The Cloud Pod | Weekly AI & Cloud News on AWS, Azure & GCP

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 0⃣ 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