Welcome to episode 315 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Your hosts, Justin and Matt, are here to bring you the latest in cloud and AI news, including news about AI from the White House, the newest hacker exploits, and news from CloudWatch, CrowdStrike, and GKE – plus so much more. Let’s get into it! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• SharePoint and Tell: Government Secrets at Risk


• Zero-Day Hero: How Hackers Found SharePoint’s Achilles’ Heel


• Amazon Q Gets an F in Security Class


• Spark Joy: GitHub’s Marie Kondo Approach to App Development


• No Code? No Problem! GitHub Lights a Spark Under App Creation


• GKE Turns 10: Still Not Old Enough to Deploy Itself


• A Decade of Containers: Pokémon GO Caught Them All


• Kubernetes Engine Hits Double Digits, Still Can’t Count Past 9 Pods


• Account Names: The Missing Link in AWS Cost Optimization


• Flash Gordon Saves Your VMs from the Azure-verse


• The Flash: Fastest VM Monitor in the Multiverse


• Ctrl+AI+Delete: Rebooting America’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy


• The AImerican Dream: White House Plots Path to Silicon Supremacy


• CrowdStrike’s Year of Living Resiliently


• Kernel Panic at the Disco: A Recovery Story


• The Search is Over (But Your Copilot License Isn’t)


• Ground Control to Major Tom: You’re Fired


• GPU Booking.com: Reserve Your Neural Network’s Next Vacation


• Calendar Man Strikes Again: This Time He’s Scheduling Your TPUs


• AirBnB for AI: Short-Term Rentals for Your Machine Learning Models 


• Claude’s World Tour: Now Playing in Every Region


• Going Global: Claude Gets Its Passport Stamped on Vertex AI


• SQS Finally Learns to Share: No More Queue Hogging


• The Noisy Neighbor Gets Shushed: Amazon’s Fair Play for Queues


• CloudWatch Gets Its AI Degree in Observability


• Teaching Old Logs New Tricks: CloudWatch Goes GenAI


• The Agent Whisperer: CloudWatch’s New AI Monitoring Powers


• NotebookLM Gets Its PowerPoint License


• Slides, Camera, AI-ction: NotebookLM Goes Visual


• The SSL-ippery Slope: Azure’s Managed Certs Go Public or Go Home


• Breaking Bad Certificates: DigiCert’s New Rules Leave Some Apps High and Dry


• Firewall Rules: Now with a Rough Draft Feature


• Azure’s New Policy: Think Before You Deploy

General News 

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

• Microsoft SharePoint servers are being actively exploited through a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-53770), with initial attacks primarily targeting government agencies, universities, and energy companies, according to security researchers.


• The vulnerability affects on-premises SharePoint installations only, not cloud versions, with researchers identifying 9,000-10,000 vulnerable instances accessible from the internet that require immediate patching or disconnection.


• Initial exploitation appears to be limited and targeted, suggesting that nation-states likely back advanced persistent threat (APT) actors. However, broader exploitation by other threat actors is expected as attack methods become public.


• Organizations running local SharePoint deployments face immediate risk as Microsoft has not yet released a complete patch, requiring manual mitigation steps outlined in their security guidance.


• This incident highlights the ongoing security challenges of maintaining on-premises infrastructure versus cloud services, where patches and security updates are managed centrally by the provider.


• It is interesting to us that the cloud was patched, but they didn’t have a patch right away. Strange situation. 


• From a security standpoint, if you are an Office 365 customer, you have SharePoint whether you want it or not. 

01:59 Justin – “If you’re still running SharePoint on-prem, my condolences.” 

AI Is Going Great – or How ML Makes Its Money 

05:25 The White House AI Action Plan:  a new chapter in U.S. AI policy

• The White House AI Action Plan outlines three pillars focusing on accelerating AI innovation through open-source models, building secure AI infrastructure with high-security data centers, and leading international AI diplomacy while balancing export controls with global technology distribution.


• Cloudflare emphasizes that distributed edge computing networks are essential for AI inference, offering access to over 50 open-source models through Workers AI and enabling developers to build AI applications without relying on closed providers or centralized infrastructure.


• The plan endorses AI-powered cybersecurity for critical infrastructure, with Cloudflare demonstrating practical applications like blocking 247 billion daily cyberattacks using predictive AI and developing AI Labyrinth, which uses AI to trap malicious bots in endless mazes of generated content.


• Federal agencies are accelerating AI adoption with Chief AI Officers across departments, and Cloudflare’s FedRAMP Moderate authorization positions them to provide secure, scalable infrastructure for government AI initiatives with plans for FedRAMP High certification.


• The tension between promoting AI exports to allies while restricting compute and semiconductor exports to adversaries creates implementation challenges that could impact global AI deployment and innovation if export controls become overly broad or imprecise.

07:24 Justin – “I use AI every day now, and I love it, and it’s great – and I also know how bad it is at certain tasks, so to think they’re using AI to fix the tax code or to write legislation freaks me out a little bit.”

09:53 Trump’s ‘anti-woke AI’ order could reshape how US tech companies train their models | TechCrunch

• Trump’s executive order banning “woke AI” from federal contracts requires AI models to be “ideologically neutral” and avoid DEI-related content, potentially affecting companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, which recently signed up to $200M defense contracts.


• The order defines “truth-seeking” AI as prioritizing historical accuracy and objectivity, while “ideological neutrality” specifically excludes DEI concepts, creating vague standards that could pressure AI companies to align model outputs with administration rhetoric to secure federal funding.


• xAI’s Grok appears best positioned under the new rules despite documented antisemitic outputs, as it’s already on the GSA schedule for government procurement and Musk has positioned it as “anti-woke” and “less biased.”


• Experts warn the order could lead to AI companies actively reworking training datasets to comply with political priorities, with Musk stating xAI plans to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge” using Grok 4’s reasoning capabilities.


• The technical challenge is that achieving truly neutral AI is impossible since all language and data inherently contain bias, and determining what constitutes “objective truth” on politicized topics like climate science becomes a subjective judgment call.


• We don’t like this at all. 

Copy editor Heather note: I’m currently getting a PhD in public history. I’m taking an entire semester class on bias and viewpoint in historical writing, and spoiler alert: there’s no such thing as truly neutral or objective truth, because at the end of the day, someone (or some LLM) will be deciding what information is “neutral” and what is “woke,” and that very decision is by definition a bias. 

We’re definitely interested in our listeners’ thoughts on this one. Let us know on social media or on our Slack channel, and let’s discuss! 

15:33 NASA’s AI Satellite Just Made a Decision Without Humans — in 90 Seconds

• NASA’s Dynamic Targeting system enables satellites to au