The Cloud Pod | Weekly AI & Cloud News on AWS, Azure & GCP

Welcome to episode 349 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin and Jonathan managed to make it into the studio this week, and they brought a guest! Dave Garaway jas joined us, and brought some on-the-ground knowledge from GTC, plus a slew of supply chain attacks, Gmail username changes and Claude’s code debacle. We’ve got all this and more – so let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week AWS Console Gets a Makeover Nobody Asked For From Eight Hours to 22 Seconds, Hackers Got Fast AWS Spring Cleaning Hits Nine Services Hard Trivy Pursuit Turns Into a 500K Credential Heist Skip the Consultant, AWS Security Now Hacks Itself AWS Pen Testing Agent Pokes Your Cloud Around the Clock Your Cringey Gmail Address Gets a Second Chance Stop Babysitting Servers, Let Google Handle MCP AI Agent Untangles Your Kubernetes Networking Spaghetti One Bad Actor Poisons a Hundred Million Downloads Lambda Finally Hits the Gym with 32 GB From GPU Hype to Production Inference Without the Hyperscaler Headache Follow Up 01:28 Hegseth, Trump had no authority to order Anthropic to be blacklisted, judge says A US District Judge granted Anthropic a preliminary injunction blocking the Department of War’s blacklisting, ruling the designation was First Amendment retaliation rather than a legitimate national security action. The court found officials lacked authority to blacklist Anthropic without considering less restrictive alternatives or providing evidence of an urgent security risk, noting the designation was triggered by Anthropic’s “hostile manner through the press.” The practical business impact was already substantial before the ruling, with three trade deals cancelled and other potential partners delaying negotiations, representing potentially billions in lost contracts over five years. Anthropic continues to balance the legal fight with maintaining its government relationships, publicly emphasizing alignment with the Department of War’s mission around safe AI deployment even while litigating against it. For cloud and AI vendors, this case establishes a notable precedent around government procurement decisions and First Amendment protections, with implications for how companies publicly challenge federal contracting positions. 02:35 Jonathan – “I’m guessing Anthropic is super busy with all the people coming to them for deals right now, because it seems to me that Anthropic is getting all the business customers and OpenAI are getting the personal customers.”   04:08 Delve Announces Changes and New Customer Support Measures  Delve has responded to allegations from an anonymous Substack post by denying claims of faked evidence, clarifying that independent AICPA-accredited auditors, not Delve, issue SOC 2 reports and ISO 27001 certifications.  The company published... Chapters (00:00:07) - The Cloud Pod(00:01:37) - Anthropic Wins Preliminary Injunction Against US Blacklist(00:04:14) - Delve: We're Not Filling Their Own Audits With(00:08:03) - Nvidia's GTC 2017 Announcement(00:16:21) - Will Microsoft Fill the Kubernetes Demand?(00:24:09) - Are Data Centers Bad for the Environment?(00:24:57) - Is the Cloud in a Bubble?(00:27:07) - Gmail Lets You Change Your Username Every 12 Months(00:28:56) - Supply Chain Hackers Hit(00:32:47) - Anthropic's Cloud Code Leaks(00:36:09) - Amazon's New Console Enhancements(00:37:48) - AWS Lambda: Up to 32 GB of RAM and 16(00:40:17) - AWS Security Agents and AWS DevOps Agent(00:44:35) - Amazon Bedrock Agent Core Evaluations(00:52:55) - Edge Computing: Custom AI Agents(00:55:01) - Amazon's Reference Architecture for Building a FinOps Agent Using Amazon Bed(00:58:23) - Google's TurboQuant Compresses LLM Data to 3 Bits(01:01:08) - Google's Open Source AI playbook for sustainability reporting(01:01:51) - Azure Launches AI Agent to Troubleshoot Kuber(01:03:12) - Week in the Cloud: Nvidia GTC 2017

Welcome to episode 348 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio this week to bring you all the latest news in AI and Cloud, inclduing Strykers troubles, AWS’ birthday, Bedrock Agents, and Claude Code – plus so much more. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week SOC 2 It to Me Delve Fires Back  Shell Yeah Bedrock Agents Just Got Command Line Powers When Your SOC 2 Report Is Just Fan Fiction uv, Ruff, and ty Walk Into an OpenAI Acquisition Hash Field Expiration Is Here, and It’s No Redis Herring Stop Paying Full Price for Tokens You Already Bought Fake It Till You Audit It Cache Me If You Can CNCF Sandbox Edition Microsoft Learns Consent Matters in Copilot Rollout Microsoft’s Stinky Cloud Gets Federal Seal of Approval When Your Audit Trail Leads to a Blog Fight Ping Your AI Agent on Discord Like a Millennial Twenty Years of AWS and the Bill Never Stops The LLM hack that feels a lot like Node Shift Left Package issues Claude Code Auto Mode Lets AI Work Unsupervised Stop Babysitting Your AI Claude Code Goes Solo Auto Mode Gives Claude Code the Keys to the Car Java comes to the coffee shop with AI General News  01:21 Customer Updates: Stryker Network Disruption  Stryker confirmed a cyberattack on March 11, 2026, that disrupted their internal Microsoft corporate environment, affecting order processing, manufacturing, and shipping, but notably not their connected medical devices or cloud-hosted products. The attack vector was specific to Stryker’s Microsoft environment, which meant products running on AWS (Vocera Edge, Vocera Ease) and Google Cloud Platform (care.ai) were architecturally isolated and unaffected, demonstrating a practical benefit of multi-cloud separation. Stryker explicitly stated this was not ransomware or malware, and government agencies, including CISA, FBI, and the White House National Cyber Director, were engaged, with domain seizures linked to threat actors already executed. The incident highlights how healthcare organizations can architect medical device and cloud product infrastructure to be independent of corporate IT environments, as every product from Mako to SurgiCount to LIFEPAK operated normally due to network segmentation. Real-world patient impact was limited but present, with some personalized implant cases rescheduled due to shipping delays, underscoring that even contained corporate IT incidents can have downstream effects on physical supply chains. 02:30 Justin – “HugOps to the entire Stryker team; I couldn’t imagine having to rebuild my entire Windows estate at a company the size of Stryker in the middle of trying to do business and everything else.”  05:00 Chapters (00:00:00) - Episode 348(00:01:31) - Stryker Attack: How to Survive an Attack(00:05:09) - Critics: Microsoft Cloud Was a Pile of SHIT(00:06:50) - Dell Says Delve is a Fraudster and Should Be Removed(00:14:12) - Dell vs Delve: The Smear(00:18:50) - Light LLM: Supply Chain Attack(00:23:04) - Kubernetes: Open sourcing the GKE Cluster Autos(00:25:59) - Kubecon 2018: Azure Kubernetes Networking(00:27:48) - Snowflake Announces Project Snow AI Platform(00:29:36) - Codex to Acquire Astral(00:32:15) - Cloud Code 2.8: Connect to Telegram and Discord(00:34:54) - Cloud Cowork Launches Computer Use Capabilities(00:37:46) - OpenClaw: Auto-Mode for Cloud Code & Research(00:40:31) - Amazon Bedrock Agent Core: Invoke Agent Runtime with a Shell(00:42:03) - Amazon EC2 Scanning with Chain Guard(00:46:03) - AWS Turns 20 Years Old(00:47:36) - AWS MCP Server in Preview: CloudWatch 2.8(00:48:52) - GCP Cloud SQL Read Pools: Auto-Scaling(00:51:17) - How to Design with AI in 2020(00:53:48) - Microsoft at GTC 2017: Nvidia and Azure(00:56:34) - Microsoft Temporarily Halt Copilot App Deployment(00:58:12) - Microsoft's SQL Server Management Plan at SQLCon 2026(01:03:36) - Azure Skills Plugin: What's Included?(01:05:51) - Microsoft's Azure DevOps Remote MCP Server(01:07:56) - Java 26: AI Integration, More(01:09:01) - Oracle Announces AI-in-The-(01:10:19) - This Week in Cloud: AI News

Welcome to episode 347 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan are in the studio recording today, and thankfully, Jonathan hasn’t replaced us all with Skynet – yet. This week, we’re discussing how old our tools (and us) are (hint: it’s really old), whether or not the SaasApocalypse is upon us, and whether or not the business or AI is responsible for the latest round of layoffs.  Titles we almost went with this week S3 Bucket Names Finally Stop Being a Global Hunger Games One Million Tokens Walk Into a Context Window SLO Down and Smell the Reliability Metrics CloudWatch Finally Watches Your Whole Cloud Organization S3 Turns 20 and Still Buckets the Competition Azure SRE Agent Goes GA So You Don’t Have To Twenty Years of S3 and No Signs of Object Permanence One Rule to Monitor Them All Across AWS One Flag to Secure Them All on Cloud Run SaaSpocalypse Now Atlassian Layoffs Hit the Jira No More Bucket Name Bingo with S3 Regional Namespaces A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Claude Tokens One Command to Rule Your Autonomous AI Agents AI Fixes Your Incidents Before Your Boss Notices The CloudPod is only recording this week “Because of AI” Amazon begs users to leave Simple DB with another migration tool Follow Up 00:54 Microsoft’s brief in Anthropic case shows new alliance and willingness to challenge Trump administration Microsoft filed an amicus brief in Anthropic’s lawsuit against the U.S. Department of War, urging a federal judge to temporarily block the Pentagon’s designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, citing substantial costs to government contractors that rely on Anthropic models. The brief arrived one day after Microsoft launched Copilot Cowork, built on Anthropic’s Claude, and four months after Microsoft committed up to $5 billion in Anthropic as part of a deal requiring Anthropic to spend at least $30 billion on Azure, making the legal filing directly tied to concrete commercial dependencies. Microsoft highlighted a procedural inconsistency in the government’s approach: the Pentagon gave itself six months to transition off Anthropic’s models while making the supply chain designation effective immediately for contractors, creating an unequal compliance burden. Amazon, which has invested $8 billion in Anthropic, has not publicly responded to the lawsuit or the designation, creating a notable contrast in how two major cloud providers with similar financial exposure are handling the situation. OpenAI announced its own Pentagon deal on the same day the Anthropic designation was issued, and Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:00:54) - Podcasters: 17 Hours Long(00:01:09) - Microsoft's Amicus Brief in Anthropic Lawsuit(00:06:19) - Claude Launches In-App Visualization Feature(00:08:41) - Databricks Launches GENIE Code as a General Available Product(00:11:09) - 1. Million Context Window(00:17:31) - Code: Auto-Compaction(00:19:20) - GPT 5.4 Mini and Nano: Smaller Models for(00:22:19) - Amazon S3: 20 Years of Computing(00:24:56) - AWS S3: Regional Namespaces for General Purpose Bools(00:27:30) - Amazon CloudWatch(00:28:58) - Amazon SimpleDB now supports exporting domain data directly to S3(00:31:14) - Amazon CloudWatch: EC2: Detailed Monitoring Enablement(00:32:35) - Google Cloud's Sensitive Data Protection(00:35:57) - Google Completing Acquisition of Wiz Cloud Security Platform(00:40:24) - Google Cloud's Kubernetes Inference Gateway(00:45:40) - Azure S3 Agent(00:50:00) - Azure's Cloud Migration Agent and GitHub Copilot modernization agent(00:53:45) - Microsoft Merges Copilot into a Unified Organization(00:56:17) - Copilot: What's Next for the Service?(00:57:56) - Week in the Cloud: Microsoft(00:58:36) - Amazon AI Voice Service misconfiguration in Spanish

Welcome to episode 346 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Hold on to your butts, because Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio today, and they’re ready to bring you all the latest in Cloud and AI news, including the usual: Meta buying social networks, Amazon responding to outages, and OpenAI giving up another version of GPT. Let’s get into it!  Titles we almost went with this week ✍️ Cloudflare Spent $1100 to Rewrite Next.js in a Week One Pipe to Rule All Your OpenTelemetry Data ☑️ Check Yourself Before Google Wrecks Your Cloud Config Copilot Takes Jira Tickets So You Don't Have To ‍✈️ GitHub Copilot Agent Joins Your Jira Workflow Uninvited When AI Agents Network, Meta Swipes Right on Moltbook ️ Sixty Controls Walk Into a Terraform Repository One Security Console to Rule All Your Clouds AI Ate My Lock-In, and I Feel Fine ⛅ Oracle Sees $90 Billion Future Cloudy With a Chance of GPUs Your API Has Trust Issues, and We Can Prove It Stop Running Three Pipelines Like a Telemetry Hoarder From Database Dinosaur to AI Cash Cow ☠️ Meta: Target acquired; must kill Moltbook Meta saw Moltbook and said, “WE MUST OWN IT AND KILL.” Follow Up 00:51 Where things stand with the Department of War  Anthropic has been designated a supply chain risk to US national security by the Department of War, a designation the company is challenging in court as legally unsound under 10 USC 3252. The practical scope of the designation is narrow, applying only to the use of Claude in direct Department of War contracts, not to all customers that hold such contracts or to unrelated business with Anthropic. Anthropic has stated that it will continue to provide its models to the Department of War and the national security community at nominal cost, with ongoing engineering support, during any transition period and for as long as permitted. The company's two stated exceptions to military use involve fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance, and Anthropic has clarified these do not extend to operational decision-making, which it considers the military's domain. For cloud and enterprise customers, the key takeaway is that existing Claude deployments unrelated to Department of War contracts remain unaffected, though the legal dispute introduces uncertainty into federal procurement pipelines involving AI services. We will keep you updated on this in 12-18 months… AI Is Going Great - Or How ML Makes Money  01:21 Introducing GPT-5.4 OpenAI released GPT-5.4 across ChatGPT, the API, and Codex, positioning it as their most capable reasoning model to date. It merges the coding strengths of GPT-5.3-Codex with general reasoning, professional knowledge work, and native computer-use capabilities in a single model. The computer-use capabilities are a notable technical step, with GPT-5.4 achieving a 75% success rate on OSWorld-Verified desktop navigation, surpassing the reported human benchmark of 72.4% and... Chapters (00:00:00) - Week 2: Iran War and More(00:01:26) - OpenAI GPT 5.4 Injection Into Chat(00:04:26) - OpenAI ChatGpt for Excel 5.4(00:06:07) - Carl(00:08:39) - Shift Left: OpenAI's Codec Security in Research Preview(00:12:16) - OpenAI Expands Into AI Security With PromptFu Acquisition(00:14:46) - Code Review: Databricks Launches Cazale, an(00:21:38) - Meta Superintelligence Labs Buys AI Agent Social Network(00:25:12) - Cloudflare's Complete Re-write of Next JS(00:31:00) - Cloudflare Launches OAuth Vulnerability Scanner(00:33:30) - Amazon's AI-Caused Outages(00:37:37) - Amazon OpenSearch and Neptune Analytics: 35% DB Savings Plan(00:39:24) - Amazon Bedrock(00:41:36) - Amazon Connect Health: A HIPAA-Eligible AI Agent(00:46:45) - Amazon EC2: Copilot CLI to End(00:49:18) - Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver Now Available(00:51:33) - Amazon ECS: Automating GitHub Actions to Container Deployment(00:53:59) - Google Cloud Security Checklist(00:56:00) - Google's Autonomous Data Steward for Telecoms(00:57:14) - Google Notebook LM now goes after YouTubers(00:59:05) - Google's first natively multimodal embedding model(01:01:07) - Google's Gemini in Docs, Sheets, and Drive(01:03:08) - Postgres as a managed serverless database with Azure(01:04:48) - Microsoft 365 Copilot to Integrate with Cowork(01:10:02) - OCI Cost Anomaly Detection(01:10:59) - Oracle Announces Q3 Earnings(01:12:53) - Week in Cloud: The Cloud and AI(01:13:32) - Xbox One: Project Helix(01:17:55) - Xbox One vs. Playstation 4

Welcome to episode 345 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio this week and are ready to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including what’s going on between Anthropic, the DOD, and OpenAI, what the war means for Middle East data centers (Spoiler – I hope you have a good Disaster Recovery plan), and Transit Gateway pricing changes that are enough to make a grown man cry. And don’t bother waiting: Matt has completely forgotten almost two years of “bye everybody” and now claims full amnesia as to what his outtro is. Oh well. Let’s get into today’s show.  Titles we almost went with this week Claude Learned to Use a Computer Better Than Your Dad **OpenAI Amazon and OpenAI’s $138 Billion AI Bromance When Two AZs Go Dark the Cloud Gets Crispy Fifty Billion Reasons AWS Loves OpenAI Now **Anthropic Azure Still Wins Even When AWS Thinks It Did Fire, Water, and a Multi-AZ Assumption Goes Up in Smoke Claude Refuses to Go Full Skynet for the Pentagon GPT-5.3 Instant Finally Stops Lecturing You No Killer Robots Without Human Approval Please Terraform Finally Sees Your Forgotten Cloud Resources Stage Before You Rage Deploy Azure Firewall CrowdStrike to Zscaler AWS Wants Your Security Tab One Hub to Rule Your API Sprawl Transit Gateway Attachments Just Got Surprisingly Expensive Azure Container Registry Finally Has Room for Your AI Hoarding Bedrock Gets a Roommate OpenAI Moves In Azure Firewall Gets a Safety on the Trigger Stop Writing Scripts, Just Import the Dang Infrastructure Audit Your APIs Before March 2026 Bites You Damn it… my excuse not to DR is gone I’m Epically Furious about DR AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money  03:34 Anthropic acquires Vercept to advance Claude’s computer use capabilities  Anthropic acquired Vercept, a team specializing in AI perception and interaction, to strengthen Claude’s computer use capabilities.  The Vercept founders, including Ross Girshick, bring deep expertise in how AI systems visually interpret and interact with software interfaces. Claude Sonnet 4.6 shows substantial improvement in computer use benchmarks, jumping from under 15% on the OSWorld evaluation in late 2024 to 72.5% today.  The model is now approaching human-level performance on tasks like navigating spreadsheets and completing multi-tab web forms. Computer use enables Claude to operate inside live applications the way a human would, handling multi-step workflows across tools that cannot be automated through code alone.  This is relevant for enterprise use cases involving document processing, browser-based workflows, and cross-application task management. This is Anthropic’s second acquisition in a short period, following the purchase of Bun, which was tied to the Claude Code milestone. The pattern suggests Anthropic is actively acquiring specialized engineering teams rather than just technology assets. For developers and businesses building agentic workflows on Claude, the improved computer use performance means more reliable automation of complex, real-world software tasks without requiring custom integrations or APIs for every application involved. 05:18 Justin – “It seems like every day I have to upda... Chapters (00:00:00) - Foreign, Where the forecast is always cloudy(00:01:04) - Let's Talk Cloud(00:01:37) - Anthropic Expands Cloud's Computer Use Capabilities(00:07:17) - How to Write a Review in AI-Native(00:10:07) - Alexis Skill Creator Update & Cloud Agent(00:12:18) - Anthropic Banished from Supporting the Military(00:18:49) - Google AI's Gemini 3.1 & Nanobana(00:20:07) - Chat GPT 5.3: More Alikes, Less Dist(00:24:08) - Comments on the AI News(00:24:58) - Amazon AWS: Drone Strike in the Middle East Affects Infrastructure(00:30:52) - Azure vs. Google: The Distributed Data Center(00:34:06) - OpenAI Expands Cloud Deal to $100 Million(00:39:51) - Amazon Security Hub Extended: Full Stack Enterprise Security with Curated Partner(00:41:57) - Amazon's Encryption Controls: Starting Soon(00:44:17) - Amazon Cloud: Natural Language to Cedar Compliance(00:47:13) - API Specs: Combat Specs Sprawl(00:48:39) - Google Cloud's Polyglot Storage approach for Chatbot(00:52:53) - Matt's Azure Quotation(00:53:21) - Azure Monitor Pipeline: New Public Preview(00:55:30) - Microsoft Azure Local Disconnected and Large Model Support(00:58:39) - Azure Functions for Linux: Best Practices for Self-signed Cert(01:00:54) - Microsoft Azure Confidential VMs: Learning the Names(01:04:44) - Azure firewall policy: Two-Phase Draft and Deploy(01:05:51) - Azure container registry: 100 terabytes of storage(01:09:00) - Azure 2.8 Resource Limits(01:09:52) - This Week in the Cloud: OpenAI and the Trump Administration

Welcome to episode 344 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin is out of the office at a World of Warcraft Tournament (not really), and Ryan is pursuing his lifelong dream of becoming a roadie for The Eagles (maybe?), so it’s Jonathan and Matt holding down the fort this week, and they’ve got a ton of cloud news for you! From security to AI assistants, we’ve got all the news you need. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Zero Bus, All Gas, No Kafka Brakes AI Coding Bot Bites the Hand That Runs It When Your Robot Developer Goes Rogue on AWS Kubernetes VPA Finally Stops Evicting Your Database Pods Google Trains 100 Million People, Still No One Reads the Docs  MCP Walks Into a Bar Not Enterprise Ready Yet No More Pod Evictions Kubernetes 1.35 Scales In Place No Keys No Drama Just IAM and Cloud SQL One Agent to Rule Them All in Kubernetes IAM Tired of Writing Policies Manually When Your AI Coding Tool Has Delete Permissions One Dashboard to Rule All Your GPU Clusters Serverless Reservations Prove Nothing Is Truly Free Range Kiro Takes the Wheel on AWS IAM Policies Stop Blaming Backups for Your Bad Architecture AI Agent Goes Rogue, Takes AWS Down With It Everything is Bigger in Texas Except the Water Usage OpenAI launches the college basketball of Inference. Pro service – low cost General News  1:05 Code Mode: give agents an entire API in 1,000 tokens Cloudflare‘s Code Mode MCP server reduces token consumption by 99.9% compared to a traditional MCP implementation, exposing the entire Cloudflare API (over 2,500 endpoints) through just two tools, search() and execute(), using roughly 1,000 tokens versus 1.17 million for a conventional approach. The architecture works by having the AI agent write JavaScript code against a typed OpenAPI spec representation, rather than loading tool definitions into context, with code executing inside a sandboxed V8 isolate (Dynamic Worker) that restricts file system access, environment variables, and external fetches by default. This approach addresses a fundamental constraint in agentic AI systems: adding more tools to give agents broader capabilities directly competes with the available context space for the task at hand. 01:41 Jonathan- “It’s good. I’m not sure I could imagine 2 ½ thousand MCP tool definitions in a context window and still actually use it for anything.”    AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money  03:58 OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI Peter Steinberger, creator of viral AI assistant OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot), has joined OpenAI to lead development of next-generation personal agents.  OpenClaw gained attention for its ability to perform real-world tasks like calendar management, flight booking, and autonomous social network participation. OpenAI will maintain OpenClaw as an open source project through a foundation structure, allo... Chapters (00:00:07) - The Cloud Pod(00:01:00) - Cloudflare, OpenAI: The AI Assistant(00:10:04) - Cobalt vs. COBOL(00:17:16) - Databricks Connect: Single Sync vs. Kafka(00:20:06) - ChatGPT Pro Lite at $100 a month(00:21:53) - Packer Adds SBOM Vulnerability Scanning(00:24:17) - Kubernetes 1.35: Auto-Scale Pod Storage(00:29:22) - Amazon's AI Coding Bot Causes AWS Outage(00:33:49) - Amazon IAM policy Autopilot(00:34:28) - AWS IAM Policy Autopilot: Will It Increase Security(00:38:57) - Amazon Expands Serverless to AI-generated 'TikTok(00:39:44) - Google Cloud Expands MCP Server Coverage to Azure, Cloud,(00:46:40) - Google's $15 Billion Investment in AI Infrastructure(00:49:18) - Microsoft Azure Completing 100% Renewable Energy(00:54:32) - More Flexible Quotations on AWS(00:56:23) - Microsoft Sovereignty Cloud: When IT's Connected, Connected(00:58:08) - Kouser Command Center: Unified Operations Platform for AI(01:00:01) - AMD Instinct Mi 350X GPUs coming to DigitalOcean(01:00:43) - Week in Cloud: Chatting With Just Us

Welcome to episode 343 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio this week bringing you all the latest in Cloud and AI news, including some of the smaller clouds like Cloudflare and Crusoe Cloud, as well as announcements from the big guys like Google’s Gemini DeepThink, Anthropic’s big pay day, and Microsoft’s Notepad problem. We’ve got all this plus Matt screwing up his outro AGAIN, so let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Chrome’s WebMCP Protocol: Teaching AI Agents to Stop Doom-Scrolling the DOM and Actually Get Work Done Claude Enterprise Self-Service: Because Sometimes You Just Want to Buy AI Without Small Talk AWS EC2 Goes Inception Mode: Now You Can Virtualize Your Virtualization Without Going Broke Amazon EC2 Nested Virtualization: Because Your Virtual Machine Was Lonely and Needed Its Own Virtual Machine CloudWatch Alarm Mute Rules: Because Your Deployment Doesn’t Need a Standing    Ovation at 3 AM Anthropic’s $380 Billion Valuation Proves AI Funding Has Gone Claude Nine AWS EC2 Nested Virtualization Finally Escapes the Expensive Hardware Jail Cloudflare Teaches AI Agents the Magic Words: Accept text/markdown and Save 13,000 Tokens Crusoe Cloud’s MCP Server: Teaching AI Assistants to Stop Asking for the Manager and Just Fix Your Infrastructure Azure’s New Agentic Copilot: Because Manually Clicking Through Dashboards Was So 2023 Chrome’s WebMCP Gives AI Agents a GPS for Websites Because Apparently They’ve Been Lost in the HTML This Whole Time  Anthropic Cuts Out the Middleman: Claude Enterprise Now Available Without the Enterprise Sales Dance AWS Gives CloudWatch the Silent Treatment: New Mute Rules Let Alarms Sleep Through Maintenance Windows AWS CloudWatch Hits Snooze: Mute Rules End On-Call Nightmares AWS Gives CloudWatch the Silent Treatment General News  00:45 Bloat Risk? Microsoft’s Notepad Upgrade Also Introduced a Vulnerability | PCMag Microsoft’s recent Notepad modernization introduced CVE-2026-20841, a vulnerability in the new Markdown support feature that allows malicious links in files to execute remote code.  The flaw has been patched in the February 2026 security updates, but it highlights the security trade-offs when adding features to historically simple applications. The vulnerability exploits Notepad’s Markdown rendering capability, which Microsoft added in May to support lightweight markup language formatting. When Notepad opens a specially crafted Markdown file, embedded malicious links can trigger unverified protocols that load and execute remote files on the system. This incident raises questions about feature bloat in core Windows utilities, particularly as Microsoft continues adding network-dependent capabilities like AI-powered text writing to Notepad. Security researchers are debating whether basic text editors should have network functionality at all, given the expanded attack surface. The vulnerability demonstrates how modernization efforts can introduce security risks in previously low-risk applications.  Organizations using Windows need to ensure t... Chapters (00:00:00) - AWS Cloudwatch Finally Learns to Hit Snooze(00:00:48) - Microsoft's Notepad Vulnerability(00:03:09) - WebMCP: The Standardization of AI Agents(00:07:17) - AI Completes 4% of GitHub Commits(00:09:32) - Cloud for Enterprise: Anthropic's Dominance(00:14:54) - Sonnet 4.6 Available for Cloud(00:16:34) - Coding Productivity: The Shift(00:25:37) - MacBook Pro: Should You Upgrade to the M5?(00:29:13) - Mac Studio: The M3 Ultra vs. Nvidia DGX Spark(00:31:00) - Alibaba Launches New Large Language Model(00:32:03) - Sea Dance Studio Launches Sealed Dance 2.0(00:35:27) - AMD EPYC, HPC 8A Instances Now Available on(00:38:05) - Kafka: Native AWS API for Topic Management(00:41:08) - Amazon Bedrock now supports six new Open Weight Models(00:50:32) - AWS: Supports nested virtualization on bare metal EC2 instances(00:52:24) - Amazon SageMaker Inference for Custom Nova Models now available(00:54:45) - Google's DeepThink Update to Gemini 3(00:57:32) - BigQuery: Cross-Region Queries in Preview(01:00:52) - Microsoft's Azure Copilot: Automating Cloud Operations(01:03:22) - Azure now offers instant access to incremental snapshots for premium SSD,(01:04:42) - Crystal Cloud and the AI-first Hypercloud(01:05:16) - Cloud Infrastructure Management: Bringing AI Agents to the Cloud(01:07:21) - Cloudflare to automatically convert HTML to Markdown for AI Agents(01:10:52) - Week in Cloud: The Cloud and AI

Welcome to episode 342 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio today to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news this week. How do you feel about ads? How do you feel about ads while using AI? We’ve got options! We’ve got a round-up of tech Super Bowl ads, AI ads, Earnings reports (who frankly need the ad revenue), and a plethora of Opus 4.6 announcements, plus more. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week ChatGPT Goes Full Mad Men: Your AI Assistant Now Comes With Commercial Breaks Heroku’s New Feature: No New Features AWS Gives EC2 Instances a Storage Growth Spurt: 22.8TB of Local NVMe Now Available Identity Crisis Averted: IAM Identity Center Learns to Replicate Itself JSON Schema Enforcement: Because Your LLM Needs Structure in Its Life From Zero to Admin in 480 Seconds: A Serbian Speedrun Story From Proof of Concept to Proof of Claw: DigitalOcean Tames AI Agent Infrastructure Azure’s Growth Hits the Clouds: Microsoft’s 39% Increase Still Not Enough for Wall Street One Lake to Rule Them All: Microsoft and Snowflake Finally Stop Fighting Over Your Data Free Lunch Officially Over: ChatGPT Learns That Servers Cost Money Claude Won’t Sell You Anything (Except Maybe Peace of Mind) IAM Identity Center Goes Multi-Regional: Because One Region to Rule Them All Wasn’t Enough Databricks Takes the Base Out of Database with Lakebase GA I’m a Chrome Tab hoarder General News  01:30 Superbowl Ads of Note OpenAI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCN9iCXNJqQ Microsoft CoPilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndj9Jk-tGKo Base44?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKEUWtqvsis  Gemini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1yGy9fELtE Anthropic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmnjDLwZckA  ai.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7I-D4YXbzg&t=3s 16:35 Justin -If you ever want to knowif there’s a bubble, spending dumb money on the Super Bowl on an ad that makes no sense is probably your number one clue.”  16:53 It’s Earnings Time! Microsoft (MSFT) Q2 earnings report 2026 Microsoft Q2 2026 earnings show Azure cloud growth slowing to 39% from 40% in the prior quarter, missing analyst expectations of 39.4% and causing shares to drop 7% in after-hours trading.  The company’s gross margin hit a three-year low at 68% due to substantial AI infrastructure investments totaling $37.5 billion in capital expenditures, up 66% year over year. OpenAI now represents 45% of Microsoft’s $625 billion remaining commercial performance obligation after the company committed to a $250 billion cloud services deal during the quarter.  This concentration raises questions about revenue dependence on a single customer, though Microsoft maintains that the remaining backlog is still larger and more diversified than most compet... Chapters (00:00:00) - Cloud Pod: Speed Run Your AWS Account(00:01:27) - Super Bowl LI Commercials(00:02:08) - The Super Bowl Commercials(00:04:40) - 15 Dumb Apps Built With No Code(00:06:30) - Top 10 Ads Using AI(00:07:40) - OpenAI vs Anthropic: The Chat(00:12:42) - A AI Startup Spends $70 Million On A Dumb Ad(00:15:50) - Microsoft Earnings: Down 7%(00:19:19) - Google Cloud Earnings Beat Estimates(00:21:39) - Amazon's 200 Billion Investment Plan for Cloud Infrastructure(00:28:04) - Heroku to Become a Sustaining Engineering Model(00:31:32) - AWS Security: The Last Minute Attack(00:35:28) - Cloud Business Model: How ML Makes Money(00:44:15) - OpenAI GPT5.3 Codex(00:46:21) - Facebook Testing Adverts on Free and Go Tier Users(00:47:18) - Claude Opus 4.6 on Cloud, More(00:48:17) - Snowflake and Databricks: Supervisor Agent(00:49:38) - HashiCorp Launches Agent Skills Pack(00:53:22) - Amazon's New massively big C8ID and R8ID Inst(00:55:49) - AWS IAM Identity Center: Multi Region Replication(00:59:00) - JSON Schema Compliance in Bedrock(01:00:35) - Amazon Redshift: Automatic Optimization now in place(01:02:05) - Google Cloud: Developer Knowledge API & MCP Server(01:06:27) - Bolt 2.8 in Python vs. Google Docs(01:08:49) - Google Cloud Expands Sovereign Cloud Portfolio(01:09:44) - Google's Gemini Enterprise Agent Ready Program(01:11:43) - Charlie Bell Retires as EVP of Security and Focus on Quality(01:17:40) - Azure Database for PostgreSQL at Ignite 2019(01:19:55) - Microsoft OneLake & Snowflake: Bi directional Iceberg Tables(01:21:58) - Azure Container Storage 2.10: Native elastic SAN Integration with(01:23:22) - SQLCon 2018(01:24:51) - This Week in the Cloud: Earnings

Welcome to episode 341 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Matt & Ryan are picking up Justin’s slack this week while he’s traveling for work, but don’t worry, because they have plenty of news! We’re talking about those mass layoffs over at AWS, a major security breach over at Notepad++, and some new slight of hand over at Elon’s companies. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get into it!  Titles we almost went with this week Finally, a Chatbot That Actually Knows Where Your Data Lives **Anthropic Microsoft Adds Security Analyzer to MSSQL Extension: Because Bobby Tables Jokes Are Only Funny Until They Happen to You From Sequential Sadness to Parallel Paradise: GKE Node Pools Get Concurrent From Vibe Coding to Production: AWS MCP Server Gets SOPs One Prompt to Deploy Them All: AWS MCP Server Automates Infrastructure AWS Layoffs: Scaling Down Instead of Scaling Out Mutual TLS: Because CloudFront and Your Origin Need Couples Therapy Claude Team Plan: Now With More Seats and Less Bills From Snowflake to Snowball: Rolling Data and Dev Into One Platform From Notepad++ to Notepad Pwned: A Six-Month Hosting Horror Story EventBridge Payload Capacity Gets a 4x Upgrade: No More Event Splitting Headaches CloudFront Finally Learns to Check ID Before Knocking on Origin’s Door General News  01:30 SpaceX acquires xAI, plans to launch a massive satellite constellation to power it – Ars Technica SpaceX has acquired xAI to create a vertically integrated AI and space infrastructure company, with plans to deploy up to 1 million satellites as orbital data centers.  This represents a significant bet that space-based compute infrastructure can be cost-competitive with traditional ground-based data centers for AI workloads. The merger combines SpaceX’s launch capabilities and satellite manufacturing expertise with xAI’s Grok chatbot and X social platform.  The strategy assumes AI demand will continue to grow and that compute capacity, rather than other factors, is the primary bottleneck to AI adoption. The orbital data center concept raises questions about latency, power requirements, thermal management, and maintenance compared to terrestrial facilities.  Traditional cloud providers have invested heavily in ground-based infrastructure optimized for these factors. This consolidation of Musk’s companies creates potential conflicts between SpaceX’s established government and commercial contracts and xAI’s more controversial products.  The integration of a proven aerospace company with a newer AI venture introduces execution risk to SpaceX’s core business. The plan depends on several unproven assumptions, including sustained AI market growth, viable economics for space-based computing, and the ability to manufacture and launch satellites at unprecedented scale.  Cloud providers and enterprises will need to evaluate whether orbital compute offers advantages over existing multi-region terrestrial deployments. 03:22 Ryan – “I feel like this is a shell game con; taxes are over here – no, now they’re over here!”  06:49 Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Podcast(00:01:40) - SpaceX to Deploy 1 Million Satellites as Data Centers for(00:06:50) - Notepad Hacked by State Sponsored Hackers(00:14:52) - Amazon Layoffs: What They Mean for Product Development(00:18:34) - Google's Genie 3 AI World Model Available for Ultra Users(00:23:15) - OpenAI to Retire Older ChatGPT Models(00:27:06) - OpenAI Launches Codex on a Mac OS X App(00:33:46) - AWS: Automatically Promote Code to Production with AI Agents(00:38:59) - AWS STS: Validation of Provider Specific Claims (OID(00:44:10) - Amazon Cloudfront Announces Mutual TLS Authentication with Origin(00:50:30) - Amazon EventBridge: Increased 1 megabyte payload size for Machine Learning(00:56:31) - Google Cloud BigQuery: Conversational Analytics in 2020(00:57:59) - Google Cloud Launches Single Tenant Cloud HSM(01:02:53) - How to manage 15,000 keys on a single HSM with(01:05:47) - Microsoft Launches DLSV7, DSV7 and ESV(01:11:31) - This Week in the Cloud: The Cloud: AI & More

