What’s in the Box? Azure released a new GigaOM study which backs up the findings from the GigaOM study we covered on episode 58. How incredible — Azure, which paid for the scientific (and unverifiable) study, was found to be the best at everything once again! The Azure Backup service now offers a preview of the

The most terrifying part of moving to the cloud isn’t security, migration techniques or learning new infrastructure as code tools, it is managing that pesky cloud bill.  To some CFO’s it might even be downright terrifying.  Join Jonathan and Justin as they talk about all things FinOps with Rob Martin from Apptio (formerly Cloudability) where they discuss cost management techniques, getting help via the Finops Foundation and more. A big thanks to TCP-Talks Sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning, and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.  

Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker kick off our new TCP Talks bonus episodes with a chat with Mike Kelly, CTO at Blue Medora. Monitoring can be hard on-premises or in the cloud. As a result, it can be downright scary with multi-cloud strategies, hybrid cloud, and legacy tools. Bring order chaos, by centralizing the management of metrics and logs. From solving out of disk space alerts to building observability techniques, Stackdriver and Bindplane can help.  Adopting these practices and principals will help your Observability and SRE teams in the cloud.

Peter is back after a few weeks away from the show. Azure launches new Event Grid features, Palo Alto Networks picks up Twistlock and Puresec and Google has a really bad day. Plus the amazing lightning round with Peter. Sponsors: Foghorn Consulting – https://fogops.io/thecloudpod Topics: 25th Episode Blog Post Azure has simplified event-driven architectures with new updates to Event Grid Palo Alto Networks enters into definitive agreement to purchase Twistlock and Puresec Oracle Lays off hundreds from its Seattle office as its cloud strategy remains grounded Azure Adaptive network hardening in Azure Security Center is now GA Amazon EBS adds ability to take point-in-time, crash-consistent snapshots across multiple EBS volumes Announcing Tag-Based Access Control for AWS Cloudformation New Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) – Now Generally Available Google Cloud has Major Outage on 6/2 Google Cloud Outage resolved, but it reveals holes in cloud computing atmosphere An update on Sunday’s service disruption Lightning Round (Jonathan 6, Justin 9, Peter 1 and Guest 3): AWS is Announcing Windows Server version 1903 AMI’s for Amazon EC2 Amazon Chime now supports United States Toll-Free Numbers

Show Notes 1/8/18 Amazon reportedly buys cloud endure for $250 million Fargate Lowers prices by 50% Cloudera/Hortonworks merger closes, takes aim at Amazon Is this the worst S3 compromise? Google Purchases DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) Github goes Free AWS CLI Query JMES Path reference Lightning Round Windows Server 2019 AMI’s now available on AWS Parallel Cluster now available in Sweden Alexa announces Skill Builder Beta Example/Certification WAF now includes a monitoring dashboard MSFT Project Bali EMR announces 99.9% Service Level agreement Cool Tools AWS CLI Builder AWS Console Recorder Sponsors Foghorn Consulting – https://www.fogops.io/thecloudpod Last week in AWS – https://www.lastweekinaws.com Audible – http://www.audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Enjoy our recap of AWS Re:Invent 2018 Topics: Announcements Pre-Reinvent Monday-Tuedsay - Recap Andy Jassy - Recap Werner Vogels - Recap Sponsors: Foghorn Consulting - www.fogops.io - Your leading AWS premier partner helping companies move to the cloudLastweek in AWS - www.lastweekinaws.com - Your weekly dose of AWS Snark and announcements. 

 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 ada

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 5⃣Five 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.

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

 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 t

For this special edition of TCP Talks, Justin Brodley is joined by four distinguished guests from the FinOps Foundation following the recent FinOps X conference in San Diego. Rob Martin, Mike Fuller, Graham Murphy, and the TCP team dive deep into the evolution of FinOps from pure cloud cost management to the broader “Cloud Plus” world, the rapid adoption of Focus 1.2, and how AI is transforming both what we manage and how we manage it. About Our Guests Rob Martin has been with the FinOps Foundation for four years, currently focusing on the AI working group, ITAM initiatives, and the rapidly growing public sector adoption. His experience spans training development and strategic initiatives that have helped shape the foundation’s direction during a period of explosive growth. Mike Fuller is one of the founding members of the FinOps Foundation and co-author of the Cloud FinOps book. As a member of the Focus project steering committee, he’s been instrumental in developing the specification that’s standardizing cloud billing data across the industry. Graham Murphy serves as Director of SaaS P&L for Technology One in Brisbane. With 8-9 years in FinOps and recently nominated as both a FinOps Ambassador and Focus Ambassador, Graham brings a practitioner’s perspective from the APAC region and insights on implementing Focus in a SaaS environment. Conference Growth and Evolution The 2025 FinOps X conference in San Diego marked a significant milestone with approximately 2,000 attendees—a substantial increase from the previous year. Despite the larger venue, the conference maintained its intimate feel, allowing for meaningful connections and knowledge sharing. 2:49 Graham: “AI definitely grew a lot this year. A lot more talk about how you go about managing AI, how FinOps is going to drive better value out of your AI investments. And also just a lot of people trying to understand where to start.” The conference format evolved with more senior leadership participation, including executives from PepsiCo, Ticketmaster, and Nubank sharing their FinOps journeys. The quality of presentations notably improved, with practitioners willing to share deeper insights into their mature FinOps programs. The Cloud Plus Revolution A dominant theme throughout the conference was the expansion beyond traditional cloud cost management into what the foundation calls “Cloud Plus”—encompassing SaaS, data center, licensing, and AI costs. 4:31 Mike: “We saw that sort of echoed quite well across many of the breakout sessions by practitioners exactly how they’re sort of incorporating other costs into the conversation of their practices.” 6:56 Rob: “Ticketmaster said something that I loved, which was that they were ‘happily hybrid’… we understand that we’ve got all these different modalities that we’re going to use to deliver value—SaaS models and data center models and cloud models.” This shift represents a fundamental change in how organizations view FinOps, moving from a cloud-specific practice to a comprehensive IT financial management approach.

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 gets its Vector Victor. 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 improveme