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 analytics platform, for $1 billion after failing to build their own solution internally for three years. 


• DX analyzes engineering team productivity, and identifies bottlenecks without making developers feel surveilled.


• DX provides both qualitative and quantitative insights into developer productivity, helping enterprises understand what’s slowing down their engineering teams. 


• The platform serves over 350 enterprise customers including ADP, Adyen, and GitHub.


• The acquisition is particularly timely, as companies struggle to measure ROI on AI tool investments and understand if their growing AI budgets are being spent effectively. DX can help track how these tools impact developer productivity.


• 90% of DX’s customers already use Atlassian tools, making this a natural integration that creates an end-to-end workflow. 


• Teams can identify bottlenecks with DX analytics then use Atlassian’s project management tools to address them.


• Despite serving major enterprises and tripling their customer base annually, DX raised less than $5 million in venture funding. This bootstrapped approach aligned with Atlassian’s own growth philosophy.

04:30 Justin – “I use DX, I actually really like DX, some I’m hoping Atlassian doesn’t F it up.” 

AWS

06:51 Qwen models are now available in Amazon Bedrock | AWS News Blog

• Amazon Bedrock adds four Qwen3 models from Alibaba, including mixture-of-experts (MoE) and dense architectures, with the largest Qwen3-Coder-480B having 480B total parameters but only activating 35B per request for efficient inference.


• The models introduce hybrid thinking modes that allow developers to choose between step-by-step reasoning for complex problems or fast responses for simpler tasks, helping balance performance and cost trade-offs.


• Qwen3-Coder models support up to 256K tokens natively (1M with extrapolation), enabling repository-scale code analysis and long-context processing without chunking, while maintaining strong performance on coding benchmarks.


• All models are available as fully managed serverless offerings across multiple regions with no infrastructure setup required, and Amazon Bedrock automatically enables access for all AWS accounts starting October 2025.


• Key use cases include agentic workflows with built-in tool calling capabilities, code generation across entire repositories, and cost-optimized deployments using the smaller Qwen3-32B dense model for edge computing scenarios.

07:22 DeepSeek-V3.1 model now available in Amazon Bedrock | AWS News Blog

• DeepSeek-V3.1 is now available in Amazon Bedrock as a fully managed foundation model that switches between thinking mode for step-by-step reasoning and non-thinking mode for faster direct answers, with AWS being the first cloud provider to offer DeepSeek models in a serverless deployment.


• The model delivers improved performance in code generation, debugging, and software engineering workflows while supporting over 100 languages with near-native proficiency, making it suitable for global enterprise applications and multilingual customer service implementations.


• Key technical capabilities include enhanced tool calling through post-training optimization, structured tool usage for agentic workflows, and integration with Amazon Bedrock Guardrails for implementing custom safeguards and responsible AI policies.


• Available in 5 AWS regions (US West Oregon, Asia Pacific Tokyo/Mumbai, Europe London/Stockholm) with support for both InvokeModel and Converse APIs, allowing developers to toggle between reasoning modes based on use case requirements.


• AWS is simplifying model access by automatically enabling all serverless foundation models for every AWS account starting October 2025, eliminating manual activation while maintaining IAM and SCP controls for administrators to restrict access as needed.

08:00 Justin – “I’m still skeptical about DeepSeek; because it sounded like it was derivative of ChatGPT, so I don’t really know what you’re getting out of it, other than it’s something cheaper.”  

08:34 <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/09/amazon-rds-mysql-innovat