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 development experience that generates working multi-modal apps from natural language prompts without requiring API key management or manual service integration.


• The platform now automatically connects appropriate models and APIs based on app descriptions, supporting capabilities like Veo for video generation, Nano Banana for image editing, and Google Search for source verification.


• New Annotation Mode enables visual app modifications by highlighting UI elements and describing changes in plain language rather than editing code directly


• The updated App Gallery provides visual examples of Gemini-powered applications with instant preview, starter code access, and remix capabilities for rapid prototyping


• Users can add personal API keys to continue development when free-tier quotas are exhausted, with automatic switching back to the free tier upon renewal.


• Are you a visual learner? You can check out their YouTube tutorial playlist here. 

05:39 Justin – “So, there are still API keys – they made it sound like there wasn’t, but there is. You just don’t have to manage them until you’ve consumed your free tier.”  

09:35 OpenAI takes aim at Microsoft 365 Copilot • The Register

• OpenAI launched “company knowledge” for ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, and Edu plans, enabling direct integration with corporate data sources, including Slack, SharePoint, Google Drive, Teams, and Outlook; notably excluding OneDrive, which could impact Microsoft-heavy organizations.


• The feature requires manual activation for each conversation and lacks capabilities like web search, image generation, or graph creation when enabled, unlike Microsoft 365 Copilot‘s deeper integration across Office applications.


• ChatGPT Business pricing at $25/user/month undercuts Microsoft 365 Copilot’s $30/month fee, potentially offering a more cost-effective enterprise AI assistant option with stronger brand recognition. (5 bucks is 5 bucks, right?) 


• Security implementation includes individual authentication per connector, encryption of all data, no training on corporate data, and an Enterprise Compliance API for conversation log review and regulatory reporting.


• Data residency and processing locations vary by connector, with no clear documentation from OpenAI, requiring organizations to verify compliance requirements before deployment.


• We kind of think we’ve heard of this before…

11:05 Ryan – “And it’s a huge problem. It’s been a huge problem that people have been trying to solve for a long time.”  

14:23 The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership – The Official Microsoft Blog

• Welp, the divorce has reached a (sort of) amicable alimony agreement. 


• Microsoft and OpenAI have restructured their partnership with Microsoft, now holding approximately 27% stake in OpenAI’s new public benefit corporation, which is now valued at $135 billion, while maintaining exclusive Azure API access and IP rights until AGI is achieved.


• The agreement introduces an independent expert panel to verify AGI declarations and extends Microsoft’s IP rights for models and products through 2032, including post-AGI models with safety guardrails, though research IP expires by 2030 or AGI verification.


• OpenAI gains significant operational flexibility, including the ability to develop non-API products with third parties on any cloud provider, release open weight models meeting capability criteria, and serve US government national security customers on any cloud infrastructure.


• Microsoft can now independently pursue AGI development alone or with partners, and if using OpenAI’s IP pre-AGI, must adhere to compute thresholds significantly larger than current le