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) 

1. ACM Competitor – True SSL competitive product


2. AI announcement in Security AI Agent (Copilot for Sentinel) – sort of (½) 


3. Azure DevOps Announcement

Justin

1. New Cobalt and Mai Gen 2 or similar – Check


2. Price Reduction on OpenAI & Significant Prompt Caching 


3. Microsoft Foundational LLM to compete with OpenAI – 

Jonathan

1. The general availability of new, smaller, and more power-efficient Azure Local hardware form factors


2. 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.


3. 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 increase in the feature file, from approximately 60 features to over 200, which exceeded the preallocated memory limit of 200 features in their Rust-based FL2 proxy code. 


• The team initially suspected a DDoS attack due to fluctuating symptoms caused by the bad configuration file being generated every five minutes as the database cluster was gradually updated.


• The outage impacted multiple Cloudflare services, including their CDN, Workers KV, Access, and even their own dashboard login system through Turnstile dependencies. 


• Customers on the older FL proxy engine did not see errors but received incorrect bot scores of zero, potentially causing false positives for those using bot blocking rules.


• Cloudflare’s remediation plan includes treating internal configuration files with the same validation rigor as user input, implementing more global kill switches for features, and preventing error reporting systems from consuming excessive resources during incidents. 


• The company acknowledged this as unacceptable for their position in the Internet ecosystem and committed to architectural improvements to prevent similar failures.

06:41 Justin – “Definitely a bad outage, but I appreciate that they owned it, and owned it hard… especially considering they were front page news.” 

AI Is Going Great, or How ML Makes Money 

07:27 Introducing GPT-5.1 for developers | OpenAI

• OpenAI has released GPT-5.1 in their API platform with adaptive reasoning that dynamically adjusts thinking time based on task complexity, resulting in 2-3x faster performance on simple tasks while maintaining frontier intelligence. 


• The model includes a new “no reasoning” mode (reasoning_effort set to ‘none’) that delivers 20% better low-latency tool calling performance compared to GPT-5 minimal reasoning, making it suitable for latency-sensitive applications while supporting web search and improved parallel tool calling.


• GPT-5.1 introduces extended prompt caching with 24-hour retention (up from minutes), maintaining the existing 90% cost reduction for cached tokens with no additional storage charges. 


• Early adopters report the model uses approximately half the tokens of competitors at similar quality levels, with companies like Balyasny Asset Management seeing agents run 50% faster while exceeding GPT-5 accuracy.


• The release includes two new developer tools in the Responses API: apply_patch for structured code editing using diffs without JSON escaping, and a shell tool that allows the model to propose and execute command-line operations in a controlled plan-execute loop. GPT-5.1 achieves 76.3% on SWE-bench Verified and shows 7% improvement on diff editing benchmarks according to early testing partners like Cline and Augment Code.


• OpenAI is also releasing specialized gpt-5.1-codex and gpt-5.1-codex-mini models optimized specifically for long-running agentic coding tasks, while maintaining the same pricing and rate limits as GPT-5. 
  
  
  
  • If you didn’t catch it in the podcast, Justin HATES this. Hates. It. All the hate. 
  
  
  
  


• The company has committed to not deprecating GPT-5 in the API and will provide advanced notice if deprecation plans change.


• Pricing and rate limits are the same at GPT-5. 

9:31 Ryan – “I didn’t really like GPT-5, so I don’t have high expectations, but as these things enhance, I’ve found  using different models for different use cases has some advantages, so maybe I’ll find the case for this one.” 

11:31 Piloting group chats in ChatGPT | OpenAI

• OpenAI is piloting group chat functionality in ChatGPT, starting with users in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan across all subscription tiers (Free, Go, Plus, and Pro). 


• The feature allows up to 20 people to collaborate in a shared conversation with ChatGPT, with responses powered by GPT-5.1 Auto that selects the optimal model based on the prompt and the user’s subscription level.


• ChatGPT has been trained with new social behaviors for group contexts, including deciding when to respond or stay quiet based on conversation flow, reacting with emojis, and referencing profile photos for personalized image generation. 


• Users can mention “ChatGPT” explicitly to trigger a response, and custom instructions can be set per group chat to control tone and personality.


• Privacy controls separate group chats from personal conversations, with personal ChatGPT memory not shared or used in group contexts. 


• Users must accept invitations to join, can see all participants, and can leave at any time, with group creators having special removal privileges.

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