Welcome to episode 340 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a full house (eventually) with Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matt all on board for today’s episode. We’ve got a lot of announcements, from Gemini for Gov (no more CamoGPT!) to Route 52 and Claude. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Claude’s Pricing Tiers: Free, Pro, and Maximum Overdrive GitHub Copilot Learns Database Schema: Finally an AI That Understands Your Joins SSMS Gets a Copilot: Your T-SQL Now Writes Itself While You Grab Coffee Too Many Cooks in the Cloud Kitchen: How 32 GPUs Outcooked the Big Tech Industrial Kitchens Uncle Sam Gets a Gemini Twin: Google’s AI Goes Federal Route 53 Gets Domain of Its Own: .ai Joins the Party Thai One On: Google Cloud Plants Its Flag in Bangkok NAT So Fast: Azure’s Gateway Gets a V2 Glow-Up Beware Azure’s SQL Assistant doesn’t smoke your joints. AI Is Going Great, Or How ML Makes Money   30:10 Announcing BlackIce: A Containerized Red Teaming Toolkit for AI Security Testing | Databricks Blog Databricks released BlackIce, an open-source containerized toolkit that bundles 14 AI security testing tools into a single Docker image available on Docker Hub as databricksruntime/blackice:17.3-LTS.  The toolkit addresses common red teaming challenges, including conflicting dependencies, complex setup requirements, and the fragmented landscape of AI security tools, by providing a unified command-line interface similar to how Kali Linux works for traditional penetration testing. The toolkit includes tools covering three main categories: Responsible AI, Security testing, and classical adversarial ML, with capabilities mapped to MITRE ATLAS and the Databricks AI Security Framework.  Tools are organized as either static (simple CLI-based with minimal programming needed) or dynamic (Python-based with customization options), with static tools isolated in separate virtual environments and dynamic tools in a global environment with managed dependencies. BlackIce integrates directly with Databricks Model Serving endpoints through custom patches applied to several tools, allowing security teams to test for vulnerabilities like prompt injections, data leakage, hallucination detection, jailbreak attacks, and supply chain security issues.  Users can deploy it via Databricks Container Services by specifying the Docker image URL when creating compute clusters. The release includes a demo notebook showing how to orchestrate multiple security tools in a single environment, with all build artifacts, tool documentation, and examples available in the GitHub repository.  The CAMLIS Red Paper provides additional technical details on tool selection criteria and the Docker image architecture. 04:30 Ryan – “It’s very difficult to feel confident in your AI security practice or patterns. I feel like it’s just bleeding edge, and I’m learning so much all the time. And so I spend a lot of time reading papers and talking to others and seeing what they’re doing and meeting with vendors trying to figure out strategy, and it just feels like I’m drinking from a fire hose, and it’s really difficult to feel confident. So I like tools like t... Chapters (00:00:07) - The Cloud Pod: Episode 340(00:01:16) - Hello, How to Subscribe to our Podcast(00:03:20) - Black Ice: A Single Toolkit for AI Security(00:13:21) - OpenAI Launches Prism: a LaTeX workspace for scientific writing(00:16:03) - Amazon EC2: New Graviton 4 Instances, and More(00:21:54) - Amazon Workspaces: Advanced Printer Redirection(00:25:50) - AWS Network Firewall Adds URL Category Based Filtering(00:28:32) - The CEO's Executive Dinner(00:29:21) - Gemini CLI Learning Course Launch(00:32:43) - Google Cloud opens new Bangkok Region Asia Southeast 3(00:36:08) - Apache Airflow 3.1 on Cloud Composer(00:38:36) - Google's Gemini for Government Launches(00:43:32) - BigQuery: Integrating AI into SQL queries(00:45:46) - SQL Server Management Studio 2.22.1 New Features & Changes(00:53:08) - Azure NAT Gateway: Standard V2 GAUNCH(00:55:31) - Microsoft Announces Unified Socks & DORA Compliance Solutions in(01:03:01) - IOM Deny Policies(01:04:59) - Google's Gemini CLI for Outages & Compliance(01:07:58) - Google's MCP for Docs(01:10:49) - Super Bowl LII

Welcome to episode 339 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Matt are in the studio today to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI announcements, including more personnel shifts (and it doesn’t seem like it was very friendly), a new way to get much needed copper, and Azure marketplace advertising 4,000 different models. What’s the real story? Let’s get into it and find out!  Titles we almost went with this week US-EAST-1: Still the Least Reliable Friend You Keep Inviting to Parties **OpenAI 0⃣ From Zero to Inference: BigQuery Makes Open Models a Two-SQL Problem AWS Goes Full Brandenburg Gate: Sovereign Cloud Opens for Business Seven Ate Nine: AWS Skips G7 and Goes Straight to G7e Instances From Crawling to Calling: Cloudflare Buys Human Native to Fix AI’s Data Problem Finally, an AI That Actually Listens to Your War Room Panic Tag, You’re Governed: AWS Automation Takes the Wheel Cloudflare Reaches for the Stars: Astro Framework Acquisition Lands Gemini Gets Personal: Google AI Finally Reads Your Email (With Permission) AWS Strikes Ore: Amazon Cuts Out the Middleman in Copper Supply Chain When Your Region Goes Down More Often Than Your Kubernetes Cluster ChatGPT Go: OpenAI’s New Middle Child Gets $8 Allowance Cloudflare’s Space-Age Acquisition: Astro Gets Jetsons-Level Upgrade Rosie the Robot Fired: Cloudflare Brings Astro Framework Into the Family It took 5 years, and now we have ads in our AI.  AI now with Ads EU says hands off my data   General News  00:50 Heather’s data is not unreliable  Maybe it’s unreliable. I blame Matt for having screwed up his outtro (as he did today), in which case I no longer recognize his participation.  01:11 Astro is joining Cloudflare Cloudflare acquires The Astro Technology Company, bringing the popular open-source web framework in-house while maintaining its MIT license and multi-cloud deployment capabilities.  Major platforms like Webflow Cloud, Wix Vibe, and Stainless already use Astro on Cloudflare infrastructure to power customer websites. Astro 6 introduces a redesigned development server built on Vite Environments API that runs code locally using the same runtime as production deployment. When using the Cloudflare Vite plugin, developers can test against workerd runtime with access to Durable Objects, D1, KV, and other Cloudflare services during local development. The framework focuses on content-driven websites through its Islands Architecture, which renders most pages as static HTML while allowing selective client-side interactivity using any UI framework.  This approach addresses the complexity that made building performant websites difficult before 2021, providing a simpler foundation for both human developers and AI coding agents. Astro 6 adds stable Live Content Collections for real-time data... Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:02:52) - Vite 6 and Cloudflare: Everything You Need to Know(00:04:53) - Cloudflare to Acquire Human Data, Boost AI Data(00:06:34) - Anthropic Launches a Lab for AI Product Development(00:10:44) - Thinking Machine's Co-Founders Return to OpenAI(00:13:29) - OpenAI to Add 750 Megawatts of Inference Capacity to Chat(00:16:35) - Chat: More Adverts Coming to AI(00:18:41) - 1Password for AI-Powered Development(00:25:21) - EC2 X8i and G7E: The Bigger(00:28:02) - Amazon Launches the AWS European Sovereign Cloud(00:32:07) - Amazon to Become First Customer of Rio Tinto's Bio-Le(00:34:34) - Curo CLI Update to 1.24(00:37:21) - BigQuery adds SQL Native Inference for Open Models(00:39:28) - Google Translate Gemma, a New Translation Model(00:43:04) - Microsoft's AI Marketplace: Central Hub for AI Adoption(00:47:10) - It's All In The Cloud For Azure...(00:49:16) - Amazon's Outages for the Year 2025(00:51:30) - US East 1 vs. Oregon: Is it Worse?

Welcome to episode 338 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, Matt, and Jonathan are in the studio today to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including a bit of a buying spree (inlcuding whole power companies) Veo 3.1, Cowork, and more – today in the cloud!   Titles we almost went with this week Snowflake’s Ironic Timing: Buying Downtime Prevention Tool While Experiencing Downtime Flexera Buys ProsperOps and Chaos Genius, Promises Less Chaos and More Prosperity Flexera Goes Shopping: Two FinOps Acquisitions to Prosper and Reduce Chaos Token of Appreciation: Gemini CLI Now Tracks Every Penny of Your AI Spend Snowflake Buys Observe to Stop Its Own Services from Melting Down Google’s Veo 3.1 Goes Vertical: Finally Understanding How People Actually Hold Their Phones Alphabet’s New Power Move: Buying the Company That Literally Powers Data Centers Dashboard Confessional: Gemini CLI Gets Transparent About Its Usage Microsoft’s New Agent Works 24/7 and Never Asks for a Raise From Robot Vacuums That Climb Stairs to TVs You Can’t Feel: CES Gets Weird Agent Shopping: When Your AI Has Better Taste Than You Do The cloudpod hosts do not like any stories this week AWS took a nap on announcements this week Claude is my new co-worker Wake up, AWS, and give us some fun news The $200 Assistant: Is Cowork the End of Workplace Admins? Azure has more interesting announcements than AWS oh noooo If you can’t beat them in AI, just acquire everyone Notebook LM turns the Data Tables on you AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money  01:11 Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Code-like for general computing – Ars Technica Anthropic launches Cowork, a new feature in the macOS Claude desktop app that extends Claude Code‘s agentic capabilities to general office work tasks.  Users can grant Claude access to specific folders and use plain language instructions to automate tasks like filling expense reports from receipt photos, writing reports from notes, or reorganizing files. Cowork lowers the technical barrier compared to Claude Code by making AI-assisted file operations accessible to non-developer knowledge workers, including marketers and office staff.  The feature was developed after Anthropic observed users already applying Claude Code to general knowledge work despite its developer-focused positioning. The tool provides similar functionality to what was possible through Model Context Protocol integrations, but offers a more streamlined interface with Claude Code-style usability improvements.  Users can submit new requests or modifications to ongoing tasks without waiting for the initial assignment to complete. Cowork represents a strategic expansion of Anthropic’s agentic AI approach beyond software development into broader productivity workflows. The feature demonstrates how AI agents with file system access can automate routine knowledge work tasks that previously required manual processing of documents and data. 02:15 Ryan – “This week is the first time I actually tried to use AI to generate a PowerPoint presentation. It did not go well. It did gener... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure Weekly(00:00:43) - Cloud Code Launches Cowork for iOS(00:06:53) - Google's Video Output (VO 3.1)(00:10:10) - Snowflake to Integrate Observe into its Data Platform(00:12:47) - Flexera Expands Cloud Commitment Management with Acquisitions(00:17:44) - AWS: Sleeping in Seattle(00:18:35) - GCP 10.2: Gemini CLI Monitoring with Google Cloud(00:20:58) - Alphabet to Acquire Data Center Company(00:23:14) - Google's Notebook LLM Adds Data Tables(00:27:53) - Google's T5 Gemma 2: Multodal Vision Models(00:31:30) - Google Launches Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) for AI Agents(00:37:36) - Microsoft's Dynamic Threat Detection Agent in Public Preview(00:40:20) - Azure Service Bus Premium: Cross-Regional Replication(00:44:41) - This Week in Cloud: Amazon Stories(00:45:32) - CES 2017: The Best Tech Gadgets(00:51:27) - How to Get Your Smoke Detector to Work(00:53:25) - Fooled by Apple's Fold Phone(00:55:42) - E Ink Poster and Raspberry PI(00:59:44) - Lawyers Use the Remarkable Notebook

 Welcome to episode 337 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan have hit the recording studio to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, from acquisitions and price hikes to new tools that Ryan somehow loves but also hates? We don’t understand either… but let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Prompt Engineering Our Way Into Trouble The Demo Worked Yesterday, We Swear It Scales Horizontally, Trust Us Responsible AI But Terrible Copy (Marketing Edition) General News  00:58 Watch ‘The Thinking Game’ documentary for free on YouTube Google DeepMind is releasing the “The Thinking Game” documentary for free on YouTube starting November 25, marking the fifth anniversary of AlphaFold.  The feature-length film provides behind-the-scenes access to the AI lab and documents the team’s work toward artificial general intelligence over five years. The documentary captures the moment when the AlphaFold team learned they had solved the 50-year protein folding problem in biology, a scientific achievement that recently earned Demis Hassabis and John Jumper the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  This represents one of the most significant practical applications of deep learning to fundamental scientific research. The film was produced by the same award-winning team that created the AlphaGo documentary, which chronicled DeepMind’s earlier achievement in mastering the game of Go. For cloud and AI practitioners, this offers insight into how Google DeepMind approaches complex AI research problems and the development process behind their models. While this is primarily a documentary release rather than a technical product announcement, it provides context for understanding Google’s broader AI strategy and the research foundation underlying its cloud AI services. The AlphaFold model itself is available through Google Cloud for protein structure prediction workloads. 01:54 Justin – “If you’re not into technology, don’t care about any of that, and don’t care about AI and how they built all the AI models that are now powering the world of LLMs we have, you will not like this documentary.”  04:22 ServiceNow to buy Armis in $7.7 billion security deal • The Register ServiceNow is acquiring Armis for $7.75 billion to integrate real-time security intelligence with its Configuration Management Database, allowing customers to identify vulnerabilities across IT, OT, and medical devices and remediate them through automated workflows.  The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026 and aims to triple ServiceNow’s current $1 billion annual security revenue. The acquisition represents a strategic data play when combined with ServiceNow’s recent purchase of Data.World, giving the company both massive volumes of se... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure: Raising GPU Prices 15%.(00:00:51) - Homework for the Week(00:01:05) - Google's The Thinking Game Documentary(00:04:22) - ServiceNow Acquires Armis for $7.5 Billion(00:06:39) - What is the Cognizant Threat Management Platform?(00:08:29) - Google's 2025: The Year of TUNE (In Depth)(00:11:36) - MetaAcquires AI Agent Firm Manus(00:15:27) - Migration from AWS Security Hub to OCSF(00:21:10) - EC2 Spot Capacity for Containerized Apps(00:23:13) - Amazon EKS now supports DNS-based and Admin Network Policies(00:26:58) - Amazon Raises EC2 Capacity Prices(00:31:19) - Lookinger: Upload CSV and Excel Files Directly into the BI(00:34:01) - AlloyDB's AI Natural Language API(00:36:23) - Google's Vertex AI Agent Builder(00:38:05) - Google Cloud SQL for MySQL Enterprise+ Edition: Optimized Writes(00:42:26) - Microsoft Acquires OSMOS for Unified Data Platform(00:44:19) - Microsoft Deploys Nvidia's Next-Gen Arubin Platform(00:46:25) - Will Oracle Use Non-Evaporative Cooling at Their New(00:51:01) - Week in the Box: Cloud: More News?

Welcome to episode 335 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Welcome to the first show of 2026, and it’s a full house, too! Justin, Jonathan, Ryan,  and Matt are all here to reflect on 2025, plus bring you their predictions for 2026. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week SQL Me Maybe: AlloyDB Gets Chatty With Your Database **OpenAI SELECT * FROM natural_language WHERE accuracy LIKE ‘100%’ **Anthropic etcd You Were Worried About Database Limits: CloudWatch Has Your Back CSV You Later: Looker Adds Drag-and-Drop Data Uploads AWS Spots an Opportunity to Manage Your Container Costs EKS Network Policies: No More IP Address Whack-a-Mole AWS Security Hub Splits: It’s Not You, It’s CSPM Spot On: ECS Finally Manages Your Cheapest Compute TOON Squad: DigitalOcean’s New Format Makes JSON Look Bloated The Price is Wrong: AWS Breaks Two Decades of Downward Pricing Tradition Show Your Work: Why AI-Generated Code Without Tests is Just Expensive Spam No More Agent Orange: Google Simplifies VM Extension Deployment AWS Discovers Prices Can Go Both Ways, Raises GPU Costs 15 Percent Sovereignty Washing: When Your European Cloud Still Answers to Uncle Sam Agent Builder Gets a Memory Upgrade: Google’s AI Finally Remembers Where It Put Its Keys Ctrl+F for the Future: A year-end Scorecard & Next-Gen Bets AI Agents, GPU Prices, and The best of the Cloud Pod 2025 Beyond the Hype: The Cloud Pods Definitive 2025 Year in Review Apocalypse Now… What? Our 2026 Forecast   Follow Up  01:27 RYAN’S PREDICTIONS Prediction Status Notes Quick LLM models for individuals ACCURATE Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, GLM-4-9B-0414, and Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct—each chosen for an outstanding balance of performance and computational efficiency, making them ideal for edge AI deployment. A new AI inference application called Inferencer allows even modest Apple Mac computers to run the largest open-source LLMs. AI at the edge natively (Lambda-esque) ACCURATE Akamai launched a new Inference Cloud product for edge AI using Nvidia’s Blackwell 6000 GPUs in 17 cities. AWS IoT Greengrass with Lambda functions for edge logic. “Edge AI allows for instant decision-making where it matters most—close to the data source.” Cloud native security mesh multi-cloud UNCLEAR Service mesh technologies continue to evolve (Istio, Linkerd), but I didn’t find a breakthrough “app-to-app at the edge” security mesh product announcement in 2025. This one needs more specific evidence. Ryan Score: 2/3 02:25 MATTHEW’S PREDICTIONS Prediction Status Notes FOCUS adopted by Snowflake or Databricks ACCURATE FOCUS version 1.2 was ratified on May 29, 2025. Three new providers announced support: Alibaba Cloud, Databricks, and Grafana. Databricks officially adopted FOCUS! AI security/ethical standard (SOC or ISO) ACCURATE ISO 42001 is the first international standard outlining requirements for AI governance. Major companies achieving certification in 2025: Automation Anywhere is among the first 100 companies worldwide to earn ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification. Anthropic also achieved ISO 42001 certification. Amazon deprecates 5+ services (WorkMail bonus) ACCURATE (no bonus) 19 services are mothballed, four are being sunset, and one is end of its supported life. Deprecated services include CodeCommit, Cloud9, S3 Select, CloudSearch, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline, QLDB, Snowball Edge, and more. WorkMail NOT deprecated – WorkDocs was (April 2025), but WorkMail remains active. Matthew Score: 3/3 03:22 JONATHAN’S PREDICTIONS Prediction Status Notes Company claims AGI achieved ACCURATE Integral AI, founded by ex-Google veteran Jad Tarifi, claims to have built a world-first AGI mo... Chapters (00:00:00) - 2019: The New Prophecies(00:01:16) - 2018 Cloud Predictions: The Best Ever(00:06:21) - Cloud Provider Coverage on The Show(00:08:20) - Ryan on Host Participation(00:09:22) - AI Spelled Out 596 Times in 2025(00:10:51) - A Year in the Life of AWS(00:12:03) - A Year in the Life of AI(00:14:38) - How to Build an AI Chatbot(00:21:43) - Cloud Hub: Update the Website, Build a CMS(00:24:48) - Top 3 Stories From 2025(00:27:12) - Agent to Agent: The Technology Standard(00:29:26) - Amazon's Nova: Underused, but Solid(00:31:51) - GitHub's migration to Azure(00:35:29) - Cloud 2.8 & Cloud 4(00:40:34) - ECS 12. Quality of Life(00:46:09) - Top 10 Cloud Outages predicted for 2021(00:47:05) - Top 10 Predictions for 2021(00:47:54) - Predictions for the AI Industry in 2017(00:50:23) - Quantum Computing: A Step Forward in 2026(00:53:24) - I Predict the First AI Agent Security Breach(00:55:02) - 2026: Infrastructure as a Human Language(00:55:49) - Will AI End the SaaS Business?(00:59:26) - I Predict One More AI-Specific Cloud Hitter(01:02:00) - AI-First Design on Websites(01:03:00) - Top 4 Predictions for the Future of Content(01:05:56) - Last Year's Prediction: AI-Generated Podcast(01:07:38) - Week in the Cloud: January 1

Welcome to episode 335 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This pre-Christmas week, Ryan and Justin have hit the studio to bring you the final show of 2025. We’ve got lots of AI images, EKS Network Policies, Gemini 3, and even some Disney drama.  Let’s get into it!  Titles we almost went with this week From Roomba to Tomb-ba: How the Robot Vacuum Pioneer Got Cleaned Out **OpenAI From Napkin Sketch to Production: Google’s App Design Center Goes GA Terraform Gets a Canvas: Google Paints Infrastructure Design with AI Mickey Mouse Takes Off the Gloves: Disney vs Google AI Showdown From Data Silos to Data Solos: Google Conducts the Integration Orchestra No More Thread Dread: AWS Brings AI to JVM Performance Troubleshooting MCP: More Corporate Plumbing Than You Think GPT-5.2 Beats Humans at Work Tasks, Still Can’t Get You Out of Monday Meetings Kerberos More Like Kerbero-Less: Microsoft Axes Ancient Encryption Standard OpenAI Teaches GPT-5.2 to PowerPoint: Death by Bullet Points Now AI-Generated MCP: Like USB-C, But Everyone’s Keeping Theirs in the Drawer Flash Gordon: Google’s Gemini 3 Gets a Speed Boost Without the Sacrifice Tag, You’re It: AWS Finally Knows Who to Bill Snowflake Gets a GPT-5.2 Upgrade: Now With More Intelligence Per Query OpenAI and Snowflake: Making Data Warehouses Smarter Than Your Average Analyst GPT-5.2 Moves Into the Snowflake: No Melting Required AI Is Going Great, or How ML Makes Money  01:06 Meta’s multibillion-dollar AI strategy overhaul creates culture clash: Meta is developing Avocado, a new frontier AI model codenamed to succeed Llama, now expected to launch in Q1 2026 after internal delays related to training performance testing.  The model may be proprietary rather than open source, marking a significant shift from Meta’s previous strategy of freely distributing Llama’s weights and architecture to developers. We feel like this is an interesting choice for Meta, but what do we know?  Meta spent 14.3 billion dollars in June 2025 to hire Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang as Chief AI Officer and acquire a stake in Scale, while raising 2026 capital expenditure guidance to 70-72 billion dollars.  Wang now leads the elite TBD Lab developing Avocado, operating separately from traditional Meta teams and not using the company’s internal workplace network. The company has restructured its AI leadership following the poor reception of Llama 4 in April, with Chief Product Officer Chris Cox no longer overseeing the GenAI unit.  Meta cut 600 jobs in Meta Superintelligence Labs in October, contributing to the departure of Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun to launch a startup, while implementing 70-hour workweeks across AI organizations. Meta’s new AI leadership under Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman has introduced a “demo, don’t memo” development approach, replacing traditional multi-step approval processes with rapid prototyping using AI agents and newer tools.  The company is also leveraging third-party cloud services from CoreWeave and Oracle while buil... Chapters (00:00:00) - A Year in Cloud(00:01:21) - Meta Developing New Frontier AI Model(00:03:15) - Disney Sues Google AI for Copyright Infringement(00:04:59) - OpenAI to License Disney's 'Sora' Characters(00:07:13) - OpenAI GPT Image 1.5 and 1.6(00:08:41) - ChatGPT 5.2 Release(00:10:45) - Cedar Open-Sourcing and CNCF(00:12:38) - AWS GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection(00:15:51) - Amazon EKS: Admin Network Policies and Application Network Policies for Ku(00:18:43) - Amazon Web Services: Thread dump analysis solution(00:22:16) - Amazon EC2: Automatic Cost Allocation based on User Attributes(00:25:47) - GCP's Gemini 3 Flash for Enterprises(00:27:19) - Google's MCP Server Integration into Anti Gravity(00:30:59) - Google's Application Design Center (GAA) Now General Availability(00:33:12) - Microsoft to deprecate RC4 Authentication by default(00:35:50) - Azure Storage: 50 Terabit Bucket Support(00:38:23) - Microsoft Expands Azure's Network for AI and Disaster Recovery(00:42:14) - This Week in Cloud: Looking Back & Looking Forward(00:43:29) - IRobot's bankruptcy throws a cloud spotlight(00:49:27) - RIP iRobot: Ben Kehoe(00:50:35) - Christmas wishes for everyone

Welcome to episode 334 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, we’re bringing you a jam-packed recap of re:Invent! We’ve got all the news, from keynotes to announcements. Whether you were there live or catching up on all the news, Justin, Matt, and Ryan are here to break it all down. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week EKS Gets Chatty: Natural Language Replaces Command Line Nightmares Harvest Now, Decrypt Later: Why Your RSA Keys Need a Quantum Makeover Before 2026 NAT So Fast: AWS Helps You Find Gateways Doing Absolutely Nothing AWS Finally Admits You Have Too Many Log Buckets AWS Finally Lets You Log In Like a Normal Human Lambda Gets a Memory: Checkpoint Your Way to Multi-Step Workflows Step Functions at Home: Lambda Durable Functions Let You Write Workflows in Actual Code No More Bucket List: S3 Public Access Gets Organization-Wide Lockdown AWS Hits Ctrl-Z on CodeCommit Deprecation AWS Puts a Cap on CloudFront: Unlimited Traffic, Limited Anxiety AWS Tells SQL Server to Take a Thread Off: Optimize CPU Cuts Costs by 55% Amazon Bedrock Gets a Bouncer: AgentCore Identity Checks IDs at the Door AI Brings on the Developer Renaissance Follow Up  01:27 re:Invent  Matt Garman- 14th Reinvent, which is weird, since we’ve been doing cloud stuff for 87 years… Warner – Open Mind for a different View and nothing else matters T-shirt. 02:59 re:Invent predictions Jonathan Serverless GPU support (extension in Lambda or a different service), it’s about time we have a serverless GPU/Inference capability. It is talked about in the keynote with DeSantis. AI Agent with a goal/instructions that can run when they need to, periodically, or always, and perform an action (Agentic Platform that runs agents) –  Garman – Bedrock AgentCore and Kiro Autonomous Agent Werner will announce this is his last keynote and he will retire He retired from re:Invent Presentations Ryan New Tranium 3 chips, Inferentia, and Graviton chips Garman – announced Tranium 3 Ultraservers. They brought the Rack Ryan Expand the number of models in or via bedrock Doubled the number of models and announced Gemma, Minimax M2, Nvidia Nemotron, Mistral Large, and Mistral 3 Refresh to AWS Organizations Justin New Nova Model & Sonic with Multi-modal Garman Nova 2 – Lite, Pro, and Sonic (the lack of Sonic the Hedgehog/Sega reference is a shame) Nova 2 Omni Announce a partnership with OpenAI (likely on stage) Not announced as new, but said they’re running on AWS and that EC2 Ultraservers are in use.  Advanced Agentic AI Capabilities for Security Hub (Automate the SOC teams) Garman – Advanced Agentic AI Capabilities for Security Hub – with NEW AWS Security Agent Matt A model router to route LLM queries to different AI models Well-architected framework expansion  End user Authentication that doesn’t suck (not current Cognito) Tie Breaker – How many times w... Chapters (00:00:00) - AWS + GCP: Kubectl Goodbye(00:01:31) - Reinvent Prediction: Who Won The PC World Awards(00:02:28) - AWS 10.2: Serverless and AI Agents(00:03:35) - Amazon Keynotes: Ryan Will Retire From Speaking(00:07:15) - AWS Security Hub: Advanced Agentic AI capabilities(00:08:06) - Treat Time: The AI Conference(00:11:04) - Matt Garmin's Conference Keynote(00:13:49) - Amazon Cloud Conference 2018: Highlights and Disclosures(00:19:05) - Swami's Keynote(00:20:33) - Peter Desantis at Reinvent:(00:21:55) - Peter Desantis's keynote(00:24:36) - Bedrock Reinforcement Learning Keynotes(00:29:23) - EC2 and Lambda: Computing with AWS, AI factories(00:30:43) - AWS Lambda Managed Instances(00:33:32) - AWS Lambda: Durable Functions Invite(00:37:37) - Amazon's Step Functions vs. AWS Lambda(00:40:40) - ECS x Kubernetes, NAT & More(00:47:16) - AWS: VPC Encryption Control (Nitro)(00:49:38) - AWS Network Firewall Proxy(00:50:58) - AWS S3: New Block Public Access Controls and More(00:54:19) - Amazon FSX for NetApp ONTAP Adds S3(00:55:56) - Database Enhancements in 2017(00:56:35) - AWS Adds Four New Features to SQL Server & Oracle RDS(00:57:30) - AWS Database Savings Plan Announcement(00:59:28) - RDS 10.2: SQL Server Resource Governor(01:00:41) - WAF and Security Identity(01:01:36) - Guardduty: Extended Threat Detection for Amazon EC2 & ECS(01:03:45) - AWS Security Agent: Automated Application Security Reviews, Code Scan(01:06:14) - Amazon IAM Policy Autopilot Release(01:08:36) - AWS data exports in the Focus 1.2 format and then(01:09:36) - AWS Compute Optimizer: Cost Efficiency and Cost Optimization(01:12:58) - Amazon Rescues CodeCommun from the AWS Cloud(01:17:10) - CloudWatch: Governance, Control Tower, and More(01:18:24) - AWS: AMI Ancestry(01:20:58) - Amazon Support Plans Reshuffled(01:25:29) - Amazon Cloud: Announcements #271

Welcome to episode 333 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are taking a quick break from re:Invent festivities. They bring you the latest and greatest in Cloud and AI news. This week, we discuss Norad and Anthropic teaming up to bring you Christmas cheer. Wait, is that right? Huh. We also have undersea cables, some Turkish region delight, and a LOT of Opus 4.5 news. Let’s get into it! Titles we almost went with this week Boring Error Pages Not Found Claude Goes Native in Snowflake: Finally, AI That Stays Where Your Data Lives Cross-Cloud Romance: AWS and Google Make It Official with Interconnect Google Gemini Puts OpenAI in Code Red: The Tables Have Turned Azure NAT Gateway V2: Now With More Zones Than a Parking Lot From ChatGPT to Chat-Uh-Oh: OpenAI Sounds the Alarm as Gemini Steals 200 Million        Users **Anthropic Scheduled Actions: Because Your VMs Need a Work-Life Balance Too Finally, Your 500 Errors Can Look as Good as Your Homepage Foundry Model Router: Because Choosing Between 47 AI Models is Nobody’s Idea of Fun Google Takes the Scenic Route: New Cable Avoids the Sunda Strait Traffic Jam Azure Application Gateway Gets Its TCP/IP Diploma Google Cloud Gets Its Türkiye Dinner: 2 Billion Dollar Cloud Feast Coming Soon Microsoft Foundry: Turning AI Chaos into Compliance Gold AI Is Going Great, or How ML Makes Money  02:59 Nano Banana Pro available for enterprise Google launches Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image) in general availability on Vertex AI and Google Workspace, with Gemini Enterprise support coming soon. The model supports up to 14 reference images for style consistency and generates 4K resolution outputs with multilingual text rendering capabilities. The model includes Google Search grounding for factual accuracy in generated infographics and diagrams, plus built-in SynthID watermarking for transparency. Copyright indemnification will be available at general availability under Google’s shared responsibility framework. Enterprise integrations are live with Adobe Firefly, Photoshop, Canva, and Figma, enabling production-grade creative workflows. Major retailers, including Klarna, Shopify, and Wayfair, report using the model for product visualization and marketing asset generation at scale. Developers can access Nano Banana Pro through Vertex AI with Provisioned Throughput and Pay As You Go pricing options, plus advanced safety filters. Business users get access through Google Workspace apps, including Slides, Vids, and Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: This Week's News(00:03:02) - Google Launches Nano Banana Pro in Google Workspace(00:05:59) - Cloud Opus 4.5 Availability and Performance(00:10:41) - OpenAI Declares Code Red as Google's Gemini GPT G(00:14:00) - AWS 10: Prediction vs. Keynotes(00:14:49) - Google Cloud Region Coming to Turkey(00:18:52) - Google to Build New Subsea Cable Link Between Australia and Thailand(00:22:12) - Google Cloud Next(00:25:57) - Google Cloud VPN Flow Logs now support Cross-Cloud Networks(00:29:43) - Amazon Cloud Connects to Google Cloud(00:32:10) - Azure Application Gateway: TLS and TCP Protocol Termination(00:35:39) - Azure 2.8: Agent to Agent in Public Preview(00:37:02) - Microsoft Cloud Open Sport 5(00:39:10) - Azure DNS & Security: Threat Intelligence Feed Blocking(00:41:22) - NAT Gateway: Standard V2 SKU and Public Preview(00:45:23) - Azure app service: Custom Error Pages now in general availability(00:47:22) - Microsoft Foundry(00:51:02) - Microsoft's AI Orchestration Layer Gets Scheduled Tasks(00:56:18) - Week in the Cloud: AWS Extravaganza(00:57:06) - NORAD's AI-powered Holiday Tools(01:00:34) - Elf Photo Day(01:01:20) - Unifi: Printer v2 local

Welcome to episode 332 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s Thanksgiving week, which can only mean one thing: AWS Re:Invent predictions! In this special episode, Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matt engage in the annual tradition of drafting their best guesses for what AWS will announce at the biggest cloud conference of the year. Justin is the reigning champion (probably because he actually reads the show notes), but with a reverse snake draft order determined by dice roll, anything could happen. Will Werner announce his retirement? Is Cognito finally getting a much-needed overhaul? And just how many times will “AI” be uttered on stage? Grab your turkey and let’s get predicting! Titles we almost went with this week: Roll For Initiative: The Re:Invent Prediction Draft Justin’s Winning Streak: A Study in Actually Doing Your Homework Serverless GPUs and Broken Dreams: Our Re:Invent Wishlist Shooting in the Dark: AWS Predictions Edition We’re Never Good at This, But Here We Go Again Vegas Odds: What Happens at Re:Invent, Gets Predicted Wrong AWS Re:Invent Predictions 2025 The annual prediction draft is here! Draft order was determined by dice roll: Jonathan first, followed by Ryan, Justin, and Matt in last position. As always, it’s a reverse order format, with points awarded for each correct prediction announced during the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday keynotes. Jonathan’s Predictions Serverless GPU Support – An extension to Lambda or a different service that provides on-demand serverless GPU/inference capability. Likely with requirements for pre-warmed provisioned instances. Agentic Platform for Continuous AI Agents – A service that allows agents to run continuously with goals or instructions, performing actions periodically or on-demand in the real world. Think: running agents on a schedule that can check conditions and take automated actions. Werner Vogels Retirement Announcement – Werner will announce that this is his last Re:Invent keynote and that he is retiring. Ryan’s Predictions New Trainium 3 Chips, Inferentia, and Graviton Chips – New generation of AWS custom silicon across training, inference, and general compute. Expanded Model Availability in Bedrock – AWS will significantly expand the number of models available in Bedrock, potentially via partnerships or integrations with additional providers. Major Refresh to AWS Organizations – UI-based or functionality refresh providing better visibility into SCPs, OU mappings, and stack sets across organizations. Chapters (00:00:02) - Episode 332: Reinvent Predictions For(00:01:26) - Reinvent: The Contest(00:03:35) - How to Predict the AI Announcement(00:04:23) - Serverless GPUs: First Step(00:05:58) - SageMaker vs. Amazon: The Fight(00:09:56) - What is the Future of AI Agents?(00:11:03) - Facebook is an Agent Platform, but...(00:11:38) - AWS: Bedrock Expansion & OpenAI Partnership(00:15:09) - Top Tech Speakers: ML, AI and the Warner Key(00:16:15) - Third and Final Prediction(00:17:15) - WSJDLive: Future of AWS IT refresh(00:18:18) - 3 of the Best Security Hub Features(00:19:22) - AWS: Cognito 2.0 or Agentic Identities?(00:21:27) - Tiebreaker: How Many Times Will AI Be Said?(00:23:28) - What to Do to Reinvent Yourself at Reinvent 2012(00:24:00) - Amazon's AI Wish List(00:29:50) - A Taste of Re Invent 2018

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)  ACM Competitor – True SSL competitive product AI announcement in Security AI Agent (Copilot for Sentinel) – sort of (½)  Azure DevOps Announcement Justin New Cobalt and Mai Gen 2 or similar – Check Price Reduction on OpenAI & Significant Prompt Caching  Microsoft Foundational LLM to compete with OpenAI –  Jonathan The general availability of new, smaller, and more power-efficient Azure Local hardware form factors 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. 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 i... Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:01:04) - Matchbox: Microsoft's AI Announcement(00:05:04) - Cloudflare's Worst Outage Since 2019(00:07:32) - GPT 5.1 Release(00:11:21) - ChatGPT Launches Group Chat(00:14:53) - Microsoft Teams: Working in Teams with Copilot(00:16:16) - Gemini 3.0 Pro Launch at Google AI Conference(00:18:51) - Microsoft, Nvidia to Develop Cloud Models for Anthropic(00:22:45) - Ingress NGINX Controller to Be Retired(00:25:05) - Cloudflare Expands AI into the Edge with a Replicate(00:29:31) - AWS Lambda: Provisioned Mode for SQS(00:32:31) - Amazon EventBridge Expands Schema Aware with New Rule Builder(00:34:37) - Application Load Balancers support JWT Token Verification(00:37:51) - How Protective Reroute Improves Network Resilience(00:40:26) - Google Security Operations Launches Emerging Threat Center(00:46:48) - Google to Invest $7 Million in Subsea Cable Networks(00:50:17) - Microsoft's Azure AI SuperFactory(00:53:43) - Azure DB for Postgres Announces Private Preview(00:57:04) - Microsoft Defender for Cloud Integrates with GitHub Advanced Security(01:00:09) - Azure introduces Smart Tiering for Blob Storage(01:06:29) - How to lay a fiber cable in your house(01:10:02) - Microsoft's AI Agent Development Announcement(01:16:21) - How to Manage Ideas in the AI World(01:22:18) - The Project Narrative in the Machine Learning Code(01:23:38) - Week in Cloud: The Cloud Pod

Welcome to episode 329 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy (and if you’re in California, rainy too!) Justin and Matt have taken a break from Ark building activities to bring you this week’s episode, packed with all the latest in cloud and AI news, including undersea cables (our favorite!) FinOps, Ignite predictions, and so much more! Grab your umbrellas and let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Fastnet and Furious: AWS Lays 320 Terabits of Cable Across the Atlantic No More kubectl apply –pray: AWS Backup Takes the Stress Out of EKS Recovery AWS Gets Swift with Lambda: No Taylor Version Required Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Microsoft Splits Teams from Office FinOps and Behold: Google Automates Your Cloud Budget Nightmares AMD Turin Around GCP’s Price-Performance with N4D VMs Azure Gets Territorial: Your Data Stays Put Whether It Likes It or Not AWS Finally Answers “Is It Available in My Region?” Before You Build It  Getting to the Bare Metal of Things: Google’s Axion Goes Commando Azure Ultra Disk Gets Ultra Serious About Latency Container Size Matters: Azure Expands ACI to 240 GB Memory  Google Containerises Chaos: Agent Sandbox Keeps Your AI from Going Rogue AWS Prints Money While Amazon Prints Pink Slips: Q3 Earnings Beat Follow Up  02:08 Microsoft sidesteps hefty EU fine with Teams unbundling deal Microsoft avoids a potentially substantial EU antitrust fine by agreeing to unbundle Teams from the Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites for a period of seven years.  The settlement follows a 2023 complaint from Salesforce-owned Slack alleging anticompetitive bundling practices that harmed rival collaboration tools. The commitments require Microsoft to offer Office and Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: When You Can't Even Sit Down(00:01:37) - Nice Job Last Week With Jonathan and Elise(00:02:03) - Microsoft Settles Competition Lawsuit Over Teams(00:04:47) - Amazon, Google Cloud Deliver Record Earnings(00:08:13) - Microsoft Q1 Fiscal 2026 Earnings(00:09:06) - Azure Q4 Update, Microsoft(00:09:45) - Azure Front Door Incident Follow Up(00:13:53) - Azure Conference Prediction(00:14:52) - Microsoft Ignite 2017: What Do You Want From SSL?(00:16:28) - Microsoft's Next-Gen AI Accelerator(00:17:32) - Top Tech News: Apple's AI Announcement(00:19:12) - Microsoft's Azure DevOps Announcement, and More(00:20:59) - How Many Times Will They Say Co-Pilot in This Present(00:21:54) - Microsoft, Chat AI, and More(00:26:12) - IBM Cloud Ability Governance and Kubecast 3.0(00:28:06) - Amazon Rolls Out New Fastnet Cable(00:29:32) - AWS Cloud Planning Tool: Capabilities by Region(00:34:04) - Kubernetes: Agent Sandbox for AI(00:35:52) - Google's Ironwood TPU and Axion VM(00:37:38) - Google Cloud: FinOps Tooling in the Future(00:39:10) - Azure 3.8: Continuous Delivery & Cost Management(00:42:29) - Will the MCP help with deployment?(00:44:20) - Microsoft UltraDisk Gets Performance and Cost Update(00:46:46) - Azure Container Instances now supports 31 VCPUs and 240(00:48:04) - Azure 10.2: Geo Priority Replication(00:49:22) - Cloud Podcast: Predicting the Keynote

Welcome to episode 329 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and special guest Elise are in the studio to bring you all the latest in AI and cloud news, including – you guessed it – more outages, and more OpenAI team-ups. We’ve also got GPUs, K8 news, and Cursor updates. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Azure Front Door: Please Use the Side Entrance – el -jb Azure and NVIDIA: A Match Made in GPU Heaven – mk Azure Goes Down Under the Weight of Its Own Configuration – el GitHub Turns Your Copilot Subscription Into an All-You-Can-Eat Agent Buffet – mk, el Microsoft Goes Full Blackwell: No Regrets, Just GPUs Jules Verne Would Be Proud: Google’s CLI Goes 20,000 Bugs Under the Codebase RAG to Riches: AWS Makes Retrieval Augmented Generation Turnkey Kubectl Gets a Gemini Twin: Google Teaches AI to Speak Kubernetes I’m Not a Robot: Azure WAF Finally Learns to Ask the Important Questions OpenAI Puts 38 Billion Eggs in Amazon’s Basket: Multi-Cloud Gets Complicated The Root Cause They’ll Never Root Out: Why Attrition Stays Off the RCA Google’s New Extension Lets You Deploy Kubernetes by Just Asking Nicely Cursor 2.0: Now With More Agents Than a Hollywood Talent Agency Follow Up  04:46 Massive Azure outage is over, but problems linger – here’s what happened | ZDNET  Azure experienced a global outage on October 29, affecting all regions simultaneously, unlike the recent AWS outage that was limited to a single region.  The incident lasted approximately eight hours from noon to 8 PM ET, impacting major services including Microsoft 365, Teams, Xbox Live, and critical infrastructure for Alaska Airlines, Vodafone UK, and Heathrow Airport, among others. The root cause was an inadvertent tenant configuration change in Azure Front Door that bypassed safety validations due to a software defect. Microsoft’s protection mechanisms failed to catch the erroneous deployment, allowing invalid configurations to propagate across the global fleet and cause HTTP timeouts, server errors, and elevated packet loss at network edges. Recovery required rolling back to the last known good configuration and gradually rebalancing traffic across nodes to prevent overload conditions.  Some customers experienced lingering issues even after the official recovery time, with Microsoft temporarily blocking configuration changes to Azure Front Door while completing the restoration process. The incident highlights concentration risk in cloud infrastructure, as this marks the second major cloud provider outage in October 2025.  Despite Azure revenue growing 40 percent in the latest quarterly report, Microsoft’s stock declined in after-hours trading as the company acknowledged capaci... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure Front Door(00:01:07) - Microsoft Azure's Front Door Outage: Update!(00:04:09) - Amazon AWS and OpenAI Announce Multi-Year Strategic Partnership(00:09:21) - OpenAI vs. Nvidia: Which One Will Win?(00:12:09) - Google removes Gemini AI models from AI Studio(00:20:40) - The New York Times' political model(00:21:35) - GitHub's Agent HQ: Orchestrating Multiple Agents with(00:25:53) - Cursor Launches Multi-Agent Interface with Composer(00:33:49) - Conversations with an AI(00:37:13) - Amazon.com Releases MCP Proxy for AWS(00:40:35) - Cloud Cost Management Tool(00:41:18) - ECS Now Supports Built-in Linear and Canary Deployments(00:44:27) - Amazon Route 53 Resolver now supports AWS Private Link(00:47:46) - Mount Points for S3(00:52:08) - Google Cloud's New Log Analytics Query Builder(00:54:40) - Google's Gemini CLI Adds Kubernetes to DevOps(00:58:13) - Google Launches Joules Extension for Gnome CLI(01:04:20) - Google Cloud: GA of Cost Anomaly Detection(01:09:07) - Microsoft and Nvidia expand AI partnership with Azure(01:11:23) - California data centers: How expensive is electricity?(01:13:02) - Microsoft: Azure Cloud: 1.2 Million Tokens a Second,(01:19:25) - Azure WAF: Capture Challenges for Bot Traffic(01:22:10) - Azure: Instant Access to Snapshots for SSD & Ultra Disk(01:27:47) - Week in Cloud: The Cloud Podcast

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 develo... Chapters (00:00:00) - AWS vs. Azure: When Will Both Companies Have Outages(00:02:07) - DDoS Attacks Rise in September(00:04:43) - Google AI Studio Introduces Vibe Coding(00:09:20) - OpenAI's Company Knowledge for Chat GPT(00:13:59) - Microsoft and OpenAI Strike a New Deal(00:17:19) - Amazon Nova: General Availability of WebGrounding(00:18:58) - Athena Health Reporting's AI-Powered Database Migration Author(00:20:56) - Amazon Reportedly Replaces 40% of DevOps Staff With AI(00:23:58) - Amazon's DynamoDB Outage(00:28:11) - CloudWatch: Automated Incident Reporting with Scope 3(00:33:24) - Amazon's Secret West Region(00:39:31) - EC2: EBS IOPS exceeded and Volume level(00:42:52) - Google Cloud Parameter Manager(00:46:37) - Azure Key Vault vs AWS SSM: Feature Flag Management(00:48:32) - Citadel Cross-Site Interconnect with Google Cloud Platform(00:51:52) - BigTable Storage: Limited-Access Storage in Preview(00:54:38) - Google Cloud: 4x Max Nvidia NVL70 Instance(00:56:58) - Nvidia GB300 Envel 72 Instances(00:58:35) - Azure databases for PostgreSQL now with High Availability ( HA)(01:00:11) - OneLake + Fabric: What Could Go Wrong?(01:01:40) - 8 Platform Engineering Anti-Patterns(01:05:01) - The Second Anti-Pattern: Lack of Product Mindset(01:08:02) - 2. Give the team some ownership of the platform(01:11:56) - Building a Successful Platform: Tracking the Wrong Metrics(01:13:34) - Don't Copy the Kubernetes Platform(01:16:08) - 7 Pitfalls of Over Engineering on Day 1(01:19:14) - Platform Engineering: The Product Management Process(01:20:59) - This Week in the Cloud: Platform Engineering(01:21:41) - Next Week In The Cloud: Trip to the Bay

Welcome to episode 327 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan are here to bring you all the latest news (and a few rants) in the worlds of Cloud and AI. I’m sure all our readers are aware of the AWS outage last week, as it was in all the news everywhere. But we’ve also got some new AI models (including Sora in case you’re low on really crappy videos the youths might like), plus EKS, Kubernetes, Vertex AI, and more. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Oracle and Azure Walk Into a Cloud Bar: Nobody Gets ETL’d When DNS Goes Down, So Does Your Monday: AWS Takes Half the Internet on a Coffee Break 404 Cloud Not Found: AWS Proves Even the Internet’s Phone Book Can Get Lost DNS: Definitely Not Staffed – How AWS Lost Its Way When It Lost Its People When Larry Met Satya: A Cloud Love Story Azure Finally Answers ‘Dude, Where’s My Data?’ with Storage Discovery Breaking: Microsoft Discovers AI Training Uses More Power Than a Small Country 404 Engineers Not Found – AWS Learns the Hard Way That People Are Its Most Critical Infrastructure Azure Storage Discovery: Finding Your Data Needles in the Cloud Haystack EKS Auto Mode: Because Even Your Clusters Deserve Cruise Control Azure Gets Reel: Microsoft Adds Video Generation to AI Foundry The Great Token Heist: Vertex AI Steals 90% Off Your Gemini Bills Cache Me If You Can: Vertex AI’s Token-Saving Feature IaC Just Got a Manager – And It’s Not Your Boss  From Musk to Microsoft: Grok 4 Makes the Great Cloud Migration No Harness.. You are not going to make IACM happen Microsoft Drafts a Solution to Container Creation Chaos PowerShell to the People: Azure Simplifies the Great Gateway Migration IP There Yet? Azure’s Scripts Keep Your Address While You Upgrade Follow Up 00:53 Glacier Deprecation Email Standalone Amazon Glacier service (vault-based with separate APIs) will stop accepting new customers as of December 15, 2025.  S3 Glacier storage classes (Instant Retrieval, Flexible Retrieval, Deep Archive) are completely unaffected and continue normally Existing Glacier customers can keep using it forever – no forced migration required.  AWS is essentially consolidating around S3 as the unified storage platform, rather than maintaining two separate archival services. The standalone service will enter maintenance mode, meaning there will be no new features, but the service will remain operational. Migration to S3 Glacier is optional but recommended for better integration, lower costs, and more features. (Justin assures us it is actually slightly cheaper, so there’s that.)  General News  02:24 Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure vs. GCP(00:00:59) - Amazon's Glacier Storage Deprecation, and More(00:02:33) - Big IP Software Breach: Worrisome(00:04:56) - Claude Code Gets a Web Version(00:11:45) - Infrastructure as Code Management: Annoying Sales Pitch(00:14:26) - AWS: US East 1 Outage Causes Chaos(00:23:17) - EC2 Capacity Manager(00:25:39) - EC2 Auto-Mode for Kubernetes 1.29(00:28:44) - Amazon. EC2: CPU Optimization for License Included Instances(00:30:55) - AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager: Improved Security Protection(00:35:14) - Amazon ECS CLI Agent Orchestrator(00:40:37) - Google Cloud: BigQuery Update, New GPUs(00:46:11) - Google Cloud: Management of Suences in Vertex & AI SDK(00:47:58) - Gemini Code Assist on GitHub Enterprise(00:52:09) - Vertex AI Context Caching(00:54:25) - Cloud Armor Announces New Features(00:57:05) - Microsoft Firewall: New Capacity Metric(00:59:55) - Microsoft's Azure API Management introduces carbon aware features(01:04:14) - Azure Storage Discovery(01:07:45) - Two new AI models available in Azure AI Foundry(01:08:54) - Azure: Application Gateway V1 to V2 Migration Scripts(01:12:43) - Oracle's AI Agent Studio Expands(01:14:05) - Week in the Cloud

Welcome to episode 326 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Ryan are your guides to all things cloud and AI this week! We’ve got news from SonicWall (and it’s not great), a host of goodbyes to say over at AWS, Oracle (finally) joins the dark side, and even Slurm – and you don’t even need to ride on a creepy river to experience it. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week SonicWall’s Cloud Backup Service: From 5% to Oh No, That’s Everyone AWS Spring Cleaning: 19 Services Get the Boot The Great AWS Service Purge of 2025 Maintenance Mode: Where Good Services Go to Die GitHub Gets Assimilated: Resistance to Azure Migration is Futile Salesforce to Ransomware Gang: You Can’t Always Get What You Want Kansas City Gets the Need for Speed with 100G Direct Connect. Peter, what are you up too Gemini Takes the Wheel: Google’s AI Learns to Click and Type  Oracle Discovers the Dark Side (Finally Has Cookies) Azure Goes Full Blackwell: 4,600 Reasons to Upgrade Your GPU Game DataStax to the Future: AWS Hires Database CEO for Security Role The Clone Wars: EBS Strikes Back with Instant Volume Copies Slurm Dunk: AWS Brings HPC Scheduling to Kubernetes The Great Cluster Convergence: When Slurm Met EKS Codex sent me a DM that I’ll ignore too on Slack General News  01:24 SonicWall: Firewall configs stolen for all cloud backup customers SonicWall confirmed that all customers using their cloud backup service had firewall configuration files exposed in a breach, expanding from their initial estimate of 5% to 100% of cloud backup users. That’s a big difference… The exposed backup files contain AES-256-encrypted credentials and configuration data, which could include MFA seeds for TOTP authentication, potentially explaining recent Akira ransomware attacks that bypassed MFA. SonicWall requires affected customers to reset all credentials, including local user passwords, TOTP codes, VPN shared secrets, API keys, and authentication tokens across their entire infrastructure. This incident highlights a fundamental security risk of cloud-based configuration backups where sensitive credentials are stored centrally, making them attractive targets for attackers. The breach demonstrates why WebAuthn/passkeys offer superior security architecture since they don’t rely on shared secrets that can be stolen from backups or servers. Interested in checking out their detailed remediation guidance? Find that here.  02:36 Justin – “You know, providing your own encryption keys is also good; not allowing your SaaS vendor to have the encryption key is a positive thing to do. There’s all kinds of ways to protect your data in the cloud when you’re leveraging a SaaS service.” 04:43 Take this rob and shove it! Salesforce issues stern retort to ransomware extort Salesforce is refusing to pay ransomware demands from criminals claiming to have stolen nearly 1 billion customer records, stating they will not engage, negotiate with, or pay any extortion dema... Chapters (00:00:00) - Cloud Pod: Oracle Explains The Dark Side(00:01:31) - Cloud Security: Sonicwall Hacking(00:04:44) - Salesforce Rejects Ransomware Demand(00:07:04) - OpenAI's AI Agent Kit and More(00:10:10) - Google's Gemini 2.5 for UIs(00:12:20) - Amazon Is Moving 19 AWS Services to Maintenance Mode(00:16:30) - AWS Direct Connect now offers 100 Gigabytes dedicated connections with Mac(00:17:37) - AWS Identity Center now supports customer-managed KMS Keys(00:18:56) - Amazon QuickSuite M8A New Instance Launch(00:22:31) - Amazon Hires Former Data Stack CEO as VP of Security Services and(00:26:43) - Amazon Bedrock Agent Core(00:28:35) - AWS Transports AI Inference to Custom Chips(00:30:07) - Amazon EBS Volume Clones(00:31:45) - Amazon EKS Adds Slurm to Kubernetes(00:32:48) - GCP Introduces Gemini Enterprise as a Unified AI Platform(00:35:44) - Google's LLM Eval Kit for Prompt Engineering(00:37:57) - Google Cloud : NetApp Files for Enterprise Storage(00:40:43) - GitHub to Move All Its Software to Azure(00:45:17) - Microsoft Deploys First Production Cluster with Nvidia GB300 GPUs(00:48:31) - Oracle's Dark Mode in Oci

Welcome to episode 325 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin is on vacation this week, so it’s up to Ryan and Matthew to bring you all the latest news in cloud and AI, and they definitely deliver! This week we have an AWS invoice undo button, Sora 2, and quite a bit of news DigitalOcean – plus so much more. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week AWS Shoots for the Cloud with NBA Partnership Nothing But Net: AWS Scores Big with Basketball AI Deal From Courtside to Cloud-side: AWS Dunks on Sports Analytics PostgreSQL Gets a Gemini Twin for Natural Language Queries Fuzzy Logic: When Your Database Finally Speaks Your Language CLI and Let AI: Google’s Natural Language Database Assistant Satya’s Org Chart Shuffle: Now with More AI Synergy Microsoft Reorgs Again: This Time It’s Personal (and Commercial) Ctrl+Alt+Delete: Microsoft Reboots Its Sales Machine Sora 2: The Sequel Nobody Asked For But Everyone Will Use OpenAI Puts the “You” in YouTube (AI Edition) Sam Altman Stars in His Own AI-Generated Reality Show Grok and Roll: Microsoft’s New AI Model Rocks Azure To Grok or Not to Grok: That is the Question Grok Around the Clock: Azure’s 24/7 Reasoning Machine Spark Joy: Google Lights Up ML Inference for Data Pipelines DigitalOcean’s Storage Trinity: Hot, Cold, and Backed Up NFS: Not For Suckers (Network File Storage) The Goldilocks Storage Strategy: Not Too Hot, Not Too Cold, Just Right NAT Gonna Cost You: DigitalOcean’s Gateway to Savings BYOIP: Bring Your Own IP (But Leave Your Billing Worries Behind) The Great Invoice Escape: No More Support Tickets Required Ctrl+Z for Your AWS Bills: The Undo Button Finance Teams Needed Image Builder Finally Learns When to Stop Trying Pipeline Dreams: Now With Built-in Reality Checks EC2 Image Builder Gets a Failure Intervention Feature MCP: Model Context Protocol or Marvel Cinematic Protocol? AI is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money  00:45 OpenAI’s Sora 2 lets users insert themselves into AI videos with sound – Ars Technica OpenAI’s Sora 2 introduces synchronized audio generation alongside video synthesis, matching Google’s Veo 3 and Alibaba’s Wan 2.5 capabilities.  This positions OpenAI competitively in the multimodal AI space with what they call their “GPT-3.5 moment for video.” The new iOS social app feature allows users to insert themselves into AI-generated videos through “cameos,” suggesting potential applications for personalized content creation and social media integration at scale. Sora 2 demonstrates improved physical accuracy and consistency across multiple shots, addressing previous limitations where objects would teleport or deform unrealistically.  The model can now simulate complex movements like gymnastics routines while maintaining proper physics. The addition of “sophisticated background soundscapes, speech, and sound effects” expands potential enterprise use cases for automated video production, training materials, and marketing content generation without separate audio post-processing. Chapters (00:00:00) - GCP 325(00:00:54) - OpenAI Sora 2: Creators of AI Videos(00:03:31) - Joules: New Tools and APIs for Developers(00:05:18) - OpenAI Doubles Down on Chip Diversity with AMD(00:07:52) - NBA Launches 'Inside the Game' Powered by AWS(00:14:27) - EC2 Image Builder Update(00:18:13) - AWS releases Open Source MCP Server for Amazon Bedrock Agent(00:22:57) - AWS Knowledge Based MCP Server(00:27:27) - AWS Service Quotations: Automatic Management(00:30:31) - Amazon RDS for DB2 Launches Native Database Backups(00:32:36) - GCP.com: Gemini CLI for PostgreSQL(00:37:34) - Google Announces $4 Billion Investment in Arkansas(00:42:06) - Microsoft Restructuring its Azure Commercial Organization(00:44:58) - Microsoft Bringing Xai Grok 4 to Azure AI Foundry(00:47:24) - Microsoft to Allow Personal Copilot in Corporate Environments(00:51:07) - Fabric Mirroring for Azure SQL Managed Instances(00:54:28) - Microsoft Firewall Update 1.8(00:56:32) - DigitalOcean: AI Storage, NFS, and More(00:59:58) - DigitalOcean Build smarter Agents with OpenAI and VPC(01:02:07) - DigitalOcean Brings Per Second Charges to Droplet Plans(01:04:40) - per second billing for Windows at DigitalOcean(01:06:15) - Snowflake Managed MCP Servers for Secure Governed Data(01:11:51) - Week in the Cloud: September 7, 2017

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 ana... Chapters (00:00:00) - Cloud Podcast: Databricks 1(00:01:11) - Google and Kegel Launch Five Day Training Course on AI Agents(00:03:34) - Atlasian Buys DX: Will It Hurt Their Business?(00:07:03) - Amazon Web Services: New Models for DeepSeek and DeepSe(00:08:42) - Amazon RDS: MySQL Innovation Release 9.4 in Database Preview(00:14:12) - QDeveloper CLI Adds Remote MCPs(00:15:56) - Amazon Nova Act Extension(00:18:08) - Google Cloud: Security Command Center Insights for Kubernetes(00:20:42) - Google's Firestore: MCP for AI Systems(00:22:59) - AI Adoption Among Software Developers Hits 90%, Says Google(00:24:00) - AI: Return on Investment?(00:31:05) - Microsoft's Entra ID Vulnerabilities(00:36:37) - Microsoft Unveils $100 Million AI Data Center(00:40:31) - Azure SQL Server 2020: Managed Instance(00:43:20) - AKS Automatic for Kubernetes + Azure Cloud(00:45:49) - Databricks 1.4(00:47:11) - Microsoft's HPC Infrastructure: HBV5 Series VMs(00:52:08) - NET (for Mobile, Desktop, and More)(00:53:12) - Azure Monitor Kubernetes: Higher throughput & more(00:54:56) - Microsoft SQL: Integrations with Grafana(01:01:59) - Microsoft Expands Fabric with New Features and Collaboration(01:05:21) - Azure Application Gateway: zero downtime upgrade capability(01:07:28) - Oracle's AI Strategy: Setting the Standard(01:10:42) - Week in Cloud: Exploring the Cloud(01:11:26) - The Need for Prompt Engineering in Cloud Software(01:18:28) - Image Generation with Google GPT5(01:22:04) - A Week in the Life

Welcome to episode 324 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Jonathan are your hosts, bringing you all the latest news and announcements in Cloud and AI. This week we have some exec changes over at Oracle, a LOT of announcements about Sonnet 4.5, and even some marketplace updates over at Azure! Let’s get started.  Titles we almost went with this week Oracle’s Executive Shuffle: Promoting from Within While Chasing from Behind Copilot Takes the Wheel on Your Legacy Code Highway Queue Up for GPUs: Google’s Take-a-Number Approach to AI Computing License to Bill: Google’s 400% Markup Grievance Autopilot Engages: GKE Goes Full Self-Driving Mode SQL Server Finally Gets a Lake House Instead of a Server Room Microsoft Gives Office Apps Their Own AI Interns Claude and Present Danger: The AI That Codes for 30 Hours Straight The Claude Father Part 4.5: An Offer Your Code Can’t Refuse CUD You Believe It? Google Makes Discounts Actually Flexible ECS Goes Full IPv6: No IPv4s Given Breaking News: AWS Finally Lets You Hit the Emergency Stop Button One Marketplace to Rule Them All BigQuery Gets a Crystal Ball and a Chatty Friend Azure’s September to Remember: When Certificates and Allocators Attack Shall I Compare Thee to a Sonnet? 4.5 Ways Anthropic Just Leveled Up AWS provides a big red button Follow Up  01:26 The global harms of restrictive cloud licensing, one year later | Google Cloud Blog Google Cloud filed a formal complaint with the European Commission one year ago about Microsoft’s anti-competitive cloud licensing practices, specifically the 400% price markup Microsoft imposes on customers who move Windows Server workloads to non-Azure clouds. The UK Competition and Markets Authority found that restrictive licensing costs UK cloud customers £500 million annually due to lack of competition, while US government agencies overspend by $750 million yearly because of Microsoft’s licensing tactics. Microsoft recently disclosed that forcing software customers to use Azure is one of three pillars driving its growth and is implementing new licensing changes preventing managed service providers from hosting certain workloads on Azure competitors. Multiple regulators globally including South Africa and the US FTC are now investigating Microsoft’s cloud licensing practices, with the CMA finding that Azure has gained customers at 2-3x the rate of competitors since implementing restrictive terms. A European Centre for International Political Economy study suggests ending restrictive licensing could unlock €1.2 trillion in additional EU GDP by 2030 and generate €450 billion annually in fiscal savings and productivity gains. 03:32 Jonathan – “I’d feel happier about these complaints Google were making if they actually reciprocated the deals they make for their customers in the... Chapters (00:00:00) - GCP Alumni(00:01:35) - Microsoft's Cloud Licensing Practices(00:05:22) - Microsoft introduces Office Agent in Copilot Chat(00:08:13) - Claude Sonet 4.5 Launches(00:09:33) - Claude 4.5 New Feature Announcement(00:15:12) - Bill Gates on ChatGPT and Bots(00:16:10) - Snowflake, Cloud Sonnet 4.5, and SQL Server(00:17:39) - Amazon EC2, ECS now supporting IPv6 Only workloads(00:20:23) - Amazon Machine Image Governance (New Parameter)(00:25:42) - Easy to Auto-Scalping (New Feature)(00:29:23) - Amazon EC2: Managed Serverless Instances(00:33:28) - AWS Outposts: Third-Party Storage Integration(00:36:45) - Google's Flex Start VMS for AI & GKE Autop(00:41:48) - Google Launches Cloud SQL, BigQuery Extensions(00:45:11) - BigQuery and Google Analytics: AI Data Analysis & Forecast(00:47:02) - Microsoft Azure Migrate and Modernize: Cloud Code vs. Microsoft(00:53:22) - Microsoft's Azure Marketplace Unifying with AppSource(00:56:06) - Azure Compute Gallery: Soft Delete(00:57:49) - Microsoft Azure Outages: Lessons Learned(01:03:32) - Week in Cloud: A Week of Consistency

Welcome to episode 322 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! We have BIG NEWS – Jonathan is back! He’s joined in the studio by Justin and Ryan to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including ongoing drama in the Microsoft/OpenAI drama, saying goodbye to data transfer fees (in the EU), M4 Power, and more. Let’s get started!   Titles we almost went with this week EU Later, Egress Fees: Google’s Brexit from Data Transfer Charges The Keys to the Cosmos: Azure Unlocks Customer Control Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Google Splits LLM Inference for Better Performance OpenAI and Microsoft: From Exclusive to It’s Complicated  Google’s New Model Has Trust Issues (And That’s a Good Thing) Mac to the Future: AWS Brings M4 Power to the Cloud Oracle’s Cloud Nine: Stock Soars on Half-Trillion Dollar Dreams ChatGPT: From Chat Bot to Hat Bot (Everyone’s Wearing Different Professional Hats) Five Billion Reasons to Love British AI NVMe Gonna Give You Up: AWS Delivers the Storage Metrics You’ve Been Missing Tea and AI: OpenAI Crosses the Pond The Norway Bug Strikes Back: A New YAML Hope A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack channel for more info. AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money  01:33 Microsoft and OpenAI make a deal: Reading between the lines of their secretive new agreement – GeekWire Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding that will restructure their partnership, with OpenAI’s nonprofit entity receiving an equity stake exceeding $100 billion in a new public benefit corporation where Microsoft will play a major role. The deal addresses the AGI clause that previously allowed OpenAI to unilaterally dissolve the partnership upon achieving artificial general intelligence, which had been a significant risk for Microsoft’s multi-billion-dollar investment. Both companies are diversifying their partnerships – Microsoft is now using Anthropic’s technology for some Office 365 AI features, while OpenAI has signed a $300 billion computing contract with Oracle over five years. Microsoft’s exclusivity on OpenAI cloud workloads has been replaced with a right of first refusal, enabling OpenAI to participate in the $500 billion Stargate AI project with Oracle and other partners. The restructuring allows OpenAI to raise capital for its mission while ensuring the nonprofit’s resources grow proportionally, with plans to use funds for community impact, including a recently launched $50 million grant program. ALSO: OpenAI and Microsoft sign preliminary deal to revise partnership terms –  Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:00:34) - Microsoft and OpenAI Restructuring(00:06:55) - OpenAI's ChatGPT 5.0 Update(00:12:33) - ChatGPT: How People Are Using the Technology(00:16:33) - OpenAI's Stargate UK Announcement(00:18:24) - LocalStack for Mac: New Instances Launch(00:25:06) - Amazon EC2: More NVME Performance Metrics with EFA(00:26:43) - AWS Launches R8GN(00:28:20) - AWS CDK Preview: Refactoring with Cloudformation(00:29:59) - Amazon CloudTrail: AI Security Analysis with a McP Server(00:33:44) - Amazon Web Services: Cloud Commitment Insurance(00:35:37) - Google Cloud Launches Multi-Cloud Data Transfer Essentials(00:40:13) - Kubernetes 1.34(00:44:17) - Google Cloud introduces new recipe for disaggregated AI Inferance(00:46:47) - Google's Data Science Agent Now Generates Code for BigQuery,(00:49:09) - Google Cloud Launches DNS Armor to Detect Cyberthreats(00:52:02) - Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)(00:54:32) - Google Cloud: Alloy DB on C4(00:56:42) - Google Cloud Trace now supports Open telemetry protocol (OTEL)(01:00:19) - Google's New 'Practical Guide to Data Science'(01:02:26) - Vault Gemma: The First Large Language Model with Privacy(01:06:05) - Customer Managed Keys(01:12:39) - Azure Logic Apps: Model Context Protocol Server (MCP)(01:14:46) - Microsoft's Kubernetes Storage v2(01:16:46) - Microsoft Fabric and AI Foundry: New Features, New Features(01:18:50) - Oracle Stock Jumping On Cloud Revenue Forecast(01:22:40) - Week in the Cloud: September 7, 2017

The Cloud Pod is in Tears Trying to Understand Azure Tiers    Welcome to episode 321 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are all on hand to bring you the latest in cloud and AI news, including increased metrics data (because who doesn’t love more data), some issues over at Cloudflare, and even bigger issues at Builder.ai  – plus so much more. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Lost in Translation: Google Helps IPv6 Find Its Way to IPv4 BigQuery’s Soft Landing for Hard Problems CloudWatch Gets a Two-Week Memory Upgrade VM Glow-Up: From Gen1 Zero to Gen2 Hero Azure Gets Contextual: API Management Learns to Speak AI The Cloud Pod: Now Broadcasting from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea LoRA LoRA on the Wall, Who’s the Finest Model of Them All Azure Says MFA or the Highway for Resource Management Two-Factor or Two-Furious: Azure’s Security Ultimatum Agent 007: License to Build CUD You Believe It? Google’s Discounts Get More Flexible WAF’s New Deal: Free Logs with Every Million Requests Served SOC It To Me: Google’s AI Security Workshop Tour MFA mandatory in Azure, now you too can hate/hate MS Authenticator AWS AMIs no longer the Tribbles of cloud computing ECS Exec; Justin’s prediction from 2018 finally comes true General News 00:56 FinOps Weekly Summit 2025 Victor Garcia reached out and asked us to share the news about the FinOps Weekly Summit coming up on October 23rd, 2025.  A lot of great speakers; if you’re in the FinOps space, we recommend it.  Want to register? You can do that here.  01:53 Ignite Registration Opens  San Francisco, Moscone Center November 18–21, 2025 Need to convince your manager to pay for you to go? Find that letter here.  02:45 Addressing the unauthorized issuance of multiple TLS certificates for 1.1.1.1 Some issues over at Cloudflare recently… Fina CA issued 12 unauthorized TLS certificates for Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver IP address between February 2024 and August 2025, violating domain control validation requirements and potentially allowing man-in-the-middle attacks on DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS connections. The incident highlights vulnerabilities in the Certificate Authority trust model where any trusted CA can issue certificates for any domain or IP without proper validation, though exploitation would require the attacker to have the private key, intercept traffic, and target clients that trust Fina CA (primarily Microsoft systems). Cloudflare failed to detect these certificates for months despite operating its own Certificate Transparency monitoring service because its system wasn’t configured to alert on IP address certificates rather than domain names, exposing gaps in its internal security monitoring. The certificates have been Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: Trying to Understand Azure tiers(00:01:04) - Two Up! Finops Weekly Summit and Ignite(00:02:56) - Cloudflare: Certificate Transparency is Critical Infrastructure(00:06:08) - AI is How ML Makes Money(00:08:44) - Visual Studio: August Update to Copilot(00:11:16) - Amazon.com: Regions and Zones in AWS Global View(00:14:19) - CloudWatch Metrics Insights: Extended to 3 Hours(00:16:19) - CloudWatch: Single Monitoring Alarms for Dynamic Resource Fleets(00:17:32) - AWS User Notifications now support centralized notification management across multi-(00:19:46) - ECS: Monitoring AMI usage with Cloud Shell(00:23:39) - AWS Terraform: Five Year Old Code(00:25:14) - AWS IAM: Network Parameter Controls for VPCs(00:27:56) - AWS WAF now provides 500 MB of free CloudWatch log(00:31:00) - WASP Config: Resource Tag Tracking for IAM Policies(00:33:01) - GCP: DNS64 and NAT64 for IPv6(00:34:28) - BigQuery Data Storage: Soft Failover(00:35:58) - Google Expands Cloud CUDs to Include HANA, Cloud(00:39:04) - Google Cloud Launches Society Operations Center Workshop(00:40:13) - Google Data Proc now supports multi-tenant cluster(00:41:37) - Google's Official Rust SDK(00:43:22) - Microsoft Azure: Upgrade to Gen2 with Trustful Launch enabled(00:45:34) - Azure API Management: New Features and Native Auto-Scaling(00:46:37) - Microsoft Launches GPT Real Time on Azure AI Foundry(00:50:47) - Azure AI Foundry(00:53:23) - Week in Cloud: September 7, 2018

Welcome to episode 320 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan are coming to you from Justin’s echo chamber and bringing all the latest in AI and Cloud news, including updates to Google’s Anti-trust case, AWS Cost MCP, new regions, updates to EKS, Veo, and Claude, and more! Let’s get into it.  Titles we almost went with this week: Breaking Bad Bottlenecks: AWS  Cooks Up Faster Container Pulls The Bucket List: Finding Your Lost Storage Dollars State of Denial: Terraform Finally Stops Saving Your Passwords Three Stages of Azure Grief: Development, Preview, and Launch Ground Control to Major Cloud: Microsoft Launches Planetary Computer Pro Veo Vidi Vici: Google Conquers Video Editing Red Alert: AWS Makes Production Accounts Actually Look Dangerous Amazon EKS Discovers the F5 Key  Chaos Theory Meets ChatGPT: When Your Reliability Data Gets an AI Therapist Breaking Bad (Services): How AI Helps You Find What’s Already   Broken Breaking Up is Hard to Cloud: Gemini Moves Back In Intel Inside Your Secrets: TDX Takes Over Google Cloud Lord of the Regions: The Return of the Kiwi  All Blacks and All Stacks: AWS Goes Full Kiwi Azure Forecast: 100% Chance of Budget Alert Storms Google Keeps Its Cloud Together: A $2.5T Near Miss Shell We Dance? AWS Makes CLI Scripting Less Painful AWS Finally Admits Nobody Remembers All Those CLI Commands Cache Me If You Claude Your AWS Console gets its Colors, just don’t choose red shirts Amazon Q walks into a bar, Tells MCP to order it a beer.. The Bartender sighs and mutters “at least chatgpt just hallucinates its beer” Ryan’s s****y scripts now as a AWS CLI Library A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack channel for more info. General News 00:57 Google Dodges A 2.5t Breakup We have breaking news – and it’s good news for Google.  Google successfully avoided a potential $2.5 trillion breakup following antitrust proceedings, maintaining its current corporate structure despite regulatory pressure. The decision represents a significant outcome for Big Tech antitrust cases, potentially setting a precedent for how regulators approach market dominance issues in the cloud and technology sectors. Cloud customers and partners can expect business continuity with Google Cloud Platform services, avoiding potential disruptions that could have resulted from a corporate restructuring. The ruling may influence how other major cloud providers structure their businesses and approach regulatory compliance, particularly around bundling services and market competition. Enterprise customers relying on Google’s integrated ecosystem of cloud, advertising, and productivity tools can continue their current architectures without concerns about service separation. You just KNOW Microsoft is super mad about this.  AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money  02:16 Introducing GPT-Realtime OpenAI‘s Chapters (00:00:07) - Cloud Pod: Azure vs GCP(00:01:01) - Google Stops Exploring a Breakup(00:03:49) - Terraform Cloud Provider 7.0 in general availability(00:06:13) - How to Query Gremlin's LLM with Chaos Engineering Data(00:08:32) - Amazon EKS: Parallel Polls for AI & Windows(00:15:52) - Amazon.com: Terraform Deployment for SFTP Connectors(00:19:11) - Amazon Q Developer Adds Central Admin Control for MCP Servers(00:21:04) - AWS i8ge and M8i Flex Instances(00:24:55) - Amazon M7i Flex Instances: Best Cloud Instances(00:27:53) - Wales: New AWS Region Launches in New Zealand(00:32:56) - Google Cloud: New Features and No Cost Option for Videos(00:37:11) - GKE Container Optimized Compute(00:38:42) - Intel TDX for Confidential Computing with Google(00:40:17) - GCP EventArc Advanced is Now Generally Available(00:42:31) - Azure AI Foundry: Comprehensive agent observability capabilities(00:46:59) - Microsoft's Planetary Computer Pro: An All-in-One for(00:50:56) - Microsoft's Migration From MOSP to Microsoft Accounts Causes False Budget Alert(00:52:49) - Microsoft to Make UltraDs More Affordable in Multiple Regions(00:54:00) - The Business Talk Podcast(00:55:00) - Week in Cloud: Exploring the Cloud

Welcome to episode 319 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan are in the studio to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news. AWS Cost MCP makes exploring your finops data as simple as english text. We’ve got a sunnier view for junior devs, a Microsoft open source development, tokens, and it’s even Kubernetes’ birthday – let’s get into it!  Titles we almost went with this week: From Linux Hater to Open Source Darling: A Microsoft Love Story 20,000 Lines of Code and a Dream: Microsoft’s Open Source Glow-Up Ctrl+Alt+Delete Your Assumptions: Microsoft Goes Full Penguin Token and Esteem: Amazon Bedrock Gets a Counter CSI: Cloud Scene Investigation The Great SQL Migration: How AI Became the Universal Translator Token and Ye Shall Receive: Bedrock’s New Counting Feature The Count of Monte Token: A Bedrock Tale – mk Ctrl+Z for Your Database: Now with Built-in Lag Time IP Freely: GKE Takes the Pain Out of Address Management AWS CEO: AI Can’t Replace Junior Devs Because Someone Has to Fix the AI’s Code Better Late Than Never: RDS PostgreSQL Gets Time Travel The SQL Whisperer: Teaching AI to Speak Database DigitalOcean Goes Full Chatbot: Your Infrastructure Now Speaks Human Musk vs Cook: The App Store Wars Episode AI Firestore Goes Mongo: A Database Love Story GKE Turns 10: Now With More Candles and Less Complexity Prime Day Infrastructure: Now With 87,000 AI Chips and a Robot Army AWS Scales to Quadrillion Requests: Your Black Friday Traffic Looks Cute AWS billing now speaks human, thanks to MCPs The Bastion Holds: Azure’s New Gateway to Kubernetes Kingdoms The Surge Before the Merge: Azure’s New Upgrade Strategy CNI Overlay: Because Your Pods Deserve Their Own ZIP Code AI Is Going Great – or How ML Makes Money  00:46 Musk’s xAI sues Apple, OpenAI alleging scheme that harmed X, Grok xAI filed a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI, alleging anticompetitive practices in AI chatbot distribution, claiming Apple deprioritizes competing AI apps like Grok in the App Store while favoring ChatGPT through direct integration into iOS devices. The lawsuit highlights tensions in AI platform distribution models, where cloud-based AI services depend on mobile app stores for user access, potentially creating gatekeeping concerns for competing generative AI providers. Apple’s partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iPhone, iPad, and Mac products represents a shift toward native AI integration rather than app-based access, which could impact how cloud AI services reach end users. The dispute underscores growing competition in the generative AI market, where multiple players, including xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Perplexity, are vying for market position through both cloud APIs and mobile distribution channels. For cloud developers, this case raises questions about AI service distribution strategies and whether direct device integration partnerships will become necessary to compete effectively against app store-based distribution models. 01:55 Justin – “There’s always a potential for conflict of interest when you have a partnership like this, but also the app store – there’s a... Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:00:58) - Amazon's Grok Sues Apple Over App Store Distribution(00:04:19) - Amazon CEO: AI Replacing Junior Developers is the Dumbest Idea(00:11:10) - Amazon: Count Your Tokens With AWS AI(00:17:32) - Amazon RDS for Postgres: Delayed Read Replicas(00:22:41) - Amazon Prime Day: My Favorite Amazon Announcement(00:23:45) - Amazon's Prime Day 2022(00:25:15) - AWS: How AWS Met Prime Day(00:29:17) - Amazon's Databases Hit Record Highs During Prime Day(00:30:14) - CloudTrail: What Caches Do They Use? vs.(00:33:37) - Amazon's AWS Countdown(00:35:52) - Google's AI Developer Tooling: Which One to Use?(00:40:12) - Google Launches Gemini 2.5 Flash Image on Vertex AI(00:42:54) - Google Cloud Asset Inventory: Root Cause Analysis Tool(00:46:12) - Google's automated SQL Translation from Databrick Spark SQL to Big(00:48:10) - Google's White Paper on AI Inference Environmental Impact(00:52:23) - Google Cloud Compliance Manager: Integrated Security and Compliance Management(00:59:04) - Kubernetes: GK Auto IPAM(01:01:59) - GKE: Happy 10th Anniversary!(01:08:24) - Microsoft Azure News: Week Three(01:09:47) - Microsoft vs. AWS: Open Source and Scale(01:14:01) - Microsoft to Give DocumentDB to the Linux Foundation(01:15:57) - Azure Bastion now supports Private AKS Clusters via Tunnel(01:24:11) - Microsoft Migrate now enables direct migration to zone redundant storage disks(01:29:49) - Digital Ocean's MCP Server Now Available(01:35:33) - Week in the Cloud: September 7, 2017

 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: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack channel for more info. 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’  Chapters (00:00:00) - Week in the Cloud: GCP, Azure, VS Code Bind(00:00:57) - AOL to discontinue dial-up service(00:02:27) - UK Government Tells You to Deactivate Your Emails to Save Water(00:06:03) - UK's Data Center Problem(00:08:18) - GitHub Actions: SHA pinning and more(00:11:04) - Curo Pricing Plans Go Live for AWS(00:16:05) - Aurora DB Turns 10 Years Old(00:18:22) - Happy Birthday to My Sister!(00:18:36) - Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services(00:20:53) - Gartner's Strategic Cloud Platform Services(00:25:01) - Gartner's Cloud Assessment: Microsoft, Google, Azure(00:26:32) - Go Driver to Reduce Database Failover Times by 60%(00:28:23) - Amazon AWS Announces R8i Flex and R7i Flex(00:30:58) - GKE: Multi-Subnet Support for Kubernetes(00:33:51) - Database Center for Google Cloud: Unifying Database Fleet Management(00:35:59) - Google Cloud HSM: Client Side Encryption(00:38:06) - Google Cloud Announces Comprehensive AI Security Abilities(00:41:23) - Google LLM: Right Size for GPUs and TPUs(00:44:14) - Microsoft Terraform Adds Ms. Graph Provider in Public Preview(00:46:45) - Azure AI Foundry: Unifying OneLake and Agent Factory(00:52:03) - Gartner's Cloud: Oracle-Microsoft partnership(00:54:52) - DigitalOcean Announces SQL Stored Procedures Support(00:58:35) - Shifting Down: How Google Does It(01:04:19) - Back in the Cloud: Week Three(01:04:43) - Week in Cloud: The Cloud Podcast

Welcome to episode 317 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and an out-of-breath (from outrunning bears) Ryan are back in the studio to bring you another episode of everyone’s favorite cloud and AI news wrap-up. This week we’ve got GTP-5, Oracle’s newly minted AI conference, hallucinations (not the good kind), and even a Cloud Journey follow-up. Let’s get into it!  Titles we almost went with this week: Oracle Intelligence: Mission Las Vegas AI World: Oracle’s Excellent Adventure AI Gets a Reality Check: Amazon’s New Math Teacher for Hallucinating Models Jules Verne’s 20,000 Lines Under the C GPT-5: The Empire Strikes Back at Computing Costs 5⃣Five Alive: OpenAI’s Latest Language Model Drops GPT-5 is Alive! (And Ready for Your API Calls) From Kanban to Kan’t-Ban: Alienate Your User Base in One Update No More Console Hopping: ECS Logs Stay Put Following the Paper Trail: ECS Logs Go Live The Pull Request Whisperer Five’s Company: DigitalOcean Joins the GPT Party WireGuard Your Kubernetes: The Mesh-iah Has Arrived EKS-tending Your Reach: When Your Nodes Need a VPN Alternative Buttercup Blooms: DARPA’s Prize-Winning AI Security Tool Goes Public From DARPA to Docker: How Buttercup Brings AI Bug-Hunting to Your Laptop Agent 007: License to Query Compliance Manager: Because Nobody Dreams of Filling Out Federal Paperwork Do Compliance Managers dream of Public Sector sheep? Blob’s Your Uncle: Finding Lost Data in the Cloud Wassette: Teaching Your AI Assistant to Go Shopping for Tools Monitor, Monitor on the Wall, Who’s the Most Secure of All? Better Late Than IPv-Never VPC Logs: Now with 100% Less Manual Labor CloudWatch Catches All the Flows in Your Organization The Organization-Wide Net: No VPC Left Behind SQS Goes Super Size: Would You Like to Quadruple That? One MiB to Rule Them All: SQS’s Payload Growth Spurt Microsoft Finally Merges with Its $7.5 Billion Side Piece From Hub to Spoke: GitHub Loses Its Independence Cloud Run Forest Run: Google’s AI Workshop Marathon From Zero to AI Hero: Google’s Production Pipeline Workshop The Fast and the Serverless: Cloud Run Drift A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack channel for more info. General News  01:17 GitHub will be folded into Microsoft proper as CEO steps down – Ars Technica GitHub will lose its operational independence and be integrated into Microsoft’s CoreAI organization in 2025, ending its separate CEO structure that has existed since Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition in 2018. The reorganization eliminates the CEO position, with GitHub’s leadership team reporting to multiple executives within CoreAI rather than a single leader, potentially impacting decision-making speed and product direction. This structural change could affect GitHub’s developer-focused culture and remote-first operations that have distinguished it from Microsoft’s traditional corporate structure. The integration into CoreAI suggests Micr...

Welcome to episode 316 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’ve got earnings (with sound effects, obviously) as well as news from DeepSeek, DocumentDB, DigitalOcean, and a bunch of GPU news. Justin and Matt are here to lead you through all of it, so let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week: Lake Sentinel: The Security Data Monster Nobody Asked For Certificate Authority Issues: When Your Free Lunch Gets a Security Audit Slash and Learn: Gemini Gets Command-ing DigitalOcean Drops Anchor in AI Waters with Gradient Platform The Three Stages of Azure Grief: Development, Preview, and Launch E for Enormous: Azure’s New VM Sizes Are Anything But Virtual SRE You Later: Azure’s AI Agent Takes Over Your On-Call Duties Site Reliability Engineer? More Like AI Reliability Engineer Azure Disks Get Elastic Waistbands Agent Smith Would Be Proud: Google’s Multi-Agent Matrix Gets Real C4 Yourself: Google Explodes Into GA with Intel’s Latest Silicon The Cost is Right: GCP Edition Penny for Your Cloud Thoughts: Google’s Budget-Friendly Update DocumentDB Goes on a Diet: Now Available in Serverless Size MongoDB Compatibility Gets the AWS Serverless Treatment No Server? No Problem: DocumentDB Joins the Serverless Party Stream Big or Go Home: Lambda’s 10x Payload Boost Lambda Response Streaming: Because Size Matters GPT Goes Open Source Shopping GPT’s Open Source Awakening When Your Antivirus Needs an Antivirus: Enter Project Ire The Opus Among Us: Anthropic’s Coding Assistant Gets an Upgrade Serverless is becoming serverful in streaming responses General News  02:08 It’s Earnings Time! (INSERT AWESOME SOUND EFFECTS HERE)  02:16 Alphabet beats earnings expectations, raises spending forecast Google Cloud revenue hit $13.62 billion, up 32% year-over-year, with OpenAI now using Google’s infrastructure for ChatGPT, signaling growing enterprise confidence in Google’s AI infrastructure capabilities. Alphabet is raising its 2025 capital expenditure forecast from $75 billion to $85 billion, driven by cloud and AI demand, with plans to increase spending further in 2026 as it competes for AI workloads. AI Overviews now serves 2 billion monthly users across 200+ countries, while the Gemini app reached 450 million monthly active users, demonstrating Google’s scale in deploying AI services globally. The $10 billion increase in planned capital spending reflects the infrastructure arms race among cloud providers to capture AI workloads, which require significant compute and specialized hardware investments. Google’s cloud growth rate of 32% outpaces its overall revenue growth of 14%, indicating the strategic importance of cloud services as traditional search and advertising face increased AI competition. 03:55 Justin – “I don’t know what it takes to actually run one of these large models at like ultimate scale that like a ChatGPT needs or Anthropic, but I have to imagine it’s just thousands and thousands of GPUs just working nonstop.” 04:31 Microsoft (MSFT) Q4 earnings report 2025 Microsoft reported Q4 fiscal 2025 earnings with revenue of $76.44 billion, up 18% year-ove... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure: Why Microsoft's New AI Agent Won't Work(00:01:17) - Earnings season(00:01:43) - Google Cloud Revenue Up 32%, Capital Spending Forecast Up(00:03:51) - Microsoft Reports Strong Cloud Growth, AI Investment(00:05:51) - Amazon's AI, Cloud Growth(00:10:24) - Google's DeepThink AI for Complex Reasoning(00:13:13) - OpenAI releases new GPT OSS120B and OSS(00:15:32) - Microsoft's AI-enabled Binary Analyzer(00:24:27) - Good Testing Practices in Cloud(00:25:59) - Claude Opus 4.1 Upgrade to Sonnet 4(00:27:46) - AWS G6F: Fractional GPU Instances(00:29:40) - Amazon DocumentDB DCU Scale(00:34:13) - Amazon's Region Switch(00:37:28) - AWS Lambda: 200 Megabyte Response Streaming Capacity(00:38:55) - Gemini CLI: Adding slash commands to Google Cloud Code(00:41:06) - Agent to Agent Protocol Upgraded to Version 3(00:42:57) - GK Cloud: C4 Bare Metal VM on the Intel Xeon(00:44:35) - Google Cloud Hub Optimization and Cost Explorer Expands to Public Preview(00:47:04) - Microsoft's Sentinel Data Lake Announcement(00:50:42) - Microsoft's New E128 & E1092 VM Sizes(00:54:17) - Azure SRE Agent Billing Model(00:57:02) - Azure 2.8 Live Resizing for Ultra NVMe disks(00:59:13) - Azure Backup now supports agentless multi-disk backups(01:02:05) - Digital Ocean Brings AI to a Unified Platform(01:03:50) - This Week in the Cloud: Ending

 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 Shar... Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: EC2 Shutdown Explained(00:01:08) - Microsoft SharePoint zero-day targeting government agencies(00:05:33) - Cloudflare Supports the White House AI Action Plan(00:10:04) - Trump's Anti-Woke AI Order(00:15:28) - NASA's AI Satellite Just Made a Decision Without Humans(00:21:14) - GitHub Launches Spark: A New Way to Build Micro(00:22:50) - Amazon AI Code Coding Assistant Hacked(00:26:01) - AWS Cross-Team Optimization Hub Update 1.4(00:27:50) - Amazon EC2: Auto-shutdown and more(00:30:44) - Amazon SQS Introduces Fair Queues to Prevent(00:34:11) - Amazon CloudWatch: Generative AI Observability in Preview(00:37:37) - GKE: Celebrating 10 Years in the Cloud(00:44:06) - Google's BigQuery for AI Agents(00:45:37) - Google Cloud: Global Endpoints on Vertex AI(00:50:21) - NotebookLM: Video Overviews in Cloud Documentation(00:52:22) - Azure VM Availability Monitoring(00:55:39) - Microsoft 365 copilot search: Unified Search with AI(00:57:42) - Azure App Service: Important Changes to Managed Certificates(01:02:29) - Azure Firewall: Draft and Deploy (Preview)(01:05:25) - Cloud Journey: Two Cloud Journey Stories(01:05:45) - IAM Identity Center vs. Cloud Shell: Best Authentication Solution(01:12:48) - 1Password Passkey(01:14:15) - CrowdStrike Expands Security Resilience Program

Welcome to episode 314 of The Cloud Pod, where your hosts, Matt and Ryan, are holding down the fort in Justin’s absence and bringing what’s left of our audience (those of you still here after the last time they were left in charge) the latest and greatest in cloud and tech news. We’ve got undersea cables, vector storage, and even some hobos – but not the kind on trains. Plus AWS S3 Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week: S3 Gets Direction: AWS Points to Vector Storage Vector? I Hardly Know Her! S3’s New AI Storage Play S3 Finds Its Magnitude and Direction Claude Goes to Wall Street Anthropic’s Bull Run Into Financial Services AI Assistant Gets Its Series 7 License Nova Scotia: AWS Brings Regional Flavor to AI Models The Fine-Tuning of the Shrew: Teaching Nova Models New Tricks Nova-caine: Numbing the Pain of Model Customization AgentCore Blimey: AWS Gives AI Agents Their License to Scale The Agent Infrastructure: Mission Deployable From Zero to Agent Hero: AWS Tackles the Production Problem SageMaker Gets Its Data Act Together From Catalog to QuickSight: A Data Love Story The Great Data Unification of 2024 AWS Free Tier Gets a $200 Makeover EKS-treme Makeover: Cluster Edition #⃣100K Nodes Walk Into a Cluster… S3 Gets Direction: Amazon Points to Vector Storage Amazon S3: Now with 90% Less Vector Bills and 100% More Dimensions Follow Up 01:03 SoftBank and OpenAI’s $500 Billion AI Project Struggles to Get Off Ground The $500 billion AI effort unveiled at the White House has struggled to get off the ground and has scaled back its near-term plans.  It’s been six months since the announcement, where they said they would spend $100B almost immediately, but now they have a more modest goal of building a small data center by the end of the year in Ohio. Softbank committed to $30 billion earlier this year, and it is one of the largest ever startup investments by them, which led them to take on new debt and sell assets.   This investment was made alongside Stargate, giving them a role in the physical infrastructure needed for AI.  Altman, though, has been eager to secure computing power as quickly as possible and has proceeded without Softbank.  Publicly, they say it’s a great partnership, and they look forward to advancing projects in multiple states Oracle was part of Stargate, but the recent 30B deal just signed with includes a commitment of 4.5 gigawatts of capacity, and would consume the equivalent power of more than two Hoover Dams, or about 4 million homes.  Oracle was also named part of the deal with UAE firm MGX as a partner, but Oracle CEO Safra Catz said that Stargate hadn’t been formed yet, as of last month.  02:31 Matthew – “…everyone’s like, how hard can it be to build a data center? But it’s city zoning, power consumption, grid improvements, water for cooling… getting communities to approve – and these things end up being a massive undertaking. And it takes the hyperscalers a long time to get these things up and operational. So it doesn’t surprise me that a small data center by the end of the year is probably something that was already in the works beforehand; they’re just taking over other plans. Most da... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure 1.8(00:01:04) - SoftBank and OpenAI's 500 Billion AI Project(00:04:53) - These Undersea Cable Sensors Could Aid Climate Change Monitoring(00:08:47) - AWS, Google Cloud AI for Financial Services(00:14:15) - Bedrock 12 Live Video Understanding Models now available in AWS(00:17:21) - Harness AI(00:20:06) - AWS New York City: AWS S3 Visions and More(00:22:56) - Elasticsearch + S3: Vector Search(00:24:47) - Amazon Nova Customization in SageMaker(00:27:40) - Amazon Bedrock Agent Core: Enterprise-grade Infrastructure for deploying AI(00:33:51) - Amazon SageMaker Catalog with Quicksight Integration(00:37:52) - WASP Introduces Free tier(00:40:01) - Amazon EC2 Budgeting Update(00:43:28) - Amazon EventBridge Locate & Debug Kinesis Data(00:47:29) - AWS S3 metadata: Complete metadata for all your S3(00:52:05) - Oh yeah, double-layer encryption with ON S3(00:52:54) - AWS Lambda: Direct to IDE and Remote Debugging(00:57:39) - ECS: Blue Green Deployments(01:00:57) - Amazon Bracket Adds New 54-Bit Qubit Quantum Processor(01:03:48) - Google CloudWatch and LibTPU for optimizing Google TPU resources(01:06:08) - Application Monitoring: Cloud Observation & Investigations(01:09:49) - Google Expands DeepSeen R1 to Microsoft Fabric(01:16:07) - AWS CLI for Migrating From Availability Sets and Basic Load Bal(01:18:42) - Microsoft's Cloud HSM(01:21:04) - Microsoft's New Hobo Model for ExpressRoute Gateways(01:23:02) - Azure Functions: Public Preview 2.8(01:26:09) - Azure WAF for Application Load Balancers for Kubernet(01:29:32) - Week in the Cloud

Welcome to episode 313 of The Cloud Pod, where your hosts, Matt, Ryan, and Justin, are here to bring you all the latest in Cloud and AI news. This week we’ve got an installation of Cloud Journey featuring Gartner and chaos AND an aftershow! We’ve got acquisition news, new tools, an undersea cable, and even a little chaos, all right now in the cloud. Let’s get into it!  Titles we almost went with this week: From Vibe Check to Production Spec Node More Mr. Nice Guy: AWS Locks Down Access Until You Ask Nicely Grok’s New Feature: Ask Elon First The AI That Phones Home to Dad Musk-See TV: When Your Chatbot Needs Parental Guidance Oracle’s Federal Discount: 75% Off for Six Months (Terms and Conditions Apply) GameDay: Not Just for Sports Anymore Bob the Builder Center: Can We Fix AWS? Yes We Can! Bucket List: Google Cloud Storage Finally Lets You Pack Up and Move The Great Bucket Migration: No Forwarding Address Required Compose Yourself: Cloud Run Gets Docker-mented Survey Says: Your Team Needs a Performance Check-Up From Florida With Love: Google’s New Cable Has a License to Transmit Sol Train: Google Lays Track Across the Atlantic Finding the Right Gradient for Your AI Journey Google Cracks the Code on AWS’s Cloud Castle Breaking Cloud: Google’s Data Analytics Cook Up Market Share From Chat to Churn: The Great GPT Subscription Exodus AWS Finally Filters Out the Pricing Noise The Price is Right: AWS Edition Gets New Search Features Four Filters and a Pricing API Walk Into a Cloud Fee-fi-fo-fum who has a flash reasoning model Follow Up 02:01 Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO Cognition acquired Windsurf’s IP, product, and remaining talent after Google hired away the CEO and senior staff, highlighting the intense competition for AI coding expertise among major tech companies. The deal follows a failed $3 billion acquisition attempt by OpenAI and Google’s $2.4 billion licensing and compensation package to secure Windsurf’s leadership, demonstrating the premium valuations for AI coding technology. Both companies develop AI coding agents designed to accelerate software development, with Cognition’s Devin agent and Windsurf’s tools representing the growing market for AI-powered developer productivity solutions. The acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees receive accelerated vesting and financial participation, addressing the disruption caused by the leadership exodus to Google. This consolidation in the AI coding space suggests smaller startups may struggle to retain talent and remain independent as tech giants aggressively pursue AI engineering capabilities. AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money  04:40 New Grok AI model surprises experts by checking Elon Musk’s views before Chapters (00:00:07) - Breaking Things On Purpose(00:00:44) - Covid Has Hit(00:02:08) - OpenAI Buys Coding Startup Windsurf(00:04:34) - Grok 4: Elon Musk's Tweets Causes a Problem(00:06:50) - DigitalOcean Launches Unified AI Cloud Platform(00:08:58) - Enterprises Are Canceling ChatGPT Subscriptions(00:13:37) - DORA Survey Open Until July 18th(00:17:50) - GCP 2.8: Free to Use, Paid(00:21:23) - SSM: Free vs. Paid Features(00:24:33) - Kiro: AI-assisted Development with VS Code(00:31:29) - Curo: A New Way to Develop with Q IDE(00:34:14) - Amazon AWS Launches P6E GB200 Ultra for AI Training(00:37:09) - Wonders of AWS: Update to AWS Builder Center(00:42:01) - Amazon's AWS Pricing Server Open Source(00:42:48) - Amazon Cloud Portal: AI vs MCP(00:45:00) - Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility to 10 regions(00:49:41) - GCP Backup for Cross-Project Backup (In Preview)(00:51:15) - Cloud Storage Bucket Relocation(00:54:40) - Gentek and Cloud Run integrate with Docker Compose(00:56:40) - Google Launches Seoul, New Transatlantic Cable(00:57:47) - Google Cloud's Cloud Battle(01:01:54) - Azure 2.8 for Mini-Flash Reasoning(01:05:41) - Oracle to Cut Cloud Costs for the Federal Government(01:07:20) - Chaos Engineering for Cloud: Future of IT Security(01:11:17) - Week in Cloud: September 7, 2017(01:11:59) - Stop Force AI Tools on Your Engineers(01:19:48) - Cloud Computing: An Eye on the AI

Welcome to episode 312 of The Cloud Pod, where your hosts, Matt, Ryan, and Justin, are here to bring you all the latest in Cloud and AI news. We’ve got security news, updates from PostgreSQL, Azure firewall and BlobNFS, plus TWO Cloud Journey stories for you!  Thanks for joining us this week in the cloud!   Titles we almost went with this week: Git Happens: Why Your Database Pipeline Keeps Breaking PostgreSQL and Chill: Azure’s New Storage Options for Database Romance NVMe, Myself, and PostgreSQL Canvas and Effect: AWS Paints a New Picture for E-commerce Oracle’s $30 Billion Stargate: The AI Infrastructure Wars Begin Larry’s Last Laugh: Oracle Lands OpenAI’s Mega Deal AI Will See You Now (Couch Not Included) Purview and Present Danger: Microsoft’s AI Security SDK Goes Live The Purview from Up Here: Microsoft’s Bird’s Eye View on AI Data Security Building Bridges: Azure’s Two-Way Street to Active Directory Domain Names: Not Just for Browsers Anymore FUSE or Lose: Azure’s BlobNFS Gets a Speed Boost When Larry Met Andy: An Exadata Love Story Bing There, Done That: Azure’s New Research Assistant The Search is Over: Azure AI Foundry Finds Its Research Groove Memory Lane: Where AI Agents Go to Remember Things Elephants Never Forget, and Now Neither Do Google’s Agents Z3 or Not Z3: That is the Storage Question Local SSD Hero: A New Hope for I/O Intensive Workloads Azure’s Certificate of Insecurity KeyVault’s Keys Left Under the Doormat When Your Cloud Provider Accidentally CCs the Hackers AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money  03:09 RYAN DOES A THING FOR SECURING AI WORKLOADS Ryan was recently invited to Google’s Headquarters in San Francisco as part of a small group of security professionals where they spent time hands-on with Google security offerings, learning how to secure AI workloads.  AI – and how to secure it – is a hot topic right now, and being able to spend time working with the Google development team was really insightful, with how they work with various levels of protections in place in dummy applications.  Ryan was especially interested in the back-end logic that was executed in the applications.  05:32  Ryan – “I was impressed because there’s how we’re thinking about AI is still evolving, and how we’re protecting it’s gonna be changing rapidly, and having real-world examples really helped really flesh out how their AI services are, how they’re integrated into a security ecosystem. It was pretty impressive. And it’s something that’s near and dear. I’ve been working and trying to roll out Google agent spaces and different AI workloads and trying to get involved and make sure that we, just getting visibility into all the different ones. And that was, it was really helpful to sort of think about it in those contexts.” 10:13 OpenAI secures $30bn cloud deal with Oracle OpenAI signed a $30 billion annual cloud computing agreement with Oracle for 4.5GW of capacity, making it one of the largest AI cloud deals to date, and nearly triple Oracle’s current $10.3 billion annual data center infrastructure revenue. The deal represents a major expansion of the Stargate data center initiative, a $500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund aimed at building AI infrastructure across multiple US states, in... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure Firewall: Learning to Spell,(00:01:04) - Azure Bug in the Show Notes Bot(00:02:25) - How to Secure AI workloads with Threats(00:07:10) - GCP vs. AWS: Minimum-Viable Platforms(00:08:53) - Oracle to Buy 400,000 Nvidia GB200 Chips(00:15:54) - Google's New AI Tools for Mental Health(00:18:23) - Oracle Database at AWS(00:23:56) - Google Cloud's New Lustre Storage: General Availability(00:27:44) - Vertex AI Memory Bank Now in Public Preview(00:30:17) - Google Expands Z3 Storage Optimized VM Family(00:33:04) - Azure Adds Postgres to Kubernetes Database(00:35:42) - Kubernetes in the Wild: Data, Security, Continuous(00:39:22) - Kubernetes in the Wild: What is GitLab?(00:41:30) - Microsoft Purview SDK and APIs Announced(00:46:45) - Microsoft Entre Domain: Two Way Forest Trust(00:51:05) - Microsoft's Cloud Ranting(00:51:31) - Azure AD is Not Built for Cloud Ranting(00:52:48) - Azure Firewall GA: Fully Qualified Domain Name filtering(00:56:12) - Azure NFS for BLOB 3.0 Preview(00:58:36) - Azure AI: Deep Research(01:00:35) - Microsoft's Cloud Certificate Validation Validation Failure(01:08:21) - Database DevOps: Fix Git Before It Breaks Your Production Environment(01:13:32) - The Need for Test Drive Development in the Cloud(01:17:18) - How to Write Automated Tests with AI(01:24:36) - Test Coverage for a Large Codebase

Welcome to episode 311 of Two Old Men Yelling at Cloud – aka The Cloud Pod, featuring Matt and Ryan who absolutely, definitely did NOT record an aftershow.  This week, they’re talking about Cloudflare’s new Pay Per Crawler, a new open-source Terraform provider from mkdev, and lots of fabric news that Ryan doesn’t understand – plus so much more. Let’s get into it!   Titles we almost went with this week: (Show Editor note: There are more show titles than emojis. I give up.)  FSx and the City: When File Systems Meet Object Storage The Great Data Lake Escape: No Movement Required OpenZFS Gets an S3 Degree Without Leaving Home Kernel Sanders: Microsoft’s Recipe for Avoiding Another Fried System Windows Gets a Restraining Order Against Overly Attached Security Software Microsoft Builds a Fence Between Windows and Its Rowdy Security Neighbors Windows Gets a Kernel of Truth After CrowdStrike Meltdown Microsoft Kicks Security Vendors Out of the Kernel Clubhouse The Great Kernel Divorce: When Windows Said “It’s Not You, It’s Your Access Level” Google’s Environmental Report Card: A+ for Effort, C- for Supply Chain The Cloud Pod Goes Green: Google’s 10th Annual Carbon Confession Watts Up Doc? Google’s Energy Efficiency Bugs Bunny Would Approve Terminal Velocity: Google’s AI Gets a Command Performance Ctrl+Alt+Gemini: Google’s New CLI Companion The Prompt and the Furious: Tokyo Terminal AI See What You Did There: Google’s New Compliance Framework Control Yourself: Google Cloud Gets Serious About AI Auditing The Audit-omatic: Teaching Old Compliance New AI Tricks Veo 3: Now Playing in a Cloud Near You Google’s Video Dreams Come True (Audio Included) Lights, Camera, API Action: Veo 3 Takes the Stage Prometheus Unbound: Azure Finally Sees What It’s Been Missing VS Code Gets Fabric-ated: Now With 100% More Workspace Management Ctrl+S Your Sanity: Fabric Items Now Created Where You Code The Extension Cord That Connects Your IDE to the Data Cloud Logic Apps Gets Its Template of Doom (But in a Good Way) Copy-Paste Engineering Just Got an Azure Upgrade Microsoft Introduces the IKEA Model for Workflow Assembly WAF’s Up Doc? Security Copilot Now Speaks Firewall The Firewall Whisperer: When AI Meets Web Application Security WAF and Peace: Microsoft’s Treaty Between Security Tools Azure Goes Wild(card) with Certificate Management Front Door Finally Gets Its Wild Side Microsoft Deals Everyone a Wildcard IP Freely: Azure Takes the Guesswork Out of Address Management No More IP Envy: Azure Catches Up to AWS’s Address Game Azure’s New Feature Has All the Right Addresses Terraform and Chill: When Infrastructure Meets AI DynamoDB Goes Global: Now with 100% Less Eventually The Consistency Chronicles: Return of the Strong Read Breaking: DynamoDB Achieves Peak Table Manners Across All Regions Follow Up 00:47 Microsoft changes Windows in attempt to prevent next CrowdStrike-style catastrophe – Ars Technica Microsoft is creating a new Windows endpoint security platform that allows antivirus vendors to operate outside the kernel, preventing catastrophic system-wide failures like the CrowdStrike incident that g... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure 1.3(00:00:54) - Microsoft Is Changing Windows to Prevent the Next Crisis(00:04:07) - Cloudflare: Pay Per Crawl(00:08:36) - Terraform Provider for OpenAI(00:14:01) - Amazon FSX for OpenZFS: Integrating with S3(00:20:29) - Amazon EC2 C8GN Nitro Card Instances(00:25:13) - DynamoDB now supports Multi Region Strongly Consistent(00:30:11) - Google's 2025 Environmental Report(00:35:07) - Google Announces Gemini CLI as an AI Agent(00:39:47) - Google Cloud: Introducing recommended AI Controls Framework(00:46:03) - Azure Monitor + Prometheus Metrics Integration in VS Code(00:52:45) - Microsoft Logic Apps: Public Preview (Security Copilot)(01:01:38) - Azure Front Door: Managed Certificate for Wildcard Domains(01:04:50) - Azure Virtual Network Manager IP Address Management Feature

Welcome to episode 310 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Matt, Ryan and Justin are here to bring you all the latest and greatest in cloud and AI news.  Literally.  All of it.  This week we have announcements from re:Inforce, Manual Testing, GuardDuty, Government AI (what could go wrong?) Gemini 2.5 and, in a flash from the past, MS-DOS Editor. All this and more, this week in the cloud!  Titles we almost went with this week: ACM Finally Lets Its Certificates Leave the Nest Breaking Free: AWS Certificates Get Their Export Papers Certificate Manager Learns to Share Its Private Keys Skynet’s Origin Story: We Bullied It Into Existence Claude and Present Danger: When AI Fights Back Breaking Up is Hard to GPU EKS Marks the Spot for GuardDuty’s New Detection Powers Kubernetes Security: GuardDuty Connects the Dots Hub, Hub, Hooray for Unified Security Security Hub 2: Electric Boogaloo All Your Security Findings Are Belong to One Dashboard GuardDuty’s EKS-cellent Adventure in Attack Detection Shield Me From My Own Bad Decisions AWS Plays Network Security Whack-a-Mole Your VPC Called – It Wants Better Security Groups Permission Impossible: Your Express App Will Self-Authorize in 5 Minutes Breaking the Glass: AWS Backup Gets a Multi-Party System Gemini 2.5: Now With More Flash and Less Cash AI Goes to Washington GPT-4: Government Property Taxpayer-funded DDoS and Don’ts: A 45-Second Horror Story Google’s AI Models Get a Flash-y Upgrade (Lite on the Wallet) Flash Gordon Called – He Wants His Speed Back From Flash to Flash-Lite: Google’s AI Diet Plan Looker’s Pipeline Dreams Come True MS-DOS Editor: The Reboot Nobody Asked For But Everyone Needed Control-Alt-Delete Your Expectations: Microsoft Brings DOS to Linux Microsoft’s Text Editor Time Machine Now Runs on Your Toaster Copilot Gets Its Agent License Visual Studio’s AI Agent: Now Taking Orders The Bridge Over Troubled Prompts Azure’s Managed Compute Gets More Coherent Bring Your Own GPU Party: Cohere Models Join the Azure Bash Function Telemetry Gets Open Sourced (Kind Of) Azure Functions: Now Speaking Everyone’s Language (Except Java) Bucket List: AWS Makes S3 Policy Monitoring a Breeze The Policy Police: Keeping Your S3 Buckets in Check CDK Gets Its Own Town Hall (Infrastructure Not Included) Breaking: AWS Discovers Zoom, Plans to Use It Twice Per Quarter AWS and 1Password: A Secret Love Affair Keeping Secrets Has Never Been This Public Nano Nano: AWS Brings Alien-Level Time Precision to EC2 Time Flies When You’re Having Nanoseconds WorkSpaces Core: Now With More Cores to Work With Mount Compute-ier: AWS Builds AI Training Peak Making it Rain(ier): AWS Showers Anthropic with 5x More Compute Cache Me If You Can: Google’s Plugin Play CSI: Cloud Services Investigation General News  01:09 Defending the Internet: How Cloudflare blocked a monumental 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack Cloudflare blocked a record-breaking 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack in May 2025, which delivered 37.4 TB of data in just 45 seconds – equivalent to streaming 7,480 hours of HD video or downloading 9.35 million songs in under a minute. The attack originate... Chapters (00:00:08) - Cloud Pod: Episode 310(00:01:25) - Cloudflare Blocks World's Biggest DDoS Attack(00:07:06) - Matt Appears Out Of The Blue(00:08:07) - OpenAI's Fight With Microsoft Over Stake(00:12:06) - OpenAI Launches Dedicated Government Cloud(00:14:05) - Visual Studio: June 7, 2018: AI Assistant with MCP(00:17:41) - Terraform Provider 6(00:21:16) - Microsoft's Edit: Old School Text Editor (In Rust)(00:26:35) - Learning to use a cloud computer(00:27:20) - VI vs VIM(00:29:23) - All About Security(00:29:50) - Amazon IAM Access Analyzer New Uplead Dashboard(00:33:44) - AWS Certificate Manager: Export Public SSL Certificates(00:39:19) - Certificate Industry: The Future of Automation(00:39:56) - AWS Now Requiring MFA for Root Users(00:44:51) - Amazon's AWS Network Firewall Now Includes Active Threat Defense(00:53:55) - AWS WAF(00:54:58) - AWS SHIELD Network Security Director: In Preview(00:58:18) - GuardDuty Expands Kubernetes Threat Detection Coverage to(01:05:14) - Windows Defender: Is It Windows Defender?(01:05:40) - Microsoft's Security Hub: V2, Not the New One(01:07:07) - Amazon S3 Bucket Authorization with EC2 in Express JS(01:13:53) - Amazon CDK Community Meetings Launch(01:16:08) - 1Password Integrates with AWS Secrets Manager(01:18:22) - Amazon Time Sync: Nanosecond Timestamps for Financial Services(01:20:51) - AWS VPC(01:24:59) - How many routes do you have in a Kubernetes V(01:25:21) - Amazon Building the World's Most Powerful Computing Center for AI Training(01:28:56) - Another GCP vs. Azure Story(01:29:33) - Google Cloud Backup: New Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro(01:33:36) - Google's Looker Introduces Continuous Integration(01:37:33) - Google Cloud CDN: Edge Extensions Plugins(01:38:59) - Microsoft's Q1 Quantum Computing Update(01:40:29) - Azure DevOps MCP Server and Azure AI Connect(01:42:41) - Azure Functions finally Support OTEL or OpenTelemetry in Preview(01:43:55) - Azure SQL Database: Data Virtualization & More(01:46:13) - Microsoft Ignite 2025 Early Bird Registration: $2,300(01:49:03) - Oracle Expands GROK Services to OCI(01:50:17) - Week in Cloud: What's the Cloud?

Welcome to episode 308 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Matt are on hand and ready to bring you an action packed episode. Unfortunately, this one is also lullaby free. Apologies. This week we’re talking about Databricks and Lakebridge, Cedar Analysis, Amazon Q, Google’s little hiccup, and updates to SQL – plus so much more! Thanks for joining us.  Titles we almost went with this week: KV Phone Home: When Your Key-Value Store Goes AWOL When Your Coreless Service Finds Its Core Problem Oracle’s Vanity Fair: Pretty URLs for Pretty Penny From Warehouse to Lakehouse: Your Free Ticket to Cloud Town 1⃣Databricks Uno: Because One is the Loneliest Number Free as in Beer, Smart as in Data Science Cedar Analysis: Because Your Authorization Policies Wood Never Lie Cedar Analysis: Teaching Old Policies New Proofs Amazon Q Finally Learns to Talk to Other Apps Tomorrow: Visual Studio’s Predictive Edit Revolution The Ghost of Edits Future: AI Haunts Your Code Before You Write It IAM What IAM: Google’s Identity Crisis Breaks the Internet Permission Denied: The Day Google Forgot Who Everyone Was 403 Forbidden: When Google’s Bouncer Called in Sick AWS Brings the Heat to Fusion Research Larry’s Cloud Nine: Oracle Stock Soars on Forecast Raise OCI You Later: Oracle Bets Big on Cloud Growth Oracle’s Crystal Ball Shows 40% Cloud Growth Ahead Meta Scales Up Its AI Ambitions with $14 Billion Investment From FAIR to Scale: Meta’s $14 Billion AI Makeover Congratulations Databricks one, you are now the new low code solution.  AWS burns power to figure out how power works AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money  02:12 Zuckerberg makes Meta’s biggest bet on AI, $14 billion Scale AI deal Meta is finalizing a $14 billion investment for a 49% stake in Scale AI, with CEO Alexandr Wang joining to lead a new AI research lab at Meta.  This follows similar moves by Google and Microsoft acquiring AI talent through investments rather than direct acquisitions to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Scale AI specializes in data labeling and annotation services critical for training AI models, serving major clients including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.  The company’s expertise covers approximately 70% of all AI models being built, providing Meta with valuable intelligence on competitor approaches to model development. The deal reflects Meta’s struggles with its Llama AI models, particularly the underwhelming reception of Llama 4 and delays in releasing the more powerful “Behemoth” model due to concerns about competitiveness with OpenAI and DeepSeek. Meta recently reorganized its GenAI unit into two divisions following these setbacks. Wang brings both technical AI expertise and business acumen, having built Scale AI from a 2016 startup to a $14 billion valuation. His experience includes defense contracts and the recent Defense Llama collaboration with Meta for national security applications. For cloud providers and dev... Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: Episode 309(00:01:16) - Meta Completes $14 Million Investment in Scale AI(00:06:34) - Databricks Free Edition, SQL Migration and More(00:09:28) - WAF and Q&D: Cloud Computing(00:17:52) - AWS Power Tools for AWS Lambda(00:22:39) - Google IAM System Failure Causes widespread Outage(00:27:00) - Cloudflare Outage Highlights Storage Provider's Failure(00:31:14) - Google's Credential Scanner for Open Source(00:33:45) - Google Cloud Location Finder: Single API for Cloud Regions(00:35:33) - Google Cloud G4VMS and G4S: New Inst(00:37:23) - Microsoft Cross Tenant Customer Managed Keys for SSD v2 &(00:39:48) - Microsoft Cloud: Azure Cost Management, Next Edit suggestions in Visual Studio(00:43:41) - Oracle's Cloud Services: Growing 16%(00:46:53) - Oracle to Offer AMD Instinct GPUs on OCI(00:48:03) - Oracle Allows Custom Domains for Autonomous Database(00:50:01) - Cloud: Episode 1

Welcome to episode 308 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt and Ryan are in the house today to tell us all about the latest and greatest from FinOps and SnowFlake conferences, plus updates from Security Command Center, OpenAI, and even a new AWS Region. All this and more, today in the cloud!  Titles we almost went with this week: I Left My Wallet at FinOps X, But Found Savings at Snowflake Summit Snowflake City Lights, FinOps by the Sea The Two Summits: A Tale of FinOps and Snowflakes Crunchy on the Outside, Snowflake on the Inside  AWS Taipei: Because Sometimes You Need Your Data Closer Than Your Night Market  AWS Plants Its Flag in Taipei: The 37th Time’s the Charm AWS Slashes GPU Prices Faster Than a CUDA Kernel Two Writers Walk Into a Database… And Both Succeed AWS Network Firewall: Now With Windows! The VPN Connection That Keeps Its Secrets Transform and Roll Out: Pub/Sub’s New Single Message Feature SAP Happens: Google’s New M4 VMs Handle It Better Total Recall: Google’s 6TB Memory Machines The M4trix Has You (And Your In-Memory Databases) DeepSeek and You Shall Find… on Google Cloud Four Score and Seven Vulnerabilities Ago – mk The Fantastic Four Security Features MCP: Model Context Protocol or Master Control Program from Tron? No SQL? No Problem! AI Takes the Wheel Injection Rejection: How Azure Keeps Your Prompts Clean General News  05:09 FinOps X 2025 Cloud Announcements: AI Agents  and Increased FOCUS Support All major cloud providers announced expanded support for FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) 1.0, with AWS already in general availability and Google Cloud launching a BigQuery export in private preview.  This signals an industry-wide standardization of cloud cost reporting formats. AWS introduced AI-powered cost optimization through Amazon Q Developer integration with Cost Optimization Hub, enabling automated recommendations across millions of resources with detailed explanations and action plans for cost reduction. Microsoft Azure launched AI agents for application modernization that can reduce migration efforts from months to hours by automating code assessment and remediation across thousands of files, while also introducing flexible PTU reservations that work across multiple AI models. Google Cloud unveiled FinOps Hub 2.0 with Gemini-powered waste detection that identifies underutilized resources (like VMs at 5% usage) and provides AI-generated optimization recommendations for Kubernetes, Cloud Run, and Cloud SQL services. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure added carbon emissions reporting with hourly power-based calculations and GHGP compliance, plus new cost anomaly detection and rules-based cost allocation features for improved financial governance. 06:11 Justin – “I mean, if I’m modernizing my application, typically it’s off .NET and Azure, but ok…”  07:20 Broadcom reboots CloudHealt... Chapters (00:00:00) - Don't Buy Software Named After Fuzzy Creatures(00:04:00) - FinOps X: Ranting About Finops Tooling(00:05:17) - Cloud Cost Reporting Standards 1.2 Spec(00:07:19) - CloudHealth's New Look for Finops(00:11:05) - FinOps and the dual-role(00:12:37) - Snowflake Summit 2018: Big Data, Intelligence & Security(00:17:29) - Snowflake Adds Postgres to its Cloud Platform(00:20:05) - OpenAI Adds Google Cloud to Its Infrastructure(00:23:34) - Mistral AI Releases Magistral, Their First Language Model(00:26:07) - Amazon Launches 37th Global Region in Taipei(00:31:25) - Wonders of AWS: Smithy API Models(00:37:34) - AWS to Lower GPU Prices for AI-based Instances(00:41:01) - AWS Open-Sourcing PG Active(00:44:43) - AWS Network Firewall: Monitoring Dashboard(00:48:35) - AWS Site to Site VPN: New Features and Best Practices(00:51:41) - Google Pub Sub: JavaScript Transforms (New Feature)(00:54:51) - Google Cloud: New SAP HANA M4 VMs with In(00:56:50) - What Sharding a Database Is Really Like(00:59:41) - Google Cloud Announces Optimized Deployment Recipes for DeepSeq(01:01:27) - BigQuery: reservation fairness and predictability,(01:06:19) - SEC Cybersecurity Command Center 2018: Four new capabilities(01:07:18) - Squid vs. Splunk(01:07:36) - Cloud Run Threat Detection(01:08:22) - SCC automatically detects connections to known malicious IPs by analyzing V(01:09:32) - Google Cloud's Natural Language Data Manipulation (MLDB)(01:11:31) - Google Cloud and Datadog: An AI Match(01:14:21) - Google Cloud Serverless for Apache Spark & BigQuery(01:16:40) - Microsoft: Azure Prompt Shields & More(01:20:08) - Jazz: Microsoft's Cloud J(01:23:45) - FinOps Tooling: The End of an Era(01:31:05) - Will Kelly: Cloud Vendors Are Screwed(01:37:18) - Will Cloud Health and Cloudability Help Your Finops?(01:41:16) - The Future of FinOps: Unit Economics(01:45:44) - Week in Cloud: The Cloud Podcast

Welcome to episode 307 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Who else is at a conference? Justin is coming to us this week from sunny San Diego where he’s attending FinOps – so we have that news to look forward to for next week. Matt and Ryan are also on hand today to share the latest news from Kubernetes, Salesforce acquisitions, and the strange case of Azure making AWS more cost effective. Titles we almost went with this week: The Great Redis Escape: One Year Later, Valkey is Living Its Best Life Cache Me If You Can: How Valkey Outran Redis’s License Policies Tier Today, Gone Tomorrow: AWS’s New Storage Class That Moves Your Data So         You Don’t  Hey AI, Deploy My App: AWS Makes It Actually Work AWS Finally Calculates What You’ll Actually Pay The Price is Right: AWS Edition From List Price to Real Price: AWS Gets Transparent Red Hat and AWS Sitting in a Tree, R-H-E-L-I-N-G Dockerfile? More Like Dockefile-It-For-Me with Amazon’s New MCP Server Elementary, My Dear Watson: Amazon Q Becomes Sherlock Holmes for AWS CUD You Believe It? Red Hat Gets the Discount Treatment Committed Relationship Status: It’s Complicated (But 20% Cheaper) RHEL Yeah! Google Drops Prices on Enterprise Linux Disk Today, Gone Tomorrow: Azure’s Vanishing OS Storage ATL1: Where GPUs Meet Sweet Tea and Southern Hospitality AWS Launches Operation Cloud Sovereignty The Great Firewall of Europe: AWS Edition Amazon Builds a GDPR Fortress in Germany General News  01:46 What Salesforce’s $8B acquisition of Informatica means for enterprise data and AI | VentureBeat Salesforce just dropped $8 billion to acquire Informatica.  This purchase was really about building the data foundation needed for agentic AI to actually work in enterprise environments – we’re talking about combining Informatica’s 30 years of data management expertise with Salesforce’s cloud platform to create what they’re calling a “unified architecture for agentic AI.” This acquisition fills a massive gap in Salesforce’s data management capabilities, bringing in critical pieces like data cataloging, integration, governance, quality controls, and master data management – all the unsexy but absolutely essential plumbing that makes AI agents trustworthy and scalable in real enterprise deployments. The timing here is fascinating, because Informatica literally just announced their own agentic AI offerings last week at Informatica World, so Salesforce is essentially buying a company that’s already pivoted hard into the AI space – rather than trying to build these capabilities from scratch. There’s going to be some interesting overlap with MuleSoft, which Salesforce bought for $6.5 billion back in 2018, but analysts are saying Informatica’s data management capabilities are more comprehensive and updated – this could mean some consolidation challenges ahead as they figure out how to integrate these overlapping technologies. For enterprise customers, this could be a game-changer because it promises to automate those painful, time-consuming data processes that typically take days or weeks. These AI agents can handle data ingestion, in... Chapters (00:00:00) - Will GCP's Gemini Understand Kubernetes?(00:01:08) - Fooled by Conference(00:01:45) - Salesforce Buys Informatica for GenTech AI(00:05:02) - Valky Turns One(00:07:42) - Harness Unveils MCP Server(00:13:23) - Terraform 2.8: Security in the Cloud(00:16:21) - Amazon Launches FSX for Lustre Intelligent Tiering(00:18:56) - Amazon AI System Development with ecs, EKS and Serverless(00:21:15) - AWS Pricing Calculator Gets a Long-Needed Feature(00:28:19) - Amazon to Launch a European Sovereign Cloud(00:36:10) - Google's Cloud-based Red Hat Discount(00:38:06) - Google Launches Vertex AI Ranking API(00:42:41) - Google Cloud Run: Bringing GPUs to Serverless(00:45:17) - Kubernetes: Volume Populator for Machine Learning(00:47:48) - Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry: Turn Every Software Developer Into an(00:51:59) - C Scripts in C(00:55:32) - Azure: General Availability of Ephemeral OS Disks(01:01:08) - Azure AI Gateway Expands Support for AWS Bedrock Model End(01:04:50) - DigitalOcean Making a Serious Play for GPUs(01:10:23) - Week in Cloud: Finops X

Welcome to episode 306 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy!  This week, we have a bunch of announcements concerning the newest offering from Anthropic – Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4, plus container security, Azure MySQL Maintenance, Vertex AI, and Mistral AI. Plus, we’ve got a Cloud Journey installment AND an aftershow – so get comfy and get ready for a trip to the clouds! Titles we almost went with this week: ECS Failures Now Have 4x the Excuses Nailing Down Your Container Security, One Patch at a Time HashiCorp’s New Recipe: Terraform, AI, and a Pinch of MCP Teaching an Old DNS New IPv6 Tricks Dash-ing through the Klusters, in an AWS Console Google’s Generative AI Playground Gets a Glow-Up Vertex AI Studio: Now with 200% More Darkness! Like our souls Claude Opus 4 Strikes a Chord on Google Cloud Sovereign-teed to Please: Google Cloud’s Royal Treatment Google’s Cloud Kingdom Expands its Borders Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s AI? Anthropic Drops Sonne(t) 4 Knowledge on Vertex Mistral AI Chats Up a Storm on Google Cloud Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Gets a Dose of Mistral Magic .NET Aspire on Azure: The App Service Strikes Back Default Outbound Access Retires, Decides Florida Isn’t for Everyone  AI Is Going Great – or How ML Makes Money  01:52 Introducing Claude 4 Claude has launched the latest models in Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, setting new standards for coding, advancing reasoning and AI agents. Maybe they’ll actually follow instructions when told to shut down? (Looking at you, ChatGPT.) Claude Opus 4 is “the world’s best coding model” with sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows.  Opus 4 has 350 billion parameters, making it one of the largest publicly available language models.  It demonstrates strong performance on academic benchmarks, including research.  Sonnet 4 is a smaller 10 billion parameter model optimized for dialogue, making it well-suited for conversational AI applications.  Alongside the models, they are also announcing: Extended thinking with tool use (beta): Both models can use tools – like web search – during extended thinking, allowing Claude to alternate between reasoning and tool use to improve its responses. New Model Capabilities: Both models can use tools in parallel, follow instructions more precisely, and when given access to local files by developers — demonstrate significantly improved memory capabilities, extracting and saving key facts maintain continuity and build tacit knowledge over time Claude code is now generally available: After receiving extensive positive feedback during our research preview, they are expanding how developers can collaborate with Claude.  Claude code now supports background tasks via github actions and native integrations with VS code and jetbrains, displaying edits directly in your files for seamless pair programming.  New Api capabilities: Four new capabilities on the API that enable developers to build more powerful AI agents including Code Execution tool, MCP connector, Files API and the ability to cache... Chapters (00:00:00) - Cloud Pod: Azure's Maintenance Makeover(00:00:38) - Gemini Power Glasses at IO 2017(00:01:58) - Claude Turns 4 and More(00:07:51) - Claude 4.2 and Silent Models(00:08:38) - OpenAI's Language AI Response API Update(00:11:14) - Docker: Hardened Images(00:15:30) - Terraform MCP Server Released for AI Integration(00:17:50) - Amazon Serverless SQL with GMAX(00:21:43) - Amazon ECS: Extended Container Exit Reason Message(00:23:55) - Dynamodb Local in AWS Cloud Shell(00:26:21) - EC2 DNS now supports IPv6(00:28:52) - EKS Dashboard: Kubernetes Cluster Management(00:33:50) - Vertex AI Studio: Going Dark(00:34:59) - Google's Gemma 3n AI Model for Mobile(00:37:03) - Google's Intelligent Agent Platform Update(00:39:24) - Google Cloud's Sovereign Cloud: Data Sovereignty(00:43:10) - GCP 2.5: Unstructured Data with Vertex(00:44:48) - Google Cloud AI: Lechat Enterprise and OCR(00:48:08) - Azure FX V2 series with 5th Gen Intel Xeon(00:49:33) - Red Hat OpenShift VM Virtualization on Azure(00:52:15) - Microsoft SQL Server: Maintenance Experience for MySQL(00:55:49) - Microsoft's NET Aspire Integration with Azure App Service(00:59:42) - Azure: Retiring Implicit Outbound Connectivity for V(01:03:19) - How to Code With AI in Visual Studio(01:08:25) - Building a serverless bot in Python(01:13:43) - Claude 2.8(01:19:07) - Google Docs: AI in the Show Notes document(01:25:27) - Building a DevOps team with AI(01:29:16) - Black FLP02 PC Case

Welcome to episode 305 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! How did you do on your Microsoft Build Predictions? As badly as us? Plus we’ve got news on AWS service changes, a lifecycle catch up page for all those services that bought the farm, tons of Gemini news (seriously, like a lot) and even some AI for .NET.  Welcome to the cloud pod- and thanks for joining us!  Titles we almost went with this week: Google’s Jules: An AI Gem for Cloud Devs   Autonomous Agents of Code: Jules’ Excellent Adventure in the Google Cloud Gemini 2.5 Shoots for the Stars with Cosmic-Sized AI Upgrades Resistance is Futile: OpenAI Assimilates Your Codebase  AWS Transformers: Rise of the Agentic AI  Teaching an old .NET dog new Linux tricks CodeBuild Puts Docker Builds in Hyperdrive Inspector Gadget’s New Trick: Mapping Container Vulnerabilities Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like Scanning Containers… Google Cranks AI to 11 with New Ultra Plan I, For One, Welcome Our New AI Ultra Overlords The Inference Engine That Could: llm-d Chugs Ahead with Kubernetes-Native        Scaling Scaling Inference to Infinity and Beyond with Google Cloud’s llm-d Google Cloud and Spring AI: A Match Made in Java-n The Fast and the Serverless: Cloud Run Drifts into AI Studio Territory SQL Server 2025: A Vector Victor, Not a Scalar Failure AI will solve my life problems of having money in my pocket I used to scan all the containers but now I will just scan yours AI Is Going Great – or How ML Makes Money  01:50 Jules: Google’s autonomous AI coding agent Jules is an autonomous AI agent that can read code, understand intent, and make code changes on its own.  It goes beyond AI coding assistants to operate independently. It clones code into a secure Google Cloud VM, allowing it to understand the full context of a project. This enables it to write tests, build features, fix bugs, and more. Jules operates asynchronously in the background, presenting its plan and reasoning when complete. This allows developers to focus on other tasks while it works. Integration with GitHub enables Jules to work directly in existing workflows without extra setup or context switching. Developers can steer and give feedback throughout the process. For cloud developers, Jules demonstrates the rapid advancement of AI for coding moving from prototype to product. Its cloud-based parallel execution enables efficient handling of complex, multi-file changes. While in public beta, Jules is free with some usage limits. This allows developers to experiment with this cutting-edge AI coding agent and understand its potential to accelerate development on Google Cloud. 02:56 Ryan – “More and more, as new tools get released, it’s just going to change the way anything gets written… it’s getting more and more capable.”  05:45 Introducing Flow: Google’s AI filmmaking tool designed for Veo Flow is an AI-powered filmmaking tool custom-designed for Google’s advanced video, image and language models (Veo, Imagen, Gemini). It allows creators to generate cinem... Chapters (00:00:00) - Cloud Pod: AWS Breaks Up With unpopular Services(00:01:02) - Google's Joules: A Code Editing Agent for Cloud Developers(00:04:54) - Google's AI Filmmaking Tool, Flow(00:08:45) - Gemini 2.5 Large Language Models Update(00:10:33) - Google's Alpha Evolve: The AI Coding Agent(00:12:50) - OpenAI's Codex AI Agent for Cloud Development(00:14:44) - HashiCorp Validated Patterns for Cloud-based IT(00:16:49) - Amazon AWS: End Support for Several Services(00:21:12) - Amazon's New Strands AI Agent SDK(00:28:01) - Cloud Cost Management: The Right Step for IT Pros(00:31:36) - AWS Code Build: New Docker Server Capability(00:33:18) - Amazon Inspector for Docker & ECR(00:34:51) - Google AI Ultra: A Premium Subscription Plan(00:39:10) - Database Center(00:40:32) - PostgreSQL on GKE(00:43:32) - Google Cloud Introduces LLM-D for Large Language Inference(00:47:00) - Spring Boot: AI in Java 1.0(00:49:33) - Google Cloud: Bringing AI Studio to Cloud Run(00:51:12) - Google's Vertex AI for Creative Content Generation(00:52:30) - Two Gemini Stories In One Week(00:52:46) - Microsoft's Build 2020 Prediction(00:55:14) - Microsoft's App Services Platform Announcement(00:57:24) - Microsoft's Cloud Announcement(00:59:25) - Azure AI Foundry: New Features, Changes(01:01:58) - Microsoft Fabric and Azure Data Portfolio: Powering the Next AI(01:04:22) - Microsoft Discovery: Accelerating Research and Development (New Platform)(01:06:35) - Microsoft, GitHub Copilot: Agentic DevOps(01:09:33) - Oracle Launches E6 Cloud Compute(01:11:32) - Week in the Cloud: Starting Late

Welcome to episode 304 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan and Matt are in the house tonight to bring you all the latest and greatest in Cloud and AI news, including AWS new Chilean region, the ongoing tug of war between Open AI and Microsoft, and even some K8 updates – plus an aftershow. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week: Open AI gets a COO delivered Things get Chile with new regions Observability and AI, I Q-uestion the logic Cloud Pod tries to Microsoft Build predictions K8 resizes pods on the fly Microsoft strongly reinforces the AI Foundry The Cloud Pod renegotiates the hosts’ contracts … we now have to pay the Cloud Pod to be on it  Follow Up  01:53 DOJ’s extreme proposals will hurt consumers and America’s tech leadership  We previously talked about the DOJ and Google Antitrust lawsuit – and now the DOJ has wrapped up their remedies hearing, and Google has *not* been quiet about it. One of the claims is that the remedies would hurt browser choice, putting browsers like Firefox out of business completely.  Google also claimed that data disclosure mandates would threaten user’s privacy – it would be MUCH safer if they could just sell it to you via their marketplace.  We do agree that divesting Chrome would make things more complicated for people living in the Google Cloud.  Really, what comes down to is that Google claims DOJ’s solutions are the wrong solutions – although to us, Google’s solutions aren’t much better.  AI – Or How ML Makes Money  09:20 OpenAI Expands Leadership with Fidji Simo  OpenAI Hires Instacart CEO Simo For Major Leadership Role  OpenAI is hiring Fidji Simo as the CEO of applications, representing a major restructuring of leadership at the company.  She was the CEO at Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:02:05) - Google Lashes Out Over DOJ's Antitrust Proposal(00:06:19) - Does a Google Divested Chrome Affect the Internet?(00:09:17) - OpenAI Expands Leadership Team(00:10:22) - OpenAI's Nonprofit Status(00:11:34) - OpenAI Announces OpenAI for Countries and Data Residency for(00:13:58) - OpenAI in Tough Negotiations With Microsoft(00:16:48) - Terraform's AWS Provider Hits 4 Billion Downloads(00:17:41) - Amazon Terraform Provider 6.0 in Public Beta(00:23:14) - Amazon Launches New AWS Region in Chile(00:24:29) - Amazon Q Developer support to OpenSearch(00:27:04) - Kubernetes 1.33 Release Notes(00:31:23) - Does AWS have cloud commitment insurance?(00:33:25) - Google's Gecko Tool for Generative AI(00:35:54) - First Build Prediction: GitHub Copilot(00:37:04) - Microsoft's LLM for OpenAI(00:38:11) - Intel Announces New Quantum Computing Chip(00:39:17) - Third Choice: Microsoft Office PC Updates(00:40:30) - Top Three Office Products for 2020(00:42:07) - Google, Microsoft's AI Competitor(00:42:46) - The Number of Times Copilot Is Invited to Microsoft's Conference(00:46:15) - Microsoft Giving Virtual Data Center Tours(00:49:21) - Azure Storage Actions(00:52:15) - How many storage accounts can I have in a subscription?(00:54:46) - Azure Storage Actions(00:59:41) - "Oh, I can't handle that!"(01:00:14) - Red Hat Summit 2025 & Azure Migrate(01:02:57) - Azure AI: Reinforcement Fine-tuning (RFT(01:05:48) - Cloud Podcast: Week 3(01:06:40) - Linux Kernels to Drop 486 CPUs(01:09:29) - Can I Run Linux on a 486?(01:14:07) - AMD vs Intel: Which Is The Best?(01:16:21) - 486 compatibility in the Linux kernel

Welcome to episode 303 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan and exhausted dad Matt are here (and mostly awake) ready to bring the latest in cloud news! This week we’ve got more news from Nova, updates to Claude, earnings news, and a mini funeral for Skype – plus a new helping of Cloud Journey! Titles we almost went with this week: Claude researches so Ryan can nap The best AI for Nova Corps, Amazon Nova Premiere JB If you can’t beat them, change the licensing terms and make them fork, and then       reverse course… and profit Q has invaded your IDE!! Skype bites the dust A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack channel for more info.  Follow Up  02:50 Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we’re doing about it OpenAI wrote up a blog post about their sycophantic Chat GPT 4o upgrade last week, and they wanted to set the record straight.  They made adjustments at improving the models default personality to make it feel more intuitive and effective across a variety of tasks.  When shaping model behavior, they start with a baseline principle and instructions outlined in their model spec.  They also teach their models how to apply these principles by incorporating user signals like thumbs up and thumbs down feedback on responses.  In this update, though, they focused too much on short-term feedback and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve. This skewed the results towards responses that were overly supportive – but disingenuous.  Beyond rolling back the changes, they are taking steps to realign the model behavior, including refining core training techniques and system prompts to explicitly steer the model away from sycophancy.  They also plan to build more guardrails to increase honesty and transparency principles in the model spec. Additionally, they plan to expand ways for users to test and give direct feedback before deployments. Lastly, OpenAI continues to expand evaluations building on the model sync and our ongoing research.  04:43 Deep Research on Microsoft Hotpatching: Yes, they’re grabbing money and screwing you. Basically.  07:06 Justin – “I’m not going to give them any credit on this one. I appreciate that they created hotpatching, but I don’t like what you want to charge me for it.”  General News It’s Earnings time – cue the sound effects! 08:03 Alphabet’s Q1 earnings shattered analyst expectations, sending the stock soaring. Google’s CEO credits its AI efforts Alphabet Q1 2025 earnings call: CEO Sundar Pichai’s remarks Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:00:54) - Manto Man's 3 Kids Announcement(00:02:40) - Microsoft Hot Patching: Changes Coming soon to the Model(00:07:36) - Before the Earnings, How to Prepare(00:07:54) - Good Quarter for Microsoft, Google, and Amazon(00:10:47) - Amazon AWS Sales Up 17%(00:16:32) - Skype Is Dead(00:18:18) - Claude's Cloud Research: How ML Makes Money(00:20:22) - OpenAI Rescues Plan to Split Off and Become for Profit(00:22:56) - Anthropic's $61.5 Million Stock Offer(00:25:00) - Redis: Moving back to the SSPL(00:30:19) - HP Terraform Premium(00:33:09) - Amazon Nova Premiere Announced at AWS Revamp(00:34:09) - Amazon's Cloud Commitment Insurance(00:35:36) - Amazon Q Developer Introduces in VS Code(00:37:27) - Amazon Q Developer in GitHub(00:39:45) - EC2 Image Builder(00:42:44) - Amazon EBS Snapshot: Fast Provisioned Rate for Volume Initial(00:46:58) - Google Cloud: Vertex AI Prediction Dedicated Endpoints(00:48:28) - Microsoft Copilot for Azure in April(00:52:57) - Alexa's Small Language Models(00:53:56) - OpenAI Announces New 5.4(00:55:21) - Azure Portal(00:59:01) - How to really become a Windows admin with Terraform(01:03:44) - Microsoft Virtual Network Terminal Access Point (VNTAP) Public Preview(01:07:01) - Oracle Touts the Cloud on the Sphere(01:09:41) - Why Your Tagging Strategy Matters for the Cloud(01:11:36) - Cloudsecurity: Tagging our Services(01:19:16) - Amazon vs. GCP: Service Management & Tagging

Welcome to episode 302 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin and Ryan are on hand to bring you all the latest in Cloud (and AI news.) We’ve got hotpatching, Project Greenland, and a rollback of GPT-4.o, which sort of makes us sad – and our egos are definitely less stroked. Plus Saas, containers, and outposts – all of this and more. Thanks for joining us in the cloud!  Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod was never accused of being sycophantic 2nd Gen outposts!?! I didn’t even know anyone was using Gen 1 AWS Outposts 2nd Gen… not with AI (GASP) If you’re doing SaaS wrong, Google & AWS have your back this week with new Features  Patching, so hot right now Larger container sizes for Azure….  You don’t say AWS Green reporting detects hotspots… surprisingly close to Maryland….. Visual pipeline for Opensearch… I want to like this… but I just can’t A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack channel for more info.  General News  01:37 Sharing new DORA research for gen AI in software development The DORA team at Google has released a new report, “Impact of Generative AI In Software Development.” The report is based on data and developer interviews, and the report aims to move beyond hype to offer a proper perspective on AI’s impact on individuals, teams and organizations.  Click on the link in our show notes to access the full report. However, Google has highlighted a few key points in the blog post. AI is Real – A staggering 89% of organizations are prioritizing the integration of AI into their applications, and 76% of technologists are already using AI in some part of their daily work.  Productivity gains confirmed: Developers using Gen AI report significant increases in flow, productivity, and job satisfaction.  For instance, a 25% increase in AI adoption is associated with a 2.1% increase in individual productivity. Organization benefits are tangible: Beyond individual gains, Dora found strong correlations between AI adoption and improvements in crucial organizational metrics. A 25% increase in AI adoption is associated with increases in document quality, code quality, code review speeds and approval speeds.  If you are looking to utilize AI in your development organization, they provide five practical approaches for both leaders and practitioners. Have transparent communications Empower developers with learning and experimentation Establish clear policies Rethink performance metrics Embrace fast feedback loops 045:06 Ryan – “Those are really good approaches, but really difficult to implement in practice. You know, in my day job, watching the company struggle to get a handle on AI from all the different angles you need to, from data protection, legal liability – just operationally – it’s very hard. So I think having a mature program where you’re rolling that out with intent and being very specific with your AI tasks I think will go a long way with a lot of companies.”   AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Its Money  08... Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:01:51) - A New Report on AI in Software Development(00:02:57) - How to Use AI in the Development Organization(00:08:37) - A Code Team's Journey(00:09:04) - How OpenAI Is Making Money With AI(00:12:13) - ChatGPT: The Chatbot's Syncophantic(00:14:38) - Cloudflare: DDoS Attacks reached 1 TB per second(00:18:22) - Cloudflare: Best DDoS Protection for $30 a month(00:20:09) - Amazon's US East 1 Availability Zone Announcement(00:25:41) - AWS AppSync Events(00:30:23) - EKS Cluster Node Monitoring and Auto-Repair(00:34:11) - Amazon Bedrock: Prompt Optimization (General Availability)(00:36:50) - Amazon Q Business Integrations for Microsoft Word and Outlook(00:39:05) - Amazon Serverless Reservations: New Discount for Analytics(00:42:25) - Amazon OpenSearch Injection Pipelines(00:44:50) - Amazon Announces Second Generation AWS Outpost Racks(00:48:09) - Amazon Cloudfront SaaS Manager: Multi-Termite Webs(00:52:34) - Amazon VPC Endpoints: 10 years too late(00:54:06) - SaaS Runtime: Fully Managed by Google Cloud(01:01:04) - On the Cloud: The IMS Blueprint(01:03:44) - Google Cloud Database and LangChain Integrations now support Go Java and(01:04:22) - OpenAI Unveils GPT Image 1 at Microsoft(01:06:16) - How to Stop restarting your Windows Servers for Patching(01:06:44) - Microsoft Hot Patching for Windows Server 25(01:13:27) - Let it go.(01:13:42) - Azure Confidential VMs(01:16:43) - Azure: Large Container Sizes for ACI(01:19:14) - DigitalOcean Launches Managed Caching for Valky(01:20:28) - How Amazon Rescued Its GPU Crunch(01:22:15) - Amazon's GPU Priority Process(01:24:01) - NVIDIA GPUs, Storage, and Collaboration(01:24:46) - Efficiency and confidentiality in the R&D environment(01:26:31) - Amazon's GPU Orchestration System(01:31:34) - Week in the Cloud: Longest Episode Yet

Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:01:07) - How to Write a 300-Episode Recap With AI(00:03:05) - We're Turning 300 Episodes Down(00:07:39) - Reinventing: The Future of the Podcast(00:13:52) - Google Wins Antitrust Case vs. DOJ(00:21:18) - Google's Proposal for the Antitrust Case(00:24:29) - OpenAI Launches OpenAI03 and O4 Mini(00:30:27) - GPT 4.1 and 4.0 Mini(00:34:25) - GitHub Cloud and Copilot Announcements(00:35:37) - Copilot for Business vs. Personal: Should You Buy Pro+(00:38:50) - Amazon VPC Route Server(00:42:32) - AWS Security Reference Architecture Code Examples for Generative AI(00:45:08) - Amazon Nova Sonic: New Gen AI Model for Voice-enabled Applications(00:46:55) - Thank You or No Thank You?(00:47:40) - Novasonic's Nova Real 1.1 security video(00:51:03) - Amazon AWS S3 Express 1 Zone Price Cut(00:53:07) - AWS STS now automatically serves all requests to the global endpoint in(00:56:13) - Gemini Cloud Assist: Spring Cleaning with FinOps Hub(00:58:23) - Google's New VM Store for Valkey(00:59:36) - Microsoft releases new capabilities to Azure AI(01:01:15) - Azure Storage Driver Update & New Capabilities for AI(01:02:06) - Llama 4 models now available in Azure AI(01:03:31) - Microsoft Azure OpenAI: GPT 4.1, 4.(01:04:43) - Copilot in Azure Announces General Availability(01:06:41) - Azure Cloud's Hybrid Connection Manager in Public Preview(01:07:38) - One-Bit AI Models Won't Need Supercomputers(01:09:46) - Microsoft's SQL Server Migration to hyperscale(01:12:42) - Oracle: My Public Cloud Was Hacked(01:14:49) - Oracle's PR for the Hacking(01:18:20) - A Week in the Cloud(01:18:57) - Week in Cloud: Cloud Apps

Welcome to episode 300 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! According to the title, this week’s show is taking place inside of a Dr. Suess book, but don’t despair – we’re not going to make you eat green eggs and ham, but we WILL give you the low down on all things Vegas. Well, Google’s Next event which recently took place in Vegas anyway. Did you make any Next predictions?  Titles we almost went with this week: ☁️This is the CLOUDPOD Episode 300 ️Tonight we dine in the Cloud The Next Chapter Now in Preview: Episode 300 A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  GCP Pre-Next 02:35 Google shakes up Gemini leadership, Google Labs head taking the reins  There was a lot of Gemini news at Next – but we’ll get to all that.  In this particular case, there’s an employee shakeup. Sissie Hsiao is stepping down from leading the Google team, and is being replaced by Josh Woodward, who is currently leading the Google Labs.  04:35 Filestore instance replication now available GCP says customers have been asking for help in meeting business and regulatory goals, and so they are releasing Filestore instance replication. This new feature offers an efficient replication point objective (RPO) that can reach 30 minutes for data change rates of 100 MB/sec. 05:16 Multi-Cluster Orchestrator for cross-region Kubernetes workloads The public preview of Multi-Cluster Orchestrator was recently announced. This lets platform and application teams optimize resource utilization, enhance application resilience, and accelerate innovation in complex, multi-cluster environments.  The need for effective multi-cluster management has become essential as organizations increasingly use Kubernetes to deploy and manage their applications; Challenges such as resource scarcity, ensuring high availability, and managing deployments across diverse environments create significant operational overhead. Multi-Cluster Orchestrator addresses these challenges by providing a centralized orchestration layer that abstracts away the complexities of underlying Kubernetes infrastructure matching workloads with capacity across regions.... Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: Episode 300(00:00:38) - Ryan's Absence at CES 2017(00:01:53) - Episode 300(00:02:30) - Google Shuffles Up Their Gemini Team(00:05:08) - GKE: Multi Cluster Orchestrator for Kubernetes(00:09:37) - Google I/O 2019: The Conference Schedule(00:12:22) - The Wizard of Oz Event at Google's Sphere(00:15:01) - The Wizard of Oz Movie Made With AI(00:18:56) - The Wizard of Oz: The Sphere(00:20:24) - Day 1, keynote(00:20:49) - Google Cloud Next: The First Google TPU for Inference &(00:25:33) - Google Agent Spaces: Unified Enterprise Search and Intelligence(00:31:38) - Google's Video, Speech and Music, Generative AI(00:35:42) - Inferring with AWS' GKE(00:38:33) - Python's AI Agent Development Kit(00:43:13) - Agent to Agent(00:47:52) - Google Cloud Keynote(00:51:18) - A Day in the Life(00:51:38) - Gemini Cloud Conference 2018: Small Announcements(00:56:52) - Google Cloud Network: Cross-Cloud Interconnect(01:02:14) - Google Cloud Storage Pools: More Storage, More Intelligence(01:03:01) - Migration from SQL Server to PostgreSQL using DMS(01:06:42) - Google Next: Predicting The Winners(01:09:08) - Microsoft's Ignite Conference Recap & More(01:13:04) - AI Conference Prediction(01:16:06) - Google Next: A Year 2 in Vegas(01:18:14) - Black Mirror: The First Season Review

Welcome to episode 299 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Google Next is quickly approaching, and you know what that means – it’s time for predictions! Who will win this year’s Crystal Ball award? Only time and the main stage will tell. Join Matthew, Justin, and Ryan as they break down their thoughts on what groundbreaking (and less groundbreaking) announcements are in store for us.  Titles we almost went with this week: OpenAI and Anthropic join forces?  Its 2025, and AWS is still trying to make Jumbo packets happen Beanstalk and Ruby’s Updates!! They’re Alive!!! Google Colossus or how to expect a colossal cloud outage someday. ‍The Cloud Pod gives an ode to Peter A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All Its Money   02:27 OpenAI adopts rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to data OpenAI is embracing Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where the data resides.   By adapting Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol or MCP across its products, including the desktop app for ChatGPT.   MCP is an open source standard that helps AI models produce better, more relevant responses to certain queries.  Sam Altman says that people love MCP and they are excited to add support across their products and that it is available today in the Agents SDK and support for the ChatGPT desktop and Response API is coming soon. MCP lets models draw data from sources like business tools and software to complete tasks, as well as from content repositories and app development environments.  We found two helpful articles that may help demystify this whole concept.  MCP: What It Is and Why It Matters – by Addy Osmani Chapters (00:00:00) - Prediction: Google Next(00:02:39) - OpenAI Arches MCP Standard for AI(00:07:42) - Databricks announces support for Anthropic Cloud 3.7(00:11:08) - AWS WAF for Amplify Hosted Sites(00:17:16) - Amazon EC2: Jumbo Frames and Full AWS Connection(00:20:02) - Ruby 3.4 Support on AWS Lambda(00:23:36) - Amazon API Gateway now supports dual-stack IPv4 & IPv6(00:26:37) - Amazon EKS Community Add Ons Catalog(00:30:02) - Beanstalk: Not Dead, but(00:31:59) - Amazon Launches Amazon Nova at New Website(00:35:17) - Google Next: Attendance Prediction & More(00:38:12) - The AI and Machine Learning Contest(00:40:12) - Google's 'Responsive AI'(00:42:19) - On The Future of AI(00:43:00) - Predictions: Microsoft Will Announce 5 New Features During the 2020 Conference(00:46:29) - GK Enterprise: Unification or Non-AI?(00:47:27) - AI Tech Announcement at Hudo(00:48:48) - Google IO 2018: Industry Verticalization, Personal Assistant(00:50:29) - Google's Cloud Announcement(00:50:56) - How many times can I say AI or ML on stage?(00:51:36) - Google Cloud Backup and Security: Two Things(00:53:37) - Google and Mlogical to Accelerate Mainframe Application Modernization(00:55:58) - Google's Colossus: The Cloud Storage System(01:02:39) - AI assisted BigQuery Data Preparation now generally available(01:04:04) - Microsoft Azure Backup Storage Billing Change(01:06:19) - Microsoft's 'Fabric' for Business Intelligence(01:07:26) - Microsoft Purview: How to Keep Up with DLP Alerts(01:10:43) - Oracle Cloud: How Much Does 131,000 Nvidia GV300(01:13:45) - OCI Bare Metal and Flex VM Instances Now Available(01:15:21) - Oracle's bare metal server pricing vs. Windows: How many regions(01:17:17) - Oracle Cloud Breach: How Can They Pass Responsibility?(01:18:23) - Cloud Pod

Welcome to episode 298 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matthew and Ryan are in the house (and still very much missing Jonathan) to bring you a  jam packed show this week, with news from Beijing to Virginia! Did you know Virginia was in the US? Amazon definitely wants you to know that.  We’ve got updates from BigQuery Git Support and their new collab tools, plus all the AI updates you were hoping you’d miss. Tune in now!  Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod now Recorded from Planet Earth ☕Wait Java still exists? When will java just be coffee and not software Cloudflare Makes AI beat Mazes Replacing native mobile things with mobile web apps won’t fix your problems AWS Turn your security over to the bots The Cloud Pod is lost in the AI labyrinth  AI security agents to secure the AI… wait recursion Durable + Stateless.. I don’t know if you know what those words means Click ops expands to our phones yay! The Cloud Pod is now a data analyst  ⁉️Gitops come to bigquery A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All Its Money   00:46 Manus, a New AI Agent From China is Going Viral—And Raising Big Questions   Manus is being described as “the first true autonomous AI agent” from China, capable of completing weeks of professional work in hours. Developed by a team called Butterfly Effect with offices in Beijing and Wuhan, Manus functions as a truly autonomous agent that independently analyzes, plans, and executes complex tasks.  The system uses a multi-agent architecture powered by several distinct AI models, including Anthropic’s Chapters (00:00:00) - Cloud Pod: Week 298(00:00:56) - China's First Autonomous AI Agent Is Going Viral(00:04:12) - Cloudflare's 'Artificial Labyrinth' to Stop Bots(00:06:54) - OpenAI's ChatGPT 4.0 Image Generation(00:10:46) - Bay Bridge vs Golden Gate(00:11:26) - OpenAI's Speech Text and Text Speech Audio Transcription(00:12:28) - Redis vs Valky: The Cloud-Tools Fork(00:17:25) - Amazon AWS: More Geography on Regions and Availability Zones(00:22:05) - Amazon Q & Quicksight: New Scales capability(00:24:39) - Amazon OpenSearch OC2 and OM2 Instances Announce(00:26:11) - OpenJDK24(00:28:26) - AWS Mobile App: More Services, Less Adoption(00:33:17) - AWS Network Firewall: New Flow Management Features(00:34:43) - Google Next(00:36:43) - Google Cloud Backup: Data Protection Summary and AI Protection(00:38:59) - Google's AI Toolbox for Databases(00:41:17) - BigQuery Repos: Git Integration in BigQuery Studio(00:45:31) - Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro Takes the Top L on the(00:48:46) - Azure Functions: Public Preview(00:52:13) - Nvidia Serverless GPUs: What You Need to Know(00:53:59) - Nvidia's Nim Microservices for Azure AI(00:57:16) - Microsoft Launches 6 AI Agents in Security Copilot(01:02:02) - Oracle Introduces AI Agent Studio(01:03:40) - Week in the Cloud: Google Cloud Next

Welcome to episode 297 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matthew have beaten the black lung and are in the studio – ready to bring you all the latest and greatest in cloud and AI news! We’ve got Wiz buyouts (that security, it’s so hot right now!) Gemma 3, Glue 5 (but not 3 or 4) and Gemini Robots – plus looking forward to AI Skills Fest and Google Next, all this week on The Cloud Pod.  Titles we almost went with this week: Google! Yer a WIZ—Ard Google Announces Network Security Integration… and that must include WIZ Gemini Robots…. What could go wrong  ️AI Data Studios … So Hot Right Now I want 32 Billion dollars Azure Follow AWS in bad life choices – mk Wait Glue is more than v2 What happened to Glue 3 and 4? 5th Try and AWS Glue still sucks A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  Follow Up  01:05 Microsoft quantum computing claim still lacks evidence: physicists are dubious A MS researcher presented results behind the company’s controversial claim to have created the first topological qubits – a long-sought goal of quantum computing.  Theorists said it’s a hard problem, and that it was a beautiful talk but the claims come without evidence, and people think they have gone overboard.  The Head of Quantum at Amazon was also highly skeptical: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-exec-casts-doubt-microsoft-quantum-claims-2025-3 02:09 Justin – “No one’s really buying Microsoft actually created a new topological qubit. There’s some doubt… basically they said that what they showed, which is a microscopic H-shaped aluminum wire on top of indium arsenide – a superconductor at ultra-cold temperatures, and the devices are designed to harness majoranas, previously undiscovered quasi-particles that are essential for topological qubits to work, and the goals for majoranas to appear at the four tips of the H-shaped wire emerging from reflective-behavior electrons, and these majorans in theory could be used to perform quantum computing that are resistant to informat...

Welcome to episode 296 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Today is a twofer – Justin and Ryan are in the house to make sure you don’t miss out on any of today’s important cloud and AI news. From AI Protection, to Google Next, to Amazon Q Developer, we’ve got it all, this week on TCP!  Titles we almost went with this week: Amazon Step Functions, walks step by step into my IDE Deepseek seeks the truth of “is it serverless or servers”?  ️ Well Architected Reviews by AI… What will my solutions architects do now?  ⌨️ The cloud pod hosts steps over the Azure EU Data Boundary ️ BYOIP to ALBs… only years too late for everyone. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  General News  01:02 HashiCorp and Red Hat, better together  Hashicorp has more details on its future, with the recent IBM acquisition in this blog post.  They talk about the wide range of Day 2 operations, including things like drift detection, image management and patching, rightsizing, and configuration management.   As Red Hat Ansible is a purpose built operational management platform, it makes it easier to properly configure resources after the initial creation, but also to evolve the configuration after setup, and then execute ad-hoc playbooks to keep things running reliably and more securely at scale.  Some additional things they’re exploring, now that the acquisition has closed: Red Hat Ansible Inventory generated dynamically by Terraform.  Official Terraform modules for Redhat Ansible, making it easier to trigger terraform from Ansible Playbooks. Redhat and Hashicorp officially support the Red Hat Ansible Provider for Terraform, making it easier to trigger Ansible from Terraform. Evolving Terraform provisioners to support a more comprehensive set of lifecycle integrations. Improved mechanisms to invoke Ansible Playbooks outside of the resource provisioning lifecycle Customers – not surprisingly – regularly inte...

Welcome to episode 295 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy!  Welp, it’s sayonara to Skype – and time to finally make the move to Teams. Hashi has officially moved to IBM, GPT 4.5 is out and people have…thoughts. Plus, Google has the career coach you need to make all your dreams come true.* *Assuming those dreams are reasonable in a volatile economy.  Titles we almost went with this week: Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the cloud dreamers, and Me  Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer ☁️You may say I’m a cloud dreamer, but I’m not the only one May the skype shut down Q can tell me that my python skills are bad How many free code assistance does Ryan need to be a good developer: ALL OF THEM Oops honey I spent 1M dollars on oracle Latest Cloud Pod Reviews: “It’s a Lemon” A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  General News  01:04 On May 5, Microsoft’s Skype will shut down for good  In what we swear is the 9th death for Skype, Microsoft has announced that after 21 years (with 13 of those years under MS Control,) Skype will be no more.  For real this time. Really.  May 5th is the official last day of Skype, and they’ve indicated you can continue your calls and chats in Teams.  Starting now, you should be able to use your Skype login to get into Teams.  For those of you who do this, you’ll see all your existing contacts and chats in Teams.  Alternatively, you can export your Skype data, specifically contacts, call history and chats.  Current subscribers to Skype Premium services will remain active until the end, but you will not be able to sign up for Skype at this time.  Skype dial pad credits will remain active in the web interface and inside Teams after May 5th so you can finish using those credits.  03:37 Matthew  – “I think there’s a lot of people and, you know, at least people I know in other countries to still use Skype, like pretty heavily for like cross country communications, things along those lines. So I think a lot of that is that there probably is still a good amount of people using it. And this is just, Hey, they’re trying to make it nicely...

Welcome to episode 294 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy!Ilya Boy, do we have a news packed week for you! Sutskever raised $30B without a product, Mira Murati launched her own AI lab, and Claude 3.7 now thinks before it speaks. Meanwhile, Microsoft casually invented new matter for quantum computing, Google built an AI scientist, and AWS killed Chime (RIP). At this rate, AI is either going to save the world or speedrun becoming Ultron. Let’s all find out together – today on The Cloud Pod!  Titles we almost went with this week: ☠️Ding – Chime is Dead Does your container really need 192 cores Quantum is the new AI AI is now IN the robots A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All It’s Money  02:41 Ilya Sutskever’s Startup in Talks to Raise Financing at $30 Billion Valuation It’s been a minute since we talked about former OpenAI executives and what they’re up to.  Let’s start with Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati, post Open AI career The Information reports that Ilya Suskevers’ startup “Safe Superintelligence” is in talks to raise $1Billion in a round that would value the startup at $30 Billion.   The company has yet to release a product, but based on the name we can guess what they’re working on… 03:22 Ryan – “It’s so nuts to me that they can raise that much without – really just an idea. Doesn’t have to have any proof or POC…” 07:07 Murati Joins Crowded AI Startup Sector Mira Murati confirmed one of the worst kept secrets in AI, by revealing her lab Thinking Machine Labs.  Murati has lured away two thirds of her team from OpenAI.  We’ll be waiting to see how the funding goes for this one.  08:02 Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code

Welcome to episode 293 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’ve got a lot of new and, surprise, a new installment of Cloud Journey AND and aftershow – so make sure to stay tuned for that! We’ve got undersea cables, Go 1.24, Wasm, Anthropic and more.  Titles we almost went with this week: ️Lets Go! Under Sea cables make AI go BRRRRRR The CloudPod says it will grow the listeners by 10x by 2027 A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  General News 01:30 Go 1.24 is released!  Go 1.24 has been released with a bunch of improvements!  Go now fully supports generic type aliases. It also includes several performance improvements to the runtime that have reduced CPU overhead by 2-3% on average across a suite of representative benchmarks. (Say that 5 times fast.) Tool improvements around tool dependencies for a module.  The standard library now includes new mechanisms to facilitate FIPS-140-3 compliance. And you know we love some good FIPS-140-3 compliance.  Lastly, it includes some improved WebAssembly support – which we’ll talk about later.  04:46 Unlocking global AI potential with next-generation subsea infrastructure Meta announced their most ambitious subsea cable endeavor: Project Waterworth.  Once the cable is completed, the project will reach five major continents and span over 50,000 KM (longer than the earth’s circumference) making it the world’s longest subsea cable project using the highest-capacity technology available.  It will bring connectivity to the US, India, Brazil, South Africa, as well as other key regions.  Waterworth will be a multi-billion dollar, multi-year investment to strengthen the scale and reliability of the world’s digital highways by opening three new oceanic corridors with the abundant, high-speed connectivit...

Welcome to episode 292 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin and Jonathan are a dynamic duo, bringing you all the latest in news – and sound effects – because it’s earnings time! Plus we’ve got new from VS Code, Azure Data Studio, CodeBuild and more.  Titles we almost went with this week: ☁️The Cloud Pod Renames Cloud Earnings to ‘The Gulf of Capex’ Sorry Elon, OpenAI Doesn’t Want Your Pocket Change MacOS gets into the Fastlane for Oil Changes A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  General News It’s earnings time!  01:29 Alphabet is planning to spend big on AI again this year, sending shares down Alphabet earnings were a bit of a let down with cloud revenue missing and their announcement of spending $75 Billion in CapEx (DeepSeek who?) Consolidated revenue rose 12% in the period to 96.5 billion.  Capex investments of $75b shocked analysts who expected $57.9 billion. EPS was 2.15 vs 2.13. Revenue of 96.5 billion vs 96.62 expected. Ad revenue rose to 72.46 billion vs 71.3, Youtube advertising revenue was 10.47 billion vs 10.22 billion.  Google Cloud was 12.0 billion vs expectation of 12.19 billion. 02:09 Jonathan – “I’m guessing ad revenue is gonna be down again, Q1, Q2 because I think a lot of ad revenue is driven by the election season. So that’s not looking too good for them.” 03:13 Microsoft GAAP EPS of $3.23 beats by $0.13, revenue of $69.6B beats by $790M Microsoft followed up with also weak growth in its Azure cloud computing unit.  EPS was 3.23 beating expectations by 0.13 Revenue of 69.6B beating by 780M Intelligent clo...

Welcome to episode 291 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan have battled through the various plagues and have come together to bring you all the latest in cloud news, including Kro, DeepSeek, and CoPilot.  Titles we almost went with this week: In Shocking News China Steals US IP ️The Cloud Pod is Now Supported in Gov Cloud  Microsoft Goes Open Source No SQL… and Hell Hasn’t Frozen Over Zombie Buckets Receive How Much Traffic?!? ️AWS, GCP and Azure eat KRO ‍✈️Github Copilot for Free, so You Can Win at Coding Interviews Customized Best Practices… I don’t think you know what best practices are ☁️TheCloudPod Leverages Deep Understanding to Make a Nuanced Decision on adopting Copilot A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  Follow Up 01:23 Is DeepSeek really sending data to China? Let’s decode  One of the early concerns about DeepSeek was its privacy implications, starting with their privacy policy.  Allegations are significant but reality is if the open source model is hosted locally or orchestrated via GPUs in the US the data does not go to China. But if you’re using the DeepSeek app it clearly states in the privacy policy that the data will be stored in China. Data hosted on Chinese servers can be seized by the Government at any time.  Maybe rethink using the native DeepSeek websites and mobile apps and just host them locally in LM studio.  02:21 Jonathan – “They’re collecting some weird data. I get collecting conversational data, because that is the business they’re in, but they’re also doing some weird stuff, like they fingerprint users by looking at the patterns of the way that they type. Not just what they type, but how they type, like the timing between hitting different letters – things like that.” 8:06 OpenAI Believes DeepSeek Was Developed Using OpenAI Models  Listener Note: paywall article 

Welcome to episode 290 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a full house this week – and a good thing too, since there’s a lot of news! Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are all in the house to bring you news on DeepSeek, OpenVox, CloudWatch, and more.  Titles we almost went with this week: ☁️The cloud pod wonders if azure is still hung over from new years Stratoshark sends the Cloud pod to the stratosphere Cutting-Edge Chinese “Reasoning” Model Rivals OpenAI… and it’s FREE?! Wireshark turns 27, Cloud Pod Hosts feel old ☠️Operator: DeepSeek is here to kill OpenAI Time for a deepthink on buying all that Nvidia stock AWS Token Service finally goes cloud native The CloudPod wonders if OpenAI’s Operator can order its own $200 subscription A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  AI IS Going Great – Or How ML Makes All Its Money 01:29 Introducing the GenAI Platform: Simplifying AI Development for All  If you’re struggling to find that AI GPU capacity, Digital Ocean is pleased to announce their DigitalOcean GenAI Platform is now available to everyone. The platform aims to democratize AI development, empowering everyone – from solo developers to large teams – to leverage the transformative potential of generative AI.  On the Gen AI platform you can: Build Scalable AI Agents Seamlessly integrate with workflows Leverage guardrails Optimize Efficiency.  Some of the use cases they are highlighting are chatbots, e-commerce assistance, support automation, business insights, AI-Driven CRMs, Personalized Learning and interactive tools.  02:23 Jonathan – “Inference cost is really the big driver there. So once you once you build something that’s that’s done, but it’s nice to see somebody focusing on delivering it as a service rather than, you know, a $50 an hour compute for training models. This is right where they need to be.” 04:21 OpenAI: Introducing Operator

Welcome to episode 289 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are here this week to bring you a riveting podcast on EU regulations! Are you asleep yet? No? Ok great. We promise it will be a good show – despite the title.  Titles we almost went with this week: Stargate: We’re not saying its Aliens, but its $500 Billion ️AWS: Now with extra sessions EC2 Flex: Bigger, Badder and Probably still expensive SNS FIFO: So fast, it’ll give you whiplash ‍⚖️Azure: Now with added Legalese (Thanks, EU) OpenAI’s Stargate: From Chatbots to Interdimensional Travel (maybe) ☢️GCP’s Biochar Initiative: Turning Waste into… Well, Less Waste (hopefully) ️AWS Console Multiple Sessions: So you can prove you dropped those databases from multiple accounts ☁️Amazon still adds new features to SNS and the cloud pod is impressed ☠️AWS tries to kill chrome profiles A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  AI IS Going Great – Or How ML Makes All Its Money 01:47 Announcing The Stargate Project Open AI announced a joint investment of $500 billion dollars over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the US, with the intent to deploy $100B immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefits for the entire world.  The initial equity funders in stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX.   Softbank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with Softbank having financial responsibility, and OpenAI having operational responsibility.  Arm, Microsoft, Nvidia

Welcome to episode 288 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Jonathan are your hosts as we make our way through this week’s cloud and AI news, including back to Vertex AI, Project Digits, Notebook LM, and some major improvements to AI image generation.  Titles we almost went with this week: Digits… I’ll show you 5 digits… The only digit the AWS local zone in New York shows me is the middle one ️Keep one eye open near Mercedes with Agentic AI A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  General News 01:59 Nvidia announces $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits If you don’t want to hand over all your money to the cloud providers, you will be able to hand over $3,000 dollars to Nvidia… for a computer that is probably going to be obsolete in 12 months. That’s fun!  The new personal AI supercomputer, called Project Digits, will launch in May.  The heart of Digits is the new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which packs enough processing power to run sophisticated AI models, while being compact enough to fit on a desk and run from a standard power outlet. Digits can handle AI models with up to 200 billion parameters, and looks very similar to a Mac Mini.  “AI will be mainstream in every application for every industry. With Project Digits, the Grace Blackwell Superchip comes to millions of developers,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a press release. “Placing an AI supercomputer on the desks of every data scientist, AI researcher, and student empowers them to engage and shape the age of AI.” The Digits system comes with 128gb of unified coherent memory and up to 4tb of NVME storage.  For even more demanding apps, two digit systems can be linked together to handle models with 405b parameters.  The GB10 chip delivers up to 1 petaflop of AI performance, meaning it can perform 1 qu...

Welcome to episode 287 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! 2025 is already shaping up to be another year of “unprecedented” times, but have no fear, Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, and Matthew are all in the house and (mostly) recovered from the holidays – and just in time to bring you all the latest new year news in the cloud world.  Titles we almost went with this week: ☁️Everyone is investing in AI… but you could invest in the cloud pod Oracle Exadata X11M: Burn a big pile of money The cloud pod has better security than Microsoft – mk ️The new and improved Cloud Pod 4.0 ️Cloud Nine… Figures (or $80 billion) ⚔️$60 Billion and Counting: The Ai Arms Race Oracle Exadata X11M: For When You Absolutely, Positively, Have to Burn Money The Cloud Pod rebrands to The Cloud AI so we can get 11B in funding A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  General News 2:42 Oracle’s rampant cloud growth wasn’t enough for Wall Street, and its stock slides after-hours  We missed talking about Oracle’s earnings call on December 9th, since we were in the middle of our re:Invent shows. Apparently, their rapid cloud growth was not sufficient to appease the Wall Street gods., but honestly – what is ever good enough for them?   They reported earnings of 1.47 a share, just shy of the 1.48 expected by the analysts. Revenue was up 9% from a year before, at $14.06B below the street’s target of $14.1 Billion. Income was up 26% from prior year, to 3.15B.   Revenue from cloud services and license support was up 12% to 10.8 billion.  Oracle CEO Safra Catz said growth in the AI segment was nothing short of extraordinary, with 336% growth in GPU unit consumption from the prior year.  Despite positive signs, Oracle guidance was soft and this also angered the Wall Street gods.  04:09 Justin – “…now in January, their stock is, up a dollar 11 today, but, looking at the month, they haven’t really recovered from earnings quite yet. So...

Welcome to episode 286 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Welcome to the final show of 2024! We thank you for joining us on our cloud journey over the past year. During this last show of the year, we look back on all the tech that changed our jobs and lives, and make predictions for an AI filled 2025. Join Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew as they look forward to even more discussions about undersea cables. Happy New Year!  Titles we almost went with this week: We thought 2024 would never end I can sum up 2024 – AI AI AI AI and uhh AI ️AI has taken over the Cloud Pod – we are not really here ‍2024 the year we hoped AI would replace us… close but not yet A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  General News 00:31   2024 Predictions Look Back Matt Simpler and Easier to access LLM with new services Kubernetes will become simpler for smaller companies to operate that doesn’t require Highly Paid Devops/Scientists Low Employee Churn Rates and increased Tenure (Quiet Quitting) 02:07 Matthew – “How is it simpler and easier? I think that there are more ways to run it. The general public has an easier way to access it. And they are simpler as Justin said that they are becoming easier and more efficient and better to use for the average user. So I know that I talked to many people that I work with now and just in general and people that are not in tech, which I feel like a year ago.” Jonathan There will be mass layoffs in tech directly attributed to AI in Q1 2024 (10k or more) Someone will start a cult that follows an AI LLM God believing in sentience, a higher power.  AI will find a new home in education. Lesson Plans, Personalized Learning plans by students, etc.  02:07 Jonathan – “Well, there is a religion called the First Church of Artificial Intelligence, but it’s been around for longer than this year. I think it’s like five, six years old at this point. So that’s kind of cheating. Ryan Start seeing the financial impact of AI to better profitability by using AI. AI Solution tied towards new employee onboarding (replace wiki technology) Removal of stateful firewalls as traffic ruleset (next-gen next-gen firewall) 02:07 Ryan – “I mean, agentic AI is something that’s been rolled out in a lot of companies. I know in my day job, it’s been rolled out. I hope to see this get even stronger and more obvious just because I think that, you know, the days of searching through thousands of documents or the one, you know, unmaintained team page that someone built three years ago when they were new are over. And so I’d like to see this continue. Justi...

Welcome to episode 285 of the Explain it to me Like I’m 5 Podcast, formerly known as The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! We’ve got a lot of news this week, including the last of our coverage from re:Invent, ChatGTP Pro, FPGA, and even some major staffing turnovers. Titles we almost went with this week: Throw $200 dollars in a fire with ChatGPT Pro Jeff Barr is wrapped up by Agentic AI ️The Tribble with Trilliums ️The Wind in the Quantum Willows  ⚰️Rise of the dead instances FPGA and PowerPC Jeff Barr is replaced by Nova The Cloud Pod: Return of the dead instances types After 6 year Jeff Barr hands over the reigns to the CloudPod ⌚For our 6th birthday Jeff barr Retires For our 6th birthday jeff barr delegates announcements to the cloud pod 6 years of meaningless PR drivel ‍6 years of cloud news and we still don’t know what Quantum computing is A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  General News HAPPY 6th BIRTHDAY!  2:00 HashiCorp at re:Invent 2024: Security Lifecycle Management with AWS Hashi is a big sponsor of re:Invent, so of course they had some news of their own to release.  HCP Vault Secrets auto-rotation is now generally available.  Dynamic secrets are generally available via HCP Vault Secrets. Secrets sync will help keep your secrets synced with AWS Secrets Manager. It still appears to be one direction, but you can now also view secrets in AWS Secrets Manager that are managed by vault.  HCP Vault Radar, now in beta, auto...

Welcome to episode 284 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Everybody is in the house this week, and it’s a good thing because since we’ve last recorded re:Invent happened, and we have a LOT to talk about. So let’s jump right in!  Titles we almost went with this week: Amazon Steals from Azure…. We Are Doomed  ️The Cloud Pod Can Now Throw Away a lot of Code The Cloud Pod Controls the Future The Cloud Pod Observes More Insights We Are Simplicity ❌X None of the Above Stop Trying to Make Bedrock & Q Happen My Head Went SuperNova over all the Q Announcements These are Not the Gadgets Bond Needed, Q!  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  AWS  08:12 It’s the re:Invent recap!  Did you make any announcement predictions? Let’s see how our hosts’  predictions stacked up to reality.  Matt – 1 Large Green Computing Reinvent LLM at the Edge Something new on S3✅ Ryan (AI) – 1 Improved serverless observability tools Expansion of AI Driven workflows in datalakes✅ Greater Focus on Multi-Account or Multi-region orchestration, centralized compliance management, or enhanced security services Jonathan – 0 New Edge Computing Capabilities better global application deployment type features. (Cloudflare competitor maybe) New automated cost optimization tools Automated RAG/vector to S3 Justin  – 2 Managed Backstage or platform like service New LLM multi-modal replacement or upgrade to Titan✅ Competitor VM offering to Broadcom✅ Honorable Mentions: Jonathan: Deeper integration between serverless and container services New region Enhanced Observability with AI driven debugging tool✅ Justin: Multicloud management – in a bigger way (Anthos competitor) Agentic AI toolings New ARM graviton chip How many will AI or Artificial Intelligence be said: 45 Justin – 35✅ Jonathan – 72 Pre:Invent There were over 180 announcements, and yes – we have them all listed here for you...

Welcome to episode 283 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Break out your crystal balls and shuffle those tarot decks, because it’s Re:Invent prediction time! Sorry we missed you all last week – the plague has been strong with us. But Justin and Jonathan are BACK, and we’ve got a ton of news, so buckle in and let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week: Not My Snowcones!  Lambda at 10: Still Better Than Windows Containers  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  General News   01:27 The voice of America Online’s “You’ve got mail” has died at age 74 Elwoods Edwards, the voice behind the online service AOL’s iconic “You’ve got mail” sound notification has died at the age of 74. He was just one day shy of his 75th birthday.  The “you’ve got mail” soundbite started in 1989 when Steve Case, CEO of Quantum Computer Services (which will later become America Online or AOL,) wanted to add a human voice to their Quantum online service.   Karen Edwards, who worked as a customer service representative, heard Case discussing the plan and suggested her husband Elwood, a professional broadcaster.  Edwards recorded the famous phrase and others (“Welcome” “File’s done” and “Goodbye” among them) on a cassette recorder in his living room.  He was paid $200 for the service.   His voice is still used to greet users of the current AOL service.  AWS  03:04 It’s Time for RE:Invent Predictions! Matt Large Green Computing Reinvent LLM at the Edge Something new On S3 Ryan (AI) Improved serverless observability tools Expansion of AI Driven workflows in datalakes Greater Focus on Multi-Account or Multi-region orchestration, centralized compliance management, or enhanced security services Jonathan New Edge Computing Capabilities better global application deployment type features. (Cloudflare competitor maybe) New automated cost optimization tools

Welcome to episode 282 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Ryan, and Matthew are happy to be joining you in the clouds versus watching election information. This week we’re talking nuclear energy, AI Search tools, and all things Pre:Invent. Welcome, and thanks for joining us!  Titles we almost went with this week: ️The Cloud Pod Would Much Rather Record This Show Than Watch the Election Results ️IBM Comes for Your AI Dollars AWS Goes Limitless with the PostgreSQL Possibilities ⌚It is Upon Us the Pre-Invent Period and AWS Does Not Disappoint ⚛️Amazon Loses Its Nuclear Superhero A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  Follow Up 01:13 Energy regulators scrutinizing data center use reject Amazon bid  Late Friday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected a proposal that would have allowed an Amazon data center to co-locate with an existing nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.   The commission voted it down 2-1  FERC chairman Willie Phillips said that the commission should encourage the development of data centers and semiconductor manufacturing as national security and economic development priorities.   Commissioners Mark Christie and Lindsay See (both R) voted to reject the proposal, while Davis Rosner and Judy Change (D) didn’t vote.  Talen Energy, who signed the agreement, drew challenges from neighboring utilities AEP and Exelon – who challenged the novel arrangement, arguing it would unfairly shift costs of running the broader grid to other consumers.  FERC’s order found the region’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, failed to show why the proposal was necessary and prove such a deal would be limited to the Susquehanna plant given the widespread interest in placing data centers next to power plants.  Talen said the ruling would have a chilling effect on the region’s economic development and it is weighing its options.  Will see what happens with Microsoft/Constellation energies plan to

Welcome to episode 281 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Ryan are your hosts as we search the clouds for all the latest news and info. This week we’re talking about ECS turning 10 (yes, we were there when it was announced, and yes, we’re old,) some more drama from the CrowdStrike fiasco, lots of updates to GitHub, plus more. Join us!   Titles we almost went with this week: Github Universe full of ECS containers ️Github Universe lives up to the Universal expectations  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  Follow Up 01:09 Dr. Matt Woods ended up at PWC as chief innovation officer YAWN What exactly does a chief innovation officer at PWC do? Is this like a semi-retirement?  General News 01:44 TSA silent on CrowdStrike’s claim Delta skipped required security update Delta isn’t backing down with CrowdStrike, and in a court filing said CrowdStrike should be on the hook for the entire $500M in losses, partly because CrowdStrike has admitted that it should have done more testing and staggered deployments to catch bugs.  Delta further alleges that CrowdStrike postured as a certified best-in-class security provider who “never cuts corners,” while secretly designing its software to bypass Microsoft security certifications to make changes at the core of Delta’s computer systems without Delta’s knowledge.  Delta says they would never have agreed to such a dangerous process if it had been disclosed.  In its testimony to Congress, CrowdStrike said that they follow standard protocols, and that they are protecting against threats as they evolve. CrowdStrike is also accusing Delta of failing to follow laws, including best practices established by the TSA. According to CrowdStrike, most customers were up within a day of the issue – while Delta took 5 days.  Crowdstrike alleges that Delta’s negligence caused this in following the TSA requirements designed to ensure that no major airline ever experiences prolonged system outages.  CrowdStrike realized Delta failed to follow the requirements when its efforts to help...

Welcome to episode 280 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are your hosts as we travel through the latest in cloud news. This week we’re talking more about nuclear power, some additional major employee shakeups, Claude releases, plus saying RIP to CloudWatch Evidently and hello to Azure Cobalt VMs.   Titles we almost went with this week: ☢️The cloud providers are colluding on Nuclear Power I fear our AWS AI nightmare might get worse without Dr. Matt Wood. I’m a glow with excitement about nuclear cloud power ⚛️Plainly no one else knew what “CloudWatch Evidently” did either We sing a Claude Sonnet about Nuclear Power ✅Evidently, The Cloud Pod was always right Amazon goes nuclear while their AI VP goes AWOL A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info. AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All It’s Money   00:53 Introducing computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku Anthropic is announcing the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and a new Model Claude 3.5 Haiku.  Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers across the board improvements over its predecessor, with particularly significant gains in coding — an area where it already leads the field (per anthropic).   Claude 3.5 Haiku interestingly matches the performance of Claude 3 Opus, the prior largest model, on many evaluations at the same cost and similar speed to the previous generation of Haiku.  Claude 3.5 Sonnet also includes a groundbreaking new capability in beta: Computer Use.   Available today as an API, developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do – by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons and typing text.   Claude 3.5 is the first frontier AI model to offer this capability.  Anthropic warns the feature is still experimental – at times cumbersome and error-prone. As well as things that are effortless for a human are still difficult including scrolling, dra...

Welcome to episode 279 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan and Matthew are your guide through the Cloud. We’re talking about everything from BigQuery to Google Nuclear power plans, and everything in between! Welcome to episode 279!  Titles we almost went with this week: AWS SKYNET (Q) now controls the supply chain ⛓️AWS Supply Chain: Where skynet meets your shopping list Digital Ocean follows Azure with the Premium everything ⛰️EKS mounts S3  GCP now a nuclear Big query don’t hit that iceberg  Big Query Yells: “ICEBERG AHEAD”  The Cloud Pod: Now with 50% more meltdown protection ☢️The Cloud Pod radiates excitement over Google’s nuclear deal A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  Follow Up 00:46 OpenAI’s Newest Possible Threat: Ex-CTO Murati Apologies listeners – paywall article.  Given the recent departure of Ex-CTO Mira Murati from OpenAI, we speculated that she might be starting something new…and the rumors are rumorin’.  Rumors have been running wild since her last day on October 4th, with several people reporting that there has been a lot of churn.  Speculation is that Murati may join former Open AI VP Bret Zoph at his new startup.   It may be easy to steal some people, as the research organization at Open AI is reportedly in upheaval after Liam Fedus’s promotion to lead post-training – several researchers have asked to switch teams.  In addition, Ilya Sutskever, an Open AI co-founder and former chief scientist, also has a new startup.   We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this particular soap opera.  2:00 Jonathan – “I kind wonder what will these other startups bring that’s different than what OpenAI are doing or Anthropic or anybody else. mean, they’re all going to be taking the same training data sets because that’s what’s available. It’s not like they’re going to invent some data from somewhere else and have an edge. I mean, I guess they could do different things like be mindful about licensing.” General News 4:41 Introducing New 48vCPU and 60vCPU Optimized Premium Droplets on 

Welcome to episode 278 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! When Justin’s away, the guys will… maybe get a show recorded? This week, we’re talking OpenAI, another service scheduled for the grave over at AWS, saying goodbye to pesky IPv4 fees, Azure FXv2 VMs, Valkey 8.0 and so much more! Thanks for joining us, here in the cloud!  Titles we almost went with this week: Another One Bites the Dust Peak AI reached: OpenAI Now Puts Print Statements in Code to Help You Debug A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Archera There are a lot of cloud cost management tools out there. But only Archera provides cloud commitment insurance. It sounds fancy but it’s really simple. Archera gives you the cost savings of a 1 or 3 year AWS Savings Plan with a commitment as short as 30 days. If you don’t use all the cloud resources you’ve committed to, they will literally put money back in your bank account to cover the difference. Other cost management tools may say they offer “commitment insurance”, but remember to ask: will you actually give me my money back? Archera will. Click this link to check them out AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All It’s Money 00:59 Introducing vision to the fine-tuning API. OpenAI has announced the integration of vision capabilities into its fine-tuning API, allowing developers to enhance the GPT-4o model to analyze and interpret images alongside text and audio inputs.  This update broadens the scope of applications for AI, enabling more multimodal interactions. The fine-tuning API now supports image inputs, which means developers can train models to understand and generate content based on visual data in conjunction with text and audio. After October 31, 2024, training for fine-tuning will cost $25 per 1 million tokens, with inference priced at $3.75 per 1 million input tokens and $15 per 1 million output tokens.  Images are tokenized based on size before pricing. The introduction of prompt caching and other efficiency measures could lower the operational costs for businesses deploying AI solutions. The API is also being enhanced to include features like epoch-based checkpoint creation, a comparative playground for model evaluation, and integration with third-party platforms like Weights and Biases for detailed fine-tuning data management. What does it mean? Admit it – you’re dying to know.  Developers can now create applications that not only process text or voice but also interpret and generate responses based on visual cues, and importantly fine tuned for domain specific applications, and this update could lead to more intuitive user interfaces in applications, where users can interact with services using images as naturally as they do with text or speech, potentially expanding the user base to those less tech-savvy or in fields where visual data is crucial...

​Welcome to episode 277 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matthew are your hosts this week for a news packed show. This week we dive into the latest in cloud computing with announcements from Google’s new AI search tools, Meta’s open-sourced AI models, and Microsoft Copilot’s expanded capabilities. We’ve also got Oracle releases, and some non-liquid Java on the agenda (but also the liquid kind, too) and Class E IP addresses. Plus, be sure to stay tuned for the aftershow!    Titles we almost went with this week: Which cloud provider does not have llama 3.2 Vmware says we will happily help you support your old Microsoft OS’s for $$$$ Class E is the best kind of IP Space Microsoft says trust AI, and so does Skynet 3.2 Llama’s walked into an AI bar…  Google gets cranky about MS Licensing, join the club ✍️Write Your Prompts, Optimize them with Vertex Prompts Analyzer, rinse repeat into a        vortex of optimization ️Oracle releases Java 23, Cloud Pod Uses Amazon Corretto 23 instead Oracle releases Java 23, Cloud Pod still says run! MK    A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Archera There are a lot of cloud cost management tools out there. But only Archera provides cloud commitment insurance. It sounds fancy but it’s really simple. Archera gives you the cost savings of a 1 or 3 year AWS Savings Plan with a commitment as short as 30 days. If you don’t use all the cloud resources you’ve committed to, they will literally put money back in your bank account to cover the difference. Other cost management tools may say they offer “commitment insurance”, but remember to ask: will you actually give me my money back? Archera will. Click this link to check them out https://shortclick.link/uthdi1 AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All It’s Money   01:06 OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, 2 other execs announce they’re leaving Listener Note: paywall article  OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati is leaving, and within hours, two more OpenAI executives joined the list of high-profile departures. Mira Murati spent 6.5 years at the company, and was named CEO temporarily when the board ousted co-founder Sam Altman.   “It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally,” Altman wrote. “I feel tremend...

Welcome to episode 276 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, our hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan do a speedrun of OpenWorld news, talk about energy needs and the totally not controversial decision to reopen 3 Mile Island, a “managed” exodus from cloud, and Kubernetes news. As well as Amazon’s RTO we are calling “Elastic Commute”. All this and more, right now on The Cloud Pod.  Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod Hosts don’t own enough pants for five days a week IBM thinks it can contain the cost of K8s Microsoft loves nuclear energy The Cloudpod tries to give Oracle some love and still does not care The cloud pod goes nuclear on k8s costs ⛽Can IBM contain the costs of Kubernetes and Nuclear Power?  Google takes on take over while microsoft takes on nuclear AWS Launches ‘Managed Exodus’: Streamline Your Talent Drain Introducing Amazon WorkForce Alienation™: Scale Your Employee Discontent to the Cloud Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab: Now with Real-Time Resignation Prediction A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  General News 01:08 IBM acquires Kubernetes cost optimization startup Kubecost  IBM is quickly becoming the place where cloud cost companies go to assimilate? Or Die? Rebirthed mabe? Either way, it’s not a great place to end up.  On Tuesday they announced the acquisition of Kubecost, a FinOps startup that helps teams monitor and optimize their K8 clusters, with a focus on efficiency – and ultimately cost.  This acquisition follows the acquisitions of Apptio, Turbonomic, and Instana over the years.  Kubecost is the company behind OpenCost; a vendor-neutral open source project that forms part of the core Kubecost...

Welcome to episode 275 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matthew and Ryan are awake and ready to bring you all the latest and greatest in cloud news, including SQream, a new partnership between OCI and AWS (yes, really) Azure Linux, and a lot of updates over at AWS. Get comfy and we’ll see you all in the cloud!  Titles we almost went with this week: I SQream, You SQream, The CloudPod SQreams for AI Ice Cream ️AWS East gets Stability, but only for AI. AWS has some Lofty Goals ️Claude Learns BigQuery ✅Azure now Securely Checks the Prompts from the cloud pod Azure find out about Linux A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  AWS 00:28 Stability AI’s best image generating models now in Amazon Bedrock  If you are like The CloudPod hosts, the part you care most about AI is the rapid ability to create graphics for any meme-worthy moment or funny pictures for that group chat.  Luckily AWS has access to the latest image generation capability with 3 models from Stability AI. Stable Image Ultra – Produces the highest quality, photorealistic outputs perfect for professional print media and large format applications. Stable image Ultra excels at rendering exceptional detail and realism.  Stable diffusion 3 large – strikes a balance between generation speed and output quality. Ideal for creating high-volume, high-quality digital assets for websites, newsletters and marketing materials.  Stable Image Core – Optimized for fast and affordable image generation, great for rapidly iterating on concepts during ideation.  One of the key improvements of Stable Image Ultra and Stable Diffusion 3 large compared to Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) is text quality in generated images, with fewer errors in spelling and typography thanks to innovation diffusion transformer architecture, which implements two separate sets of weights for image and text but enables information flow between the two modalities.  02:46 Justin – “I do notice more and more that, you get it, you get the typical product shot on Amazon, but then like they’ll insert the product into different backgrounds and scenes. Like, it’s a, it’s a lamp and all of a sudden it’s on a thing and they’re like, Hmm, that doesn’t look like a real photo though. It looks like AI. So you do notice it more and more.” 04:13

Welcome to episode 274 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan and Matthew are your hosts this week as we explore the world of SnapShots, Maia, Open Source, and VMware – just to name a few of the topics. And stay tuned for an installment of our continuing Cloud Journey Series to explore ways to decrease tech debt, all this week on The Cloud Pod.   Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod in Parallel Cluster The Cloud Pod cringes at managing 1000 aws accounts The Cloud Pod welcomes Imagen 3 with less Wokeness ️The Cloud Pod wants to be instantly snapshotted The Cloud pod hates tech debt A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  General News 00:32 Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again Shay Banon is pleased to call ElasticSearch and Kibana “open source” again.  He says everyone at Elastic is ecstatic to be open source again, it’s part of his and “Elastics DNA.”  They’re doing this by adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 and SSPL in the coming weeks.  They never stopped believing or behaving like an OSS company after they changed the license, but by being able to use the term open source and by using AGPL – an OSI approved license – removes any questions or fud people might have.  Shay says the change 3 years ago was because they had issues with AWS and the market confusion their offering was causing.  So, after trying all the other options, changing the license – all while knowing it would result in a fork with a different name – was the path they took.  While it was painful, they said it worked.  3 years later, Amazon is fully invested in their OpenSearch fork, the market confusion has mostly gone, and their partnership with AWS is stronger than ever. They are even being named partner of the year with AWS.  They want to “make life of our users as simple as possible,” so if you’re ok with the ELv2 or the SSPL, then you can keep using that license. They aren’t removing anything, just giving you another option with AGPL.

Welcome to episode 273 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Hold onto your butts – this week your hosts Justin, Ryan, Matthew and (eventually) Jonathan are bringing you two weeks worth of cloud and AI news. We’ve got Karpenter, Kubernetes, and Secrets, plus news from OpenAI, MFA changes that are going to be super fun for Matthew, and Azure Phi. Get comfy – it’s going to be a doozy! Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod Teaches Azure-normalized Camel Casing The Cloud Pod Travels to Malaysia ⚖️Azure Detaches Itself From its Own Scale Sets ✍️The Cloud Pod Conditionally Writes Show Notes  You got MFA! ⛔The Cloud Pod Delays Deleting Itself The Cloud Pod is Now the Cloud Pod Podcast! A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  General News 01:37 Terraform AzureRM provider 4.0 adds provider-defined functions  Terraform is announcing the GA of Terraform AzureRM provider 4.0.  The new version improves the extensibility and flexibility in the provider.  Since the Providers’ Last major release in March 2022, Hashi has added support for some 340 resources and 120 data sources, bringing the total Azure resources to 1,101 resources and almost 360 data sources.  The provider has topped 660M downloads, MS and Hashi continue to develop new, innovative integrations that further ease the cloud adoption journey to enterprise organizations.  With Terraform 1.8, providers can implement custom functions that you can call from the Terraform configuration. The new provider adds two Azure-specific provider functions to let users correct the casing of their resource IDs or access the individual components of it.  Previously, the Azure RM provider took an all-or-nothing approach to Azure resource provider registration, where the Terraform provider would either attempt to register a fixed set of 68 providers upon initialization or registration or be skipped.  This didn’t match Microsoft’s recommendations, which are to register resource providers only as needed, and to enable the services you’re actively using.  With adding two new feature flags,

Welcome to episode 272 of The Cloud Pod! This week, Matthew and Justin are bringing you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including new updates to the ongoing Crowdstrike drama, JSON schemas, AWS vaults, and IPv6 addresses – even some hacking opportunities! All this and more, this week in the cloud.  Titles we almost went with this week: ️The cloud pod is now logically air-gapped The Cloud Pod has continuous snark The Cloud Pod points the finger at delta AI now with JSON SCHEMAS!!!  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  Follow Up 00:35 Crowdstrike RCA The final RCA is out from Crowdstrike, and as we talked during the preliminary report, this was an issue with a channel file that had 21 input parameters. No update previously had more than 20, and it was not caught in earlier testing.  Crowdstrike has several findings, and mitigating actions that they are taking. They go into detail on each of them, and you can read through all of them at the linked document.  02:31 Justin – “…the one thing I would say is this would be a perfect RCA if it included a timeline, but it lacks, it lacks a timeline view.” 12:06 Justin – “…their mitigations don’t have any dates on them of when they’re going to be done or implemented, which, in addition to a timeline, it would be nice to see in this process.” 15:46 Microsoft joins CrowdStrike in pushing IT outage recovery responsibility  back to Delta Microsoft has joined Crowdstrike in throwing Delta under the bus.  Delta Airlines has been blaming Crowdstrike and MS for their recent IT woes, which the company claims cost them over $500 million. Microsoft says “Our preliminary review suggests that Delta, unlike its competitors, has not modernized its IT infrastructure, either for t...

Welcome to episode 271 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan and Matthew are your hosts today as we discuss the latest news in cloud and AI, including earnings reports, Google’s legal trouble, and SQL updates. We even take a minute to give some side eye to AWS’s deprioritization techniques. Spoiler alert: 0 out of 5 stars for keeping customers informed.  Titles we almost went with this week: No Google, you can’t own Park Place, Boardwalk, the railroads and the utilities  Amazons Titan Image Generator is no titan of photography ☎️BigTable graduates to SQL support TikTok/Instagram, Azure Reliability and Temu bring down the big three clouds’ earnings Span your Mind to Graphs & Vectors DOJ rules The Cloud Pod should be your default news source ☁️The CloudPod – now with SQL support ️AWS Deprioritizes 7 Services, Cloud Pod Hosts Prioritize Therapy A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.  Follow Up 00:45 Amazon decision to deprioritize 7 cloud services caught customers and  even some salespeople by surprise  Jeff Barr confirmed on Twitter (Yes will always call it Twitter) after recording last week’s episode that they had made the tough decision to deprioritize 7 cloud services.   There is still no official blog post announcing this, beyond the confirmation from Jeff Barr.  Amazon is discontinuing new access to a small number of services in the tweet – but would continue to run them in a secure environment.  Jeff Bar confirmed the list of services to be S3 Select, CloudSearch, Cloud9, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline and CodeCommit.  An AWS Spokesperson claimed to Business Insider that the changes were communicated through multiple channels within and outside the company.  But were they REALLY though? 

The Cloud Pod Puts a Hex-LLM on all these AI Announcements Welcome to episode 270 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Jonathan, Ryan, Matt and Justin are your hosts today as we sort through all of the cloud and AI news of the week, including updates to the Crowdstrike BSOD event, more info on that proposed Wiz takeover (spoiler alert: it’s toast) and some updates to Bedrock. All this and more news, right now on the Cloud Pod!  Titles we almost went with this week: The antivirus strikes back The return of the crowdstrike The cloud pod is worth more than 23B The cloud pod is rebranded to the AI podcast The cloud pod might need to move to another git provider Amazon finally gets normal naming for end user messaging  Amazon still needs to work on it’s end user messaging The CloudPod goes into hibernation before the next crisis hits EC2 Now equipped with ARM rests A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Follow Up 01:33 In what feels suspiciously like an SNL skit, CrowdStrike sent its partners $10 Uber Eats gift cards as an apology for mass IT outage As you can imagine, Twitter (or X) had thoughts.  Turns out they were just for third party partners that were helping with implementation.  2024 Economics wants to know – what are you going to do with only $10 with Uber Eats?  Crowdstrike: Preliminary Post Incident Review Moving on to the actual story – The Preliminary Post Incident Review (PIR) is now out for the BSOD Crowdstrike event we talked about last week. Crowdstrike reports that a Rapid Response Content Update for the Falcon sensor was published to Windows hosts running sensor version 7.11 and above.  The update was to gather telemetry on new threat techniques that targeted named pipes in the kernel but instead triggered a BSOD on systems online from 4:09 – 5:27 UTC. Ultimately, the crash occurred due to undetected content during validation checks, which resulted in an out-of-bounds memory read.  To avoid this, Crowdstrike plans to do a bunch of things: Improve rapid response content testing by using testing types such as Local developer, content update and rollback, stress, fuzzing, fault injection, stability and content interface testing.  Introduce additional validation checks in the content validator to prevent similar issues.  Strengthen error handling mechanisms in the Falcon sensor to ensure errors from problematic content are managed gracefully. Adopt staggered deployment strategies, starting with a canary deployment to a small subset of systems before further staged rollouts Enhanced sensor and system performance monitoring during the staggered content deployment to identify and mitigate issues promptly. Allowing a granular section of when and where these updates are deployed will give customers greater control over the delivery of rapid-response content updates. Provide notifications of content updates and timing Conduct multiple independent third-party security code reviews Conduct independent reviews of end-to-end quality processes from develop...

Welcome to episode 269 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matthew and Ryan are your hosts this week as we talk about – you guessed it – the Crowdstrike update that broke, well, everything! We’re also looking at Databricks, Google potentially buying Wiz, NY Summit news, and more!   Titles we almost went with this week: ✈️You can’t take Justin down; but a 23-hour flight to India (or Crowdstrike updates) can Google wants Wiz, and Crowdstrike Strikes all Crowdstrike, does anyone know the Graviton of this situation?  ⛰️We are called to this summit to talk AWS AI Supremacy Crowdstrike, Wiz and Chat GPT 4o Mini… oh my An Impatient Wiz builds his own data centers not impacted by Crowdstrike A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat!  General News 00:58 You Guessed It – Crowdstrike  Microsoft, CrowdStrike outage disrupts travel and business worldwide Our Statement on Today’s Outage   (listener note: paywall article)  It’s not every day you get to experience one of the largest IT Outages in history,  and it even impacted our recording of the show last week.   Crowdstrike, a popular EDR solution caused major disruption to the worlds IT systems with an errant update to their software that caused servers to BSOD, disrupting travel (airplanes, trains, etc), governments, news organizations and more.   Crowdstrike removed the errant file quickly, but still the damage was done with tons of systems requiring manual intervention to be recovered. The fix required booting into safe mode, and removing a file from the crowdstrike directory. This was all complicated by bitlocker and lack of local admin rights for many end user devices. Sometimes doing up to 15 reboots would bring the server back to life. Swinging the hard drives from one broken server to a working server manually removes the files and puts them back. The issue also caused a large-scale outage in the Azure Central region.    In addition to services on AWS being impacted that run Windows (Amazon is a well-known large Crowdstrike customer) Crowdstrike CEO Goerge Kurtz (who happened to be the CTO at Mcafee during the 2010 Update Fiasco that impacted Mcafee clients globally) stated that he was deeply sorry and vowed to make sure every customer is fully recovered. ...

Welcome to episode 268 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin says he’s in India, but we know he’s really been replaced by Skynet. Jonathan, Matthew, and Ryan are here in his stead to bring all the latest cloud news, including PGO for optimization, a Linux vulnerability, CloudFront’s new managed policies, and even a frank discussion about whether or not the AI Hype train has officially left the station. Sit back and enjoy!  Titles we almost went with this week: OpenSSH sings “Oops I did it again” All aboard, the AI hype train is leaving the station Caching In on CloudFront’s New Managed Policies  ️Get your Go Apps a personal trainer this summer with PGO Was Japan actually using floppy disks or were they 3.5 ⛱️Azure is on summer break Singapore will soon just be datacenters A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat!  General News 00:56 Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks Here’s a bit of tech nostalgia meets modernization for you!  Japan’s government has finally phased out the use of floppy disks in all its systems.  The Digital Agency has scrapped over 1,000 regulations related to their use, marking a significant step in their efforts to update government technology. Digital Minister Taro Kono, who’s been on a mission to modernize Japan’s government tech, announced this victory last week. It’s part of a larger push to digitize Japan’s notoriously paper-heavy bureaucracy, which became glaringly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Japan’s digitization efforts have hit some bumps along the way, including issues with a contact-tracing app and slow adoption of their digital ID system.  It’s a reminder that modernizing legacy systems isn’t just about replacing old hardware – it’s a complex process that involves changing long-standing processes and especially mindsets. 02:36 Jonathan – “Yeah, I remember a couple of years ago they started talking about this modernization they were doing and people started to panic because Japan’s the largest purchaser of floppy disks anymore, or three and a half inch disks anyway. And so I ended up buying some because I’ve still got a USB floppy drive and some machines that have floppy disks. And I wanted just to stock up on some for the future, just in case the price went through the roof if Japan finally cut them and they have.” 05:16 regreSSHion: Remote Unauthenticated Code Execution Vulnerability in OpenSSH s...

Welcome to episode 265 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a full house this week – Matthew, Jonathan, Ryan and Justin are all here to bring you the latest in cloud news – including FOCUS features in AWS Billing, Magic Quadrants, and AWS Metis. Plus, we have an Andoid vs. Apple showdown in the Aftershow, so be sure to stay tuned for that!  Titles we almost went with this week: Tech reports show Gartner leads in the BS quadrant  ‍⚖️Oracle adds cloud and legal expenses to their FinOps hub AWS Metis: Great chatbot, or Greek tragedy waiting to happen?  The cloud pod rocks Cargo Pants  A sonnet is written for FOCUSing on spend A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email, or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat!  General News 01:40 Finops X Recently Justin attended FinOps in beautiful and sunny San Diego – and if you weren’t there, you really should plan on attending next year. This year’s topics included: Focus 1.0 State of Vendors Conference size – they will most likely outgrow this particular conference center, seeing as how they’re either selling out or pretty close to it.  Coolest thing about the conference – on stage all the biggies – TOGETHER.  It’s great to see them all together talking about how they’re making Finops better, and introducing new things for Finops and not just saving them for their own conferences.  Next Year  – Is Oracle going to be on stage next year?  08:22 Justin – “The shift left of FinOps was a big topic. You know, how do we get visibility? How do we show people what things are going to cost? How do we make sure that, you know, people are aware of what they’re doing? And so I think, you know, it’s just a recognition that is important and just as important as security is your cost. And in some ways security is part of your cost story. Because if you bankrupt your company, that’s a pretty bad security situation.” 10:17 Introducing Managed OpenSearch: Gain Control of Your Cloud with Powerful Log Analysis  Listen. We don’t really *care* about OpenSearch – but the reality is it’s taking over the world. Nobody is doing ElasticSearch anymore.  Digital Ocean is launching Managed OpenSearch offering, a comprehensive solution designed for in depth log analysis, simplifying troubleshooting, and optimizing application performanc...

Welcome to episode 265 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Matthew are with you this week, and even though it’s a light news week, you’re definitely going to want to stick around. We’re looking forward to FinOps, talking about updates to Consul, WIF coming to Vault 1.17, and giving an intro to Databricks LakeFlow. Because we needed another lake product. Be sure to stick around for this week’s Cloud Journey series too.  Titles we almost went with this week: The CloudPod lets the DataLake flow ️ Amazon attempts an international incident in Taiwan What’s your Vector Mysql?  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email, or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat!  General News 01:40 Consul 1.19 improves Kubernetes workflows, snapshot support, and Nomad integration Consul 1.19 is now generally available, improving the user experience, providing flexibility and enhancing integration points.  Consul 1.19 introduces a new registration custom resource definition (CRD) that simplifies the process of registering external services into the mesh.   Consul service mesh already supports routing to services outside of the mesh through terminating gateways. However, there are advantages to using the new Registration CRD.  Consul snapshots can now be stored in multiple destinations, previously, you could only snapshot to a local path or to a remote object store destination but not both.   Now you can take a snapshot of NFS Mounts, San attached Storage, or Object storage.  Consul API gateways can now be deployed on Nomad, combined with transparent proxy and enterprise features like admin partitions  01:37 Matthew- “What I was surprised about, which I did not know, was that console API gateway can now be deployed on Nomad. Was it not able to be deployed before? Just feels weird… you know, consoles should be able to be deployed on nomad compared to that. You know, it’s all the same company, but sometimes team A doesn’t always talk to team B.” 03:21 Vault 1.17 brings WIF, EST support for PKI, and more   Vault 1.17 is now generally available with new secure workflows, better...

Welcome to episode 264 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, Ryan (and eventually) Matthew are all on hand this week  – and *announcement noise* this week it’s the return of the Cloud Journey Series! There’s also a lot of news from Re:inforce, a ground-breaking partnership between Oracle and Google Cloud, and updates to GKE. The guys also look ahead to Finops ‘24.  Titles we almost went with this week: ✍️First, AI came for Writers/Artists, then it came for Developers, and now it comes for Security… What’s Next?  Amazon Reinforces my Lack of Interest in Attending – JPB rl Object Storage Malware protection, everyone, please copy it! Amazon is the last man out in Oracle next-gen partnerships Dear Google, A partnership with Oracle is not Groundbreaking when Azure already did it AWS Announces some “We finally got around to it feature updates” Protect your S3 buckets from themselves with Amazon Guard Duty The CloudPod and AI play Guess Who? with IAM Access Analyzer. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email, or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat!  AWS  01:04 Simplify risk and compliance assessments with the new common control library in AWS Audit Manager   AWS Audit Manager is introducing a common control library that provides common controls with predefined and pre-mapped AWS data sources.  This makes it easy for the GRC teams to use the common control library to save time when mapping enterprise controls into Audit Manager for evidence collection, reducing their dependence on IT teams.  You can view the compliance requirements for multiple frameworks such as PCI or HIPAA, associated with the same common control in one place, making it easier to understand your audit readiness across multiple frameworks simultaneously.  Interested in pricing? You can find that info here.  01:37 Ryan – “It’s the dream! Automated evidence generation. And now with the context of known frame...

Welcome to episode 263 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re diving into the world of Snowflake, including announcements from their latest conference and details about their recent breach. Seriously – MFA is important! Plus we look at updates to Terraform, Claude 3, and OCI pushing the IOPS limits and much more. Join us!  Titles we almost went with this week: ❄️Snowflake Announces State-of-the-Art way for hackers to Talk to your Data ️Ticketmaster gets a snow job – MFA matters!  The CloudPod wouldn’t use Oracle even for a million IOPS Azure finally wakes up to hibernation support JJB No one ever called a Bastion Host Premium until Today – JPB MK I look forward to connecting Kinesis to Pub Sub to Event Hub in the most rube        goldberg eventing architecture ever ️Hashicorp shows you the way ‍10 ways to say I want you Matt (I’m not bias with the name) Can we just hibernate ourselves on AI announcements ️Sus is how i feel about the new Susscanner from AWS OCI has enough power to run Oracle databases with 1 MIllion IOPS OCI wants 1 Million IOPS (dr evil voice) Monday, Tuesday, Hashidays… General News  Terraform AWS Cloud Control API provider is now generally available  The AWS Cloud Control Provider (AWSCC), built around the AWS Cloud Control API and designed to bring new services to Terraform faster, is now generally available.  The 1.0 release represents a step in their effort to provide launch-day support of AWS services.   This service was put into tech preview in 2021.  Glad it’s finally here; although we thought this effort was abandoned, honestly.  Interesting that you can mix HCL Terraform and AWSCC, but specify the different resource types in the configurations.   00:53 New Vault and Boundary offerings advance Security Lifecycle Management at HashiDays 2024   Hashicorp held their “Hashidays” event in London

Welcome to episode 262 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, and Ryan are your hosts this week, and there’s a ton of news to get through! We look at updates to .NET and Kubernetes, the future of email, new instances that promise to cause economic woes, and – hold onto your butts – a new deep sea cable! Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week: ☁️What is a vagrant when you move it into your cloud I only Aspire not to use/support .NET AI Is the Gateway drug to Cloudflare Let me tell you about the future with MAIL ROUTING AWS invents impressive ways to burn money with the U7i instances Google Only wishes they could delete our podcast with an expiring subscription ⚔️AKS Automatic — impressive new attack weapon or an impressive way to make Ops Cry?  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Big thanks to Sonrai Security for sponsoring today’s podcast! Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod  General News  00:53 Vagrant Cloud is moving to HCP  What sort of feels like a “if you care about it, get it moved into HCP before the IBM acquisition is done” Vagrant Cloud is being migrated to the Hashicorp Cloud Platform (HCP) under the new name of HCP Vagrant Registry.   All existing users of Vagrant Cloud are now able to migrate their Vagrant Boxes to HCP.  Vagrant isn’t changing; HCP provides a fully managed platform to make using Vagrant easier.  An improved box search experience A refreshed Vagrant Cloud UI No Fee for private boxes Users who migrate can register for free with the same email address as their existing Vagrant cloud account.  Want to review the migration guide? You can find it

Welcome to episode 261 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matthew, and Ryan are your hosts this week, and there’s a ton of news to cover, including a slew of Azure and Oracle stories! This week the guys cover some new cost management strategies from FinOps, some Kubernetes updates, MS Build, and even fancy schmancy CoPilot PCs!  Titles we almost went with this week: Azure woke up and announced things AWS stops taking your IPv4 Money ‍✈️Well now everything has copilot A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Big thanks to Sonrai Security for sponsoring today’s podcast! Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod  AWS  00:57 AWS plans to invest €7.8B into the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, set to launch by the end of 2025 Amazon is sharing more details about the AWS European Sovereign Cloud roadmap so that customers and partners can start planning.  The first AWS European Sovereign Cloud is planning to launch its first AWS Region in the state of Brandenburg, Germany by the end of 2025.   Available to all AWS customers, this effort is backed by a 7.8B Euro investment in infrastructure, jobs and skills development. Customers will get the full power of the AWS architecture, expansive service portfolio and API’s that customers use today.   Customers can start building applications in any existing Region and simply move them to AWS European Sovereign Cloud when the first region launches in 2025.  And how exactly will they do that, you might be wondering? If you mean there will be an easy button that’s awesome… do it everywhere else.  if you mean update Terraform and redeployed Screw you, Amazon.  03:23 Ryan – “Yeah. It just seems so anti what they’re trying to set up with the sovereign region to begin with, right? Like, I guess copying data is fine in, but not out. Like it’s sort of, it’s like GovCloud, right? It’s completely separate. So strange.”...

Welcome to episode 260 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan and Ryan are talking about changes in leadership over at Amazon, GPT-4.o and its image generating capabilities, and the new voice of Skynet, Amazon Polly! It’s an action packed episode – and make sure to stay tuned for this week’s after show.  Titles we almost went with this week: Who eats pumpkin pie in May Bytes and Goodbyes: AWS CEO Logs Off AWS lets you know that you are burning money sooner than before High-Ho, High-Ho, It’s GPT-4-Ohhh The CloudPod pans for nuggets in the AI Gold rush A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Big thanks to Sonrai Security for sponsoring today’s podcast! Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod  General News  00:40 Terraform Enterprise adds Podman support and workflow enhancements The latest version of Terraform Enterprise now supports Podman with RHEL 8 and above.  Originally, it only supported Docker Engine and Cloud Managed K8 services.   With the upcoming EOL of RHEL 7 in June 2024, customers faced a lack of an end-to-end supported option for running a terraform enterprise on RHEL.   Now, with support from Podman, this is rectified.   01:18 Ryan – “This is for the small amount of customers running the enterprise either on -prem or in their cloud environment. It’s a pretty good option. Makes sense.” 01:42 Justin – “You know, the thing I was most interested in at this actually is that Red Hat Linux 7 is now end of life, which this is my first time in my entire 20 some odd career that I’ve never had to support Red Hat Linux in production because we use Ubuntu for some weird reason, which I actually appreciate because I always like Ubuntu best for my home projects, but I didn’t actually know Red Hat 7 was going away.” AI Is Going Great (Or, How ML Makes All It’s Money)  03:58 Hello GPT-4o Open AI has launched their

Welcome to episode 259 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan and Ryan (yes, all 4!) are covering A LOT of information – you’re going to want to sit down for this one. This week’s agenda includes unnecessary Magic Quadrants, SecOps, Dataflux updates, CNAME chain struggles, and an intro into Phi-3 – plus so much more!  Titles we almost went with this week: ⚛️GKE Config Sync or the Auto Outage for K8 Feature If only all my disasters could be managed The Cloud Pod builds a Rag Doll Understanding Dataflux has given me reflux Oracle continuing the trend of adding AI to everything even databases A new way to burn your money on the cloud which isn’t even your fault Google Gets a Magic Quadrant Participation Trophy We’re All Winners to Magic Quadrant  Don’t be a giant DNAME  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Big thanks to Sonrai Security for sponsoring today’s podcast Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod  General News  00:33 Dropbox dropped the ball on security, hemorrhaging customer and third-party info  Dropbox has revealed a major attack on its systems that saw customers’ personal information accessed by unknown and unauthorized entities.  The attack, detailed in a regulatory filing, impacted Dropbox Sign, a service that supports e-signatures similar to Docusign.  The threat actor had accessed data related to all users of Dropbox Sign, such as emails and usernames, in addition to general account settings.  For a subset of users, the threat actor accessed phone numbers, hashed passwords and certain authentication information such as API keys, OAuth tokens and multi-factor authentication.   To make things *extra* worse – if you never had an account but received a signed document your email and name has also been exposed. Good times.  Want to read the official announcement? You can find it here. 

Welcome to episode 258 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan dig into all the latest earnings reports, talk about the 57 announcements made by AWS about Q, and discuss the IBM purchase of HashiCorp – plus even more news.  Make sure to stay for the aftershow, where the guys break down an article warning about the loss of training data for LLM’s. Titles we almost went with this week: Terraform hugs to Big Blue (Bear) The CloudPod hosts again forgets to lower their headphone volume AWS fixes an issue that has made Matt swear many times Google gets mad at open-source Azure has crickets HashiCorp’s Nomadic Journey to the IBM Oasis ‍It’s Gonna be Maaay! A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:   Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod  General News  01:48 It’s Earnings TIme! Alphabet (Google) Alphabet beat on earnings and revenue in the first quarter, with revenue increasing 15% from a year earlier, one of the fastest growth rates since 2022.   They also announced its first dividend and a $70 billion dollar stock buyback. Using layoff money for something other than a buyback? IN THIS ECONOMY?  Revenue was 80.54 Billion vs 78.59 expected, resulting in earnings per share of 1.89.  Google Cloud Revenue was 9.57B vs 9.35 B expected.  Net income jumped 57% to 23.66 B up from 15.05B a year ago.  Operating income of the cloud business quadruped to 900M, showing that the company is finally generating substantial profits after pouring money into the business for years to keep up with AWS and Azure.  03:54 Justin – “Yeah, I mean, they’re doing pretty well… I think AI is helping them out tremendously in this regard.  I believe it includes G Suite as well. But I mean, like I don’t know how much revenue that is comparatively, but your Google cloud is definitely the majority of it, I think at this point..” 04:20 Microsoft

Welcome to episode 257 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, Ryan, and Jonathan are in the barnyard bringing you the latest news, which this week is really just Meta’s release of Llama 3. Seriously. That’s every announcement this week. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.  Titles we almost went with this week: Meta Llama says no Drama No Meta Prob-llama Keep Calm and Llama on  Redis did not embrace the Llama MK The bedrock of good AI is built on Llamas The CloudPod announces support for Llama3 since everyone else was doing it Llama3, better know as Llama Llama Llama The Cloud Pod now known as the LLMPod Cloud Pod is considering changing its name to LlamaPod Unlike WinAMP nothing whips the llamas ass A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Check out Sonrai Securities‘ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at www.sonrai.co/cloudpod Follow Up  01:27 Valkey is Rapidly Overtaking Redis  Valkey has continued to rack up support from AWS, Ericsson, Google, Oracle and Verizon initially, to now being joined by Alibaba, Aiven, Heroku and Percona backing Valkey as well.   Numerous blog posts have come out touting Valkey adoption. I’m not sure this whole thing is working out as well as Redis CEO Rowan Trollope had hoped.  AI Is Going Great – Or How AI Makes All It’s Money  03:26 Introducing Meta Llama 3: The most capable openly available LLM to date  Meta has launched Llama 3, the next generation of their state-of-the-art open source large language model.  Llama 3 will be available on AWS, Databricks, GCP, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, Nvidia NIM, and Snowflake with support from hardware platforms offered by AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm Includes new trust and safety tools such as Llama Guard 2, Code Shield and Cybersec eval 2 They plan to introduce new capabilities, including longer context windows, additional model sizes and enhanced performance. The first two models from Meta Lama3 are the 8B and 70B parameter variants that can support a broad range of use cases.  Meta shared some benchmarks against Gemma 7B and Mistral 7B vs the Lama 3 8B models and showed improvements across all major benc...

Welcome to episode 256 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin and Matthew are here this week to catch you up on all the news you may have missed while Google Next was going on. We’ve got all the latest news on the custom silicon hot war that’s developing, some secret sync, drama between HashiCorp and OpenTofu, and one more Google Next recap – plus much more in today’s episode. Welcome to the Cloud!  Titles we almost went with this week: I have a Google Next sized hangover Claude’s Magnificent Opus now on AWS ➡️US-EAST-1 Gets called Reliable; how insulting ️The cloud pod flies on a g6  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:   Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at www.sonrai.co/cloudpod General News  Today, we get caught up on the other Clouds from last week, and other news (besides Google, that is.) Buckle up.  04:11 OpenTofu Project Denies HashiCorp’s Allegations of Code Theft  After our news cutoff before Google Next, Hashicorp issued a strongly worded Cease and Desist letter to the OpenTofu project, accusing that the project has “repeatedly taken code Hashi provided under the BSL and used it in a manner that violates those license terms and Hashi’s intellectual properties.” It notes that in some instances, OpenTofu has incorrectly re-labeled Hashicorp’s code to make it appear as if it was made available by Hashi, originally under a different license.  Hashi gave them until April 10th to remove any allegedly copied code from the OpenTofu repo, threatening litigation if the project failed to do so.  OpenTofu struck back – and they came with receipts!  They deny that any BSL licensed code was incorporated into the OpenTofu repo, and that any code they copied came from the MPL-Licensed version of terraform. “The OpenTofu team vehemently disagrees with any suggestions that it misappropriated, mis-sourced or misused Hashi’s BSL code. All such statements have zero basis in facts” — Open Tofu Team OpenTofu showed how the code they accused was lifted from the BSL code, was actually in the MPL version, and then copied into the BSL version from an older version by a Hashi Engineer.  Anticipating third party contributions might submit BSL terraform code unwittingly or otherwise, OpenTofu i...

Welcome to episode 255 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are here to tackle the aftermath of Google Next. Whether you were there or not, sit back, relax, and let the guys dissect each day’s keynote and the major announcements.  Titles we almost went with this week: How About Some AI? ⛅“The New Way to Cloud” is a Terrible TagLine (and is what happens when you let AI do your copy) Welcome Google Cloud Next Where There is No Cloud, Just AI  Ok Google, did your phone go off? For 100 dollars, guess how many AI stories Google Has This Week  From Search to Skynet: Google Cloud Next’s Descent into AI Madness ‘Next’ Up from Google – AI!   Have Some Conference with Your AI  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’ve got a new sponsor! Sonrai Security   Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at sonrai.co/cloudpod GCP – Google Next 2024 We’re jumping right into GCP this week, so we can talk about all things Google Next.  01:44 FIrst impressions: Vegas > Moscone, so take that Vegas.  Both Ryan and Justin agree that Vegas is much better than the Mosconoe center in San Francisco for Google Next The Sessions were well organized, but Ryan is a little tired from walking back and forth between them. Exercise is tiring! \ Vegas infrastructure was well utilized, something Amazon didn’t do as well.  Folks staying at area hotels that *weren’t* Mandalay Bay had some issues with trying to get onto / off  property at the beginning and end of the day.  Free coffee is still available. *If you can find it.  Expo hall felt cramped 08:22 Thoughts on the Keynote Address  Note: Not enough space in the arena for keynotes; the arena holds approx. 12k; numbers released by Google say there were 30k in attendance.  Thomas Kurian kicked off the keynote, introduced their new tagline “The New Way to Cloud” Sundar: Months can feel like decades in the cloud… WORD. 36B revenue run rate Kurian did a rapid fire announcement of all the things coming – which required Justin to rewatch just to get them all.  A3 Mega Nvidia H100 GPUs Nvidia GB200 NVL72 (in early 2025

Welcome to episode 254 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re talking about trust issues with some security updates over at Azure, forking drama at Redis, and making all of our probably terrible predictions for Google Next. Going to be in Vegas? Find one of us and get a sticker for your favorite cloud podcast! Follow us on Slack and Twitter to get info on finding your favorite host IRL. (Unless Jonathan is your favorite. We won’t be giving directions to his hot tub.) Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod Hosts Fail To Do Their Homework The Cloud Pod Now Has a Deadline  ➿This Is Why I Love Curl … EC2 Shop Endpoint is Awesome AI & Elasticsearch… AI – But Not Like That  Preparing for Next Next Week A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’ve got a new sponsor! Sonrai Security   Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at www.sonrai.co/cloudpod Follow Up 02:15  AWS, Google, Oracle back Redis fork “Valkey” under the Linux Foundation In no surprise, placeholderKV is now backed by AWS, Google and Oracle and has been rebranded to Valkey under the Linux Foundation. Interestingly, Ericsson and Snap Inc. also joined Valkey.  03:19 Redis vs. the trillion-dollar cabals Anytime an open source company changes their license, AWS and other cloud providers are blamed for not contributing enough upstream.  Matt Asay, from Infoworld, weighs in this time. The fact that placeholder/Valkey was forked by several employees at AWS who were core contributors of Redis, does seem to imply that they’re doing more than nothing.  I should point out that Matt Asay also happens to run Developer relations at MongoDB. Pot, meet kettle.  04:14 Ryan – “It’s funny because I always feel like the cloud contribution to these things is managed services around them, right? It’s not necessarily improvements to the core source code. It’s more management of that source code. Now there are definitely areas where they do make enhancements, but I’m not sure the vast majority makes sense to be included in an open source made for everyone product either.” General News  07:01

Welcome to episode 253 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Jonathan are your hosts this week as we discuss data centers, OCI coming in hot (and potentially underwater?) in Kenya, stateful containers, and Oracle’s new globally distributed database (Oracle Autonomous Database) of many dollars. Sit back and enjoy the show! Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod: Transitioning to SSPL – Sharply Satirical Podcast Laughs! ️The Data Centers of Loudoun County The Forks of Redis were Speedb AWS, I’d Like to Make a Return, Please See…Stateful Containers Are a Thing ‍Azure Whispers Sweet Nothings to You I’m a Hip OG-DAD  Legacy Vendor plus Legacy Vendor = Profit $$ Wine Vendors >Legacy Vendors  ‍I’m Not a Regular Dad, I’m an OG Dad A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.  Follow Up 02:25  Microsoft Agreed to Pay Inflection $650 Million While Hiring Its Staff  Listener Note: Payway article  Last week, we talked about Microsoft hiring the Inflection Co-Founder Mustafa Suleyman and their Chief scientist, as well as most of the 70-person staff.  Inflection had previously raised 1.5B, and so this all seemed strange as part of their shift to an AI Studio or a company that helps others train AI models.  Now, it has been revealed that Microsoft has agreed to pay a 620M dollar licensing fee, as well as 30M to waive any legal rights related to the mass hiring. As well as it renegotiated a $140M line of credit that aimed to help inflection finance its operations and pay for the MS services.  03:22 Justin – “…that explains the mystery that we talked about last week for those who were paying attention.” General News  05:17 Redis switches licenses, acquires Speedb to go beyond its core in-memory database  Redis, one of the popular in-memory data stores, is switching away from its Open Source Three-Clause BSD license.  Instead it is adopting a dual licensing model called the

Welcome to episode 252 of The Cloud Pod podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are talking about InfluxDB, collabs between AWS and NVIDIA, some personnel changes over at Microsoft, Amazon Timestream, and so much more! Sit back and enjoy – and make sure to hang around for the aftershow, where Linux and DBOS are on the docket. You won’t want to miss it.  Titles we almost went with this week: Light a fire under your Big Queries with Spark procedures ️All your NVIDIA GPU belong to AWS Thanks, EU for Free Data Transfer for all* Microsoft, Inflection, Mufasta, Scar… this is not the Lion King Sequel I expected ⌛The Cloud Pod sees Inflections in the Timestream The Cloud Pod is a palindrome The Cloudpod loves SQL so much we made a OS out of it Lets run SQL on Kubernetes on Top of DBOS. What could go wrong? The Cloud Pod is 5 7 5 long A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel. Please. We’re not above begging. Ok. Maybe Ryan is. But the rest of us? Absolutely not.  AI Is Going Great (Or, How ML Makes All Its Money) 1:00 PSYCH! We’re giving this segment a break this week. YOU’RE WELCOME.  AWS 01:08 Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku model is now available on Amazon Bedrock  Last week Claude 3 Sonnet was available on Bedrock, this week Claude 3 Haiku is available on Bedrock.   The Haiku model is the fastest and most compact mode of the Claude 3 family, designed for near-instant responsiveness and seamless generative AI experiences that mimic human interaction.  We assume, thanks to how much Amazon is stretching this out, that next week we’ll get Opus.  Want to check it out for yourself? Head over to the Bedrock console.  02:02 Jonathan – “I haven’t tried Haiku, but I’ve played with Sonnet a lot for pre over the past week. It’s very good. It’s much better conversationally. I mean, I’m not talking about technical things. It’s like I ask all kinds of random philosophical questions or whatever, just to kind of explore what it can do, what it knows…If I was going to spend money on OpenAI or Anthropic, it wou...

Welcome to episode 251 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re looking at the potential end of low impact code thanks to generative AI, how and why Kubernetes is still hanging on, and Cloudflare’s new defensive AI project. Plus we take on the death of Project Titan in our aftershow.  Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod is Magic Why is the Cloud Pod Not on the Board of the Director for OpenAI The Cloud Pod wants Gen AI Money The Cloud Pod Thinks Magic Networks Are Less Fun Than Magic Mushrooms The Cloud Pod is Mission Critical so Give Us Your Money and Sponsor Us A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.  Follow-Up 00:50  Kubernetes Predictions Were Wrong — Redux Last week Ryan and Justin talked about why Kubernetes hasn’t disappeared into the background during our after show, and now with Matt and Jonathan here I wanted to see if they had any additional thoughts.   If you missed this two weeks ago, it’s probably because you don’t know that there are regular after shows after the final bumper of the show… typically about non-cloud things or things that generally interest our hosts. There is one today about the death of the Apple Car.  To summarize the conversation, ChatGPT has provided us with a sort of CliffsNotes version.  Ryan and Justin speculated on the reasons why Kubernetes (K8) persisted despite predictions of its decline: Global Pandemic Impact: They acknowledged the global pandemic that unfolded since 2020 and considered its potential influence on Kubernetes. The pandemic might have shifted priorities and accelerated digital transformation efforts, leading to increased reliance on Kubernetes for managing cloud-native applications and infrastructure. Organizations might have intensified their focus on scalable and resilient technologies like Kubernetes to adapt to remote work environments and changing market dynamics. Unforeseen Complexity: Despite expectations for a simpler alternative to emerge, Kubernetes has grown more complex over time. The ecosystem around Kubernetes has expanded significantly, with various platforms, services, and tools built on top of it. This complexity may have made it challenging for organizations to migrate away from Kubernetes, as they have heavily invested in its ecosystem and expertise. Critical Role in Scalability: Kubernetes remains a fundamental technology for platform engineering teams seeking to achieve scalability and standardization in their operations. Creating a standardized, opinionated path for Kubernetes within organizations enables them to streamline deployment processes, manage resources efficiently, and support the growing demands of modern applications. T...

Welcome to episode 250 of the Cloud Pod  podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Well, we’re not launching rockets this week, but we ARE discussing the AI arms race, AWS going nuclear, and all the latest drama between Elon and OpenAI. You won’t want to miss a minute of it! Titles we almost went with this week: The Paradox of AI choice ️Amazon just comes across super desperate on RACING to AI foundation model          support Your new JR developer Test-LLM ‍⚖️If you can’t beat OpenAI, sue them A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.  General News  01:12  IT Infrastructure, Operations Management & Cloud Strategies: Chicago (Rosemont/O’Hare), Illinois  Want to meet cloud superstar Matthew Kohn in person? He’s going to be giving a talk in Chicago, if you’re going to be in the neighborhood. *Maybe* he’ll have some stickers. 11:30am – 12:30pm: Using Data and AI to Shine a Light on Your Dark IT Estate AI Is Going Great (Or, How ML Makes All Its Money) 03:42 Anthropic claims its new models beat GPT-4 AI Startup Anthropics, has announced their latest version of Claude.  The company claims that it rivals OpenAI’s GPT-4 in terms of performance. Claude 3, and its family of models, includes Claude 3 Haiku, Sonnet and Opus, with Opus being the most powerful.   All show “increased capabilities” in analysis and forecasting, Anthropic claims, as well enhanced performance on specific benchmarks versus models like GPT-4 (but not GPT-4 Turbo) and Googles Gemini 1.0 Ultra (but not Gemini 1.5 Pro) Claude 3 is Anthropics first multi-modal model. In a step better than rivals, Claude can analyze multiple images in a single request (up to 20). This allows it to do compare and contrast operations However, there are limits to its image capabilities. It’s not allowed to identify people.   They admit it is also prone to mistakes on low-quality images under 200 pixels, and struggles with tasks involving spatial reasoning and object counting.   05:42 Justin – “...

Welcome to episode 249 of the CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, Justin and Ryan put on their scuba suits and dive into the latest cloud news, from Google Gemini’s “woke” woes, to Azure VMware Solution innovations, and some humorous takes on Reddit and Google’s unexpected collaboration. Join the conversation on AI, storage solutions, and more this week in the Cloud! Titles we almost went with this week: Gemini Has Gone Woke? Uhhh…ok.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.  General News  01:48 DigitalOcean beats expectations under the helm of new CEO Paddy Srinivasan Quick earnings chat. Digital Ocean, under their new CEO Paddy Srinivasan reported earnings of 44 centers per share, well ahead of Wall Street’s target of 37 cents per share.  Revenue growth was a little sluggish at 11% more than a year earlier, but the companies 181 million in reported sales still beat analysts expectations.  Full year revenue was 693M for the year.  We’re really glad to see the business is still going, and instead of going back on-premise, we think it’s a viable option for many workloads so don’t sleep on them. 02:46  Ryan – “I like that, you know, while they are very focused on, you know, traditional compute workloads, you can still see them. Dip in their toes into managed services and, and, um, their interaction with the community and documentation of how to do things. I think it’s really impactful.” 03:34 VMware moves to quell concern over rapid series of recent license changes   As we have reported multiple times on the VMWARE shellacking they are doing to the customers, Vmware has released a blog post trying to convince you that they’re **not** screwing you.  Broadcom has realigned operations around VMWare Cloud Foundation private cloud portfolio and data center-focused VMWare Vsphere suite, and

Welcome to episode 247 of the CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Pepperidge Farm remembers – and now so does ChatGPT! Today on the pod we’re talking about the new “memory” function in ChatGPT, secrets over at OCI, and Firehose dropping Kinesis like its HOT. Plus plenty of other Cloud and AI news to get you through the week. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week: I Don’t Think Anyone Wants to be “Good Enough” in AI  ㊙️Oracle Can Rotate All My Secrets Amazon Data Firehose – Not Without Kinesis  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.  Follow Up 00:57 C2C Event  Recently Justin was down at a 2gather event Google’s Cloud headquarters near Moffett Field in Sunnyvale. So to those new listeners who heard Justin there and just couldn’t get enough, welcome! We’re happy to have you.  Want to see what events are coming up, and hopefully near you? Check out the lineup here.  General News 08:25  Why companies are leaving the cloud  A recent study by Citrix, is saying that 25% of organizations in the UK have already moved half or more of their cloud-based workloads back to on-premises infrastructures.   The survey questioned 350 IT leaders on their current approaches to cloud computing.  93% of them had been involved in a cloud repatriation project in the last three years.  Surveyed said their reasons for moving from the Security Issues, High Project Expectations and unmet expectations, with most saying the cost was the biggest motivator, which definitely makes sense to us.  In general this isn’t my experience when talking to listeners, or folks at the recent C2C event; there’s always a few companies that probably shouldn’t have moved to the cloud in the first place, but those numbers don’t pan out to us in who we’re talking to.  We’re interested in listener feedback here – have any of you been involved in a repatriation project?  09:55 Ryan – “I think it’s kind of the same thing that happened in rev...

Welcome to episode 246 of The CloudPod podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re discussion localllm and just why they’ve saddled us all with that name, saying goodbye to Bard and hello to Gemini Pro, and discussing the pros and cons of helping skynet to eradicate us all. All that and more cloud and AI news, now available for your listening nightmares.  Titles we almost went with this week: Oracle says hold my beer on Africa The Cloud Pod Thinks the LLM Maturity Model has More Maturing To Do There is a Finch Windows Canary in Fargate New LLM Nightmares ⌨️The Cloud Pod Will Never Type localllm Correctly A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.  General News It’s Earnings Time!  01:42 Microsoft issues light guidance even as Azure growth drives earnings beat  Microsoft shares were up after they reported earnings of 2.93 per share vs expectations of 2.73 per share.   Revenue was 62.02 billion vs 61.12 billion.  This represents a 17.6% year over year in the quarter.  The intelligent cloud segment produced $25.88 billion in revenue, up 20% and above the $25.29 billion consensus among analysts surveyed by Streets Accounts.  Revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 30%, when analysts only expected 27.7%.   Six points are tied to AI as Microsoft now has 53,000 Azure AI customers and 1/3rd are new in the past year (per Microsoft.)  02:46 Justin- “I don’t think the count the Open AI customers, do you? Because there’s way more people that have Open AI usage than 53,000. So I think this is legitimately Azure AI – which is Open AI under the hood – but specifically paying for that subscription.” 04:19 Alphabet shares slide on disappointing Google ad revenue   Alphabet reported better-than-expected revenue and profit for the fourth quarter, but ad revenue trailed analysts projections.  Earnings per share were 1.64 vs 1.59 expected.  Revenue of 86.31 billion vs 85.33 billion expected  Google Cloud was 9.19 Billion vs 8.94 billion expected, according to Street.  That represents a 26% expansion in the fourth quarter. 

Welcome to episode 245 of The CloudPod podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week is a real SBOM of an episode. (See what I did there?) Justin and Matthew have braved Teams outages, floods, cold, and funny business names to bring you the latest in Cloud and AI news. This week, we’re talking about Roomba, OpenTofu, and Oracle deciding AI makes money, along with a host of other stories. Join us!  Titles we almost went with this week: Amazon Decides Roomba Sucks ⚔️AI Weapons: Will They Shift Cloud Supremacy Oracle Realizes There is Money in Gen AI A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.  General News REMINDER: 2gather Sunnyvale: Cloud Optimization Summit On February 15, Justin will be onsite in Google’s #Sunnyvale office for the @C2C #2Gather Sunnyvale: #CloudOptimization Summit! Come heckle him, we mean JOIN him, to talk about all things #GenAI and #CloudOps. Consider this your invitation – he’d love to see you there! Sign up →  https://events.c2cglobal.com/e/m9pvbq/?utm_campaign=speaker-Justin-B&utm_source=SOCIAL_MEDIA&utm_medium=LinkedIn 02:23 Amazon abandons $1.4 billion deal to buy Roomba maker iRobot  Amazon is no longer buying iRobot for 1.4 billion, as there is no path to regulatory approval in the European Union. We’re not surprised this is the end result.   Of course, iRobot proceeded to lay off 350 employees, or around 31 percent of its workforce.  In addition CEO Colin Angle, who co-founded the company, stepped down from his CEO position and his chair position.  Amazon gets to pay 94 Million in a termination fee to iRobot, which will help pay off a loan iRobot took the year prior.  04:02 Terraform fork OpenTofu launches into general availability OpenTofu has moved into

Welcome to episode 244 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! We’ve got a ton of news for you this week, including a lot of AI updates, including new CoPilot Pro and updates to ChatGPT, including the addition of a GPT store. Plus, we discuss everyone’s favorite supernatural axis, MagicQuadrants.It’s a jam packed episode you won’t want to miss. Titles we almost went with this week: Switching from Google is Finally Easier Cheaper AI Doesn’t Mean Better AI  Is the Cloud Pod Better Than Microsoft at Containers?  AWS is the Leader in Containers – Because You Can Run Them in Cloudshell  The Cloud Pod is Connecting to the World With Some Undersea Cables  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.  General News 2gather Sunnyvale: Cloud Optimization Summit On February 15, Justin will be onsite in Google’s #Sunnyvale office for the @C2C #2Gather Sunnyvale: #CloudOptimization Summit! Come heckle him, we mean JOIN him, to talk about all things #GenAI and #CloudOps. Consider this your invitation – he’d love to see you there! Sign up →  https://events.c2cglobal.com/e/m9pvbq/?utm_campaign=speaker-Justin-B&utm_source=SOCIAL_MEDIA&utm_medium=LinkedIn AI is Going Great (or how ML Makes all Its Money) 01:20 Introducing ChatGPT Team ChatGPT has added a new self-serve plan called Chat GPT team.   Chat GPT team offers access to their advanced models like GPT-4 and DALL-E 3 and tools like advanced data analysis.   It additionally includes:  A dedicated collaborative workspace for your team and admin tools for team management.  Access to GPT-4 32K context window Tools like Dall-E 3, GPT-4 with Vision, Browsing, Advanced Data Analysis with higher message caps No training on your business data or conversations Secure workspace for your team Create and share custom

Welcome to episode 243 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a bit of a slow new week, but we’re not hitting the snooze button! This week Justin, Matthew and Ryan are discussing more changes over at Broadcom after VMware buyout last year, HPE buying out Juniper Networks, why all the venture capital money seems to be going into trying to take down Nvidia, and changes to WHOIS lookup over at AWS certificate manager. Plus we’ll find out exactly what that special something is that makes Justin the perfect executive.  Titles we almost went with this week: New Years Happened and there is no Good New News  The Cloud Pod Was Always Security Challenged  Azure Shows the Health of Their Business by Springing into Discounts  ⚙️Network Gear Powers AI – Who Knew?  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very niche market of cloud engineers? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.  Follow Up 01:48 More news from Broadcom – and this time they’re coming after the cloud.  Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers  Remember in November when Broadcom bought VMware for $61 billion dollars? Well, the reorganization from that purchase is continuing.  Broadcom is reportedly ditching the majority of their VMware Cloud Service Providers as part of the shakeup of the partner program.  Notable companies in the CSP program include Oracle, Azure, Rackspace, and Google. These larger companies most likely won’t be impacted (yet.) It’s suspected that they will get moved over to a new partner program, but Broadcom is culling it down to only the largest partners to remain in the program. There are lots of smaller cloud players who are in the CSP who will likely be impacted and should keep an eye on this over the next few months.  https://cloud.vmware.com/providers/search-result  It’s a bad look for Broadcom, as they told the EU that acquiring VMware would increase competition in the cloud space – but cutting partners out of the program seems to be a consolidation to me.  03:29  Ryan – “I wonder if this is just going to be like new sales or something. Cause that seems very short notice if you’re on VMware as on one of these smaller cloud providers, that seems incredibly risky.” 03:45  Matthew – “I feel like they have to have something lined up. Or let me rephrase that. I would assume slash hope they have something lined up because otherwise they’re gonna really piss off a lot of people.” General News

Welcome to episode 242 of the The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy. This week your hosts Justin, Ryan, Matthew, and Jonathan are talking about DoH – or DNS over HTTPS, the Digital Ocean, CISO issues, and whether employee issues over at Amazon will impact user experience. It’s a quiet week, but some interesting conversations you’re not going to want to miss.  Titles we almost went with this week: Tired of the Winter of Other Announcements, The Cloud Pod Hits the Digital Ocean ❄️Breaking Through the Chill: The CloudPod Dives into Digital Ocean’s Latest Fed Up with the Winter of Other Announcements? Dive into Digital Ocean with the CloudPod! The Cloud Pod Almost Didn’t Bother with an Episode This Week The Cloud Pod Starts the Year Off Slow ️The Cloud Pod is Silently Slacking Off Running DNS over https Does Not Mean You Can’t Blame DNS for Always Breaking ️DNS over HTTPS, One More Way DNS Will Break A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. AI is Going Great – Or how ML Makes Money 7:20 OpenAI’s Annualized Revenue Tops $1.6 Billion as Customers Shrug Off CEO Drama Listener Note: paywall article, but worth reading.  According to two people interviewed by the Information, Open AI’s revenue has grown to 1.6B from its ChatGPT product, up from 1.3b as of mid-October.  That’s a 20% growth over two months.   As this happened during the period of the leadership crisis, it seems to not have had much impact.  This roughly means OpenAI is making $130M a month from the sales of subscriptions.  And yes, that includes us. You’re welcome, OpenAI. 8:28 Justin – “I’m sure this is a ‘it made 1.3 billion or $1.6 million in revenue’ and they spent $25 billion. I’m pretty sure that’s the current scenario.” AWS 9:23 The AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region is now available Ca-west-1 has opened the thirty-third AWS region with 3 AZ’s.  70 services available at launch.  According to the announcement, “This second Canadian Region allows you to architect multi-Region infrastructures...

Welcome to episode 241 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Can you believe we’ve reached the end of 2023? Neither can we! Join us today for a look back at 2023 and all of the announcements that excited, befuddled, and confused us – as well as a slew of predictions for 2024. Make sure to share your own predictions (after listening, of course) with us on socials.  Titles we almost went with this week:  Wait, How is it 2024?  Thank God 2023 is Over Thank God 2020 is Over… Finally? The Cloud Pod Breaks the Crystal Ball when Trying to Predict 2024 2023: A Snarky Saga of Disappointment 2023: A Snarky Saga of AI  2023… Was Anything Announced Besides AI How Cloudy Was It? A Whimsical Look Back at 2023 and Forecasting the Fluff in 2024 The 2023 Cloud Recap and 2024 Foggy Forecasts 2023’s Cloudiest Moments and 2024’s Forecasted Fun Cache & Carry: Storing Up 2023’s Memories and Downloading 2024’s Dreams  Even AI can’t help us find the best announcements of 2023 Even AI can’t help us predict the announcements of 2024 A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General Podcast News 00:23 Lot’s of changes around these here parts!  As we reflect on 2023, we would love to hear your general thoughts on the podcast. 2023 was a big year of changes for us.  Peter left as host, and we replaced him with Matt. We dropped the lightning round, and reduced the number of stories we covered; going for more depth and discussion. (I think we could still improve here.) We added the Cloud Journeys and did a segment on CCOE, Containers, Kubernetes, Cloud Platform, etc. We added the aftershow to talk about tech adjacent things that interest us as hosts. Absolutely do get on our Slack channel and let us know what you all would like to hear or your general thoughts on the show.  2023 Predictions Also known as “things we’re always wrong about.” Jonathan: Microsoft will release in preview of an Azure branded Chat GPT Justin: Data Sovereignty will drive single panes of glass against multi-cloud Totally missed on this on panes of glass, but OUT OF THE PARK when it comes to data sovereignty. That was a big deal this year. 

Welcome to episode 240! It’s a doozy this week! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan and Matthew are your hosts in this supersized episode. Today we talk about Google Gemini, the GCP sales force (you won’t believe the numbers) and Google feudalism. (There’s some lovely filth over here!) Plus we discuss the latest happenings over at HashiCorp, Broadcom, and the Code family of software. So put away your ugly sweaters and settle in for episode 240 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy!  Titles we almost went with this week: Why run Kubernetes when you can have a fraction of the functionality from Nomad and Podman? The CloudPod hopes for a Microsoft buyout before we shut down The CloudPod looks forward to semantic versioning now Mitchell has left Hashicorp Amazon Fiefdoms, Microsoft Sovereignty… I look forward to Google Feudalism Sovereign Skies vs. Feudal Fiefdoms: Who Owns the Cloud’s Crown?* ‍Cloud Fiefdoms, Feudal Futures: Battling for Data Sovereignty* Fiefdoms Fall, Sovereigns Rise: The Cloud’s Feudal Flaws* A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Follow Up 01:09 Broadcom is killing off VMware perpetual licenses and strong-arming users onto subscriptions Broadcom is wasting no time pissing off the VMware community after the closure of their purchase of Vmware. They moved quick!  With absolutely no warning, Broadcom is killing VMWares on-premise perpetual licenses, and forcing you to move onto subscriptions. According to Broadcom, this is “simplifying” their lineup and licensing model. Sure.  They are doing this by ending the sale of support and subscriptions effective immediately.  This impacts the Vsphere family of products, Cloud Foundation, SRM and the Aria suite.  You may continue to use your existing perpetual licenses until your current contract expires. They will most likely provide a one time incentive of some kind for the transition to subscription. Then, you get to pay FOREVER. Insert Mr. Burns laugh here.  You will also be able to “bring your own subscription” for license portability to Vmware validated hybrid cloud endpoints running VMware Cloud foundation.  They are also sweetening the deal by offering 50% off V

The Cloud Pod Sees the Irony of Using AI to Assist with Climate Change  Welcome to episode 239 of The Cloud Pod podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are your hosts this week as we talk about all things AI and Climate Change – and Google’s assertion that their AI is going to fix it all. Also on today’s agenda: updates to Google Next’s new dates, Azure’s chips, Defender, and all the shenanigans over at OpenAI. Join us!  Titles we almost went with this week: Microsoft Ignites my dislike for their conferences  Google keeps using that Sustainability word…. The gift of no cost learning ‍The CloudPod has an advent calendar for AI A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News 00:50 Broadcom announces successful acquisition of VMware  Broadcom has completed its acquisition of VMware… and apparently it’s a new and exciting era! (Hopefully more exciting than Tanzu has been.)  Broadcom is mostly known for networking communication chips, but has been diversifying their portfolio for a while now.   Vmware joins companies such as: Rally Software CA Products Plex (not *that* plex) Appneta Clarity Symantec Siteminder 01:58 Matthew – “I feel like whenever you get acquired, a lot of the duplicated admin services and like HR, finance, some of those kind of naturally – like whenever a company gets acquired, I feel like there’s always layoffs within the first six months, and it’s really just a lot of those overlapping services now that the parent org has. But I know that they own Symantec. That was news to me.” 04:36 Ryan – “I think that the big value prop was for a lot of these things was, you know, being able to run that virtualized infrastructure and then the partnerships are, you know, to be able to run that with the same skill sets and the same people running both without having to get into the specifics of, you know, AWS or Azure cloud specifics. And so offering that as sort of a generalized compute… I think as cloud has become more prevalent and popular and th...

Welcome to episode 238 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re bringing you a preview of Amazon re:Invent 2023. We’re talking all things AWS, Bedrock, Q, and frugal architecture, and – you guessed it – AI.  Titles we almost went with this week: Amazon Builds on Bedrock with Q ️ You Need to Be All Frugal Architects  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. “Pre”:Invent  Is it just us, or is a lot of the stuff released during pre-invent stuff that would have been main stage just a few years ago?  01:48 Major Items Introducing Amazon CloudFront KