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:

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General News 

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

• AOL is discontinuing its dial-up internet service on September 30, 2024, marking the end of a technology that introduced millions to the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s.


• Census data shows 163,401 US households still used dial-up in 2023, representing 0.13% of homes with internet subscriptions, highlighting the persistence of legacy infrastructure in underserved areas – which is honestly crazy. 


• Here’s hoping that these folks are able to switch to alternatives, like Starlink.


• This shutdown reflects broader technology lifecycle patterns as companies retire legacy services like Skype, Internet Explorer, and AOL Instant Messenger to focus resources on modern platforms.


• The transition away from dial-up demonstrates the evolution from telephone-based connectivity to broadband and wireless technologies that now dominate internet access.


• AOL’s journey from a $164 billion valuation in 2000 to being sold by Verizon in 2021 illustrates the rapid shifts in technology markets and the challenges of adapting legacy business models.

02:30 British government asks people to delete old emails to reduce data centres’ water use

• The UK government is advising citizens to delete old emails and photos to reduce water consumption by data centers, as England faces potential water shortages by 2050.


• Data centers require significant water for cooling systems, with some facilities using millions of gallons daily to maintain optimal operating temperatures for servers.


• This highlights the often-overlooked environmental impact of cloud storage, where seemingly harmless archived data contributes to ongoing resource consumption even when unused.


• The recommendation represents a shift toward individual responsibility for cloud sustainability, though the actual impact of consumer data deletion versus enterprise usage remains unclear.


• This raises questions about whether cloud providers should implement more aggressive data lifecycle policies or invest in water-efficient cooling technologies rather than relying on user behavior changes.


• Bottom line: good for data privacy, bad for water usage. 

03:01 Ryan – “It’s going to make it worse! Data at rest doesn’t use a whole lot of resources. Deleting anything from a file system is expensive from a CPU perspective, and it’s going to cause the temperature to go up – therefore, more cooling…” 

01:17 Data centres to be expanded across UK as concerns mount

• The UK is planning nearly 100 new data centers by 2030, representing a 20% increase from the current 477 facilities, with major investments from Microsoft, Google, and Blackstone Group totaling billions of pounds. 


• This expansion is driven by AI workload demands and positions the UK as a critical hub for cloud infrastructure.


• Energy consumption concerns are mounting as these facilities could add 71 TWh of electricity demand over 25 years, with evidence from Ohio showing residential energy bills increasing by $20 monthly due to data center operations. 


• The UK government has established an AI Energy Council to address supply-demand challenges.


• Water usage for cooling systems is creating infrastructure strain, particularly in areas serviced by Thames Water, with Anglian Water already objecting to one proposed site. New facilities are exploring air cooling and closed-loop systems to reduce environmental impact.


• Planning approval timelines of 5-7 years are pushing some operators to consider building in other countries, potentially threatening the UK’s position as a major data center hub. 


• The government has designated data centers as critical national infrastructure and is overturning local planning rejections to accelerate development.


• The concentration of new facilities in London and surrounding counties raises questions about regional infrastructure capacity and whether existing power and water systems can support this rapid expansion without impacting residential services and pricing.

07:12 Justin – “Power and cooling are definitely a problem… There is pressure on using water in data centers to cool them. That is a valid concern – especially with a hundred new data centers coming online, as well as powering. How do you power all those hungry, hungry GPUs?” 

Cloud Tools 

08:30 GitHub Actions policy now supports blocking and SHA pinning actions – GitHub Changelog

• GitHub Actions now lets administrators explicitly block malicious or compromised actions by adding a ! prefix to entries in the allowed actions policy, providing a critical defense mechanism when third-party workflows are identified as security threats.


• The new SHA pinning enforcement feature requires workflows to reference actions using full commit SHAs instead of tags or branches, preventing automatic execution of malicious code that could be injected into compromised dependencies.


• This addresses a major supply chain security gap where compromised actions could exfiltrate secrets or modify code across all dependent workflows, giving organizations rapid response capabilities to limit exposure.


• GitHub is also introducing immutable releases that prevent changes to existing tags and assets, enabling developers to pin tags with confidence and use Dependabot for safe updates without risk of malicious modifications.


• These features are particularly valuable for enterprises managing large GitHub Actions ecosystems, as they can now enforce security policies at the organization or repository level while maintaining the flexibility of the open source action marketplace.

09:41 Ryan – “This is something that’s been really relevant to my day job; I’ve been arguing for months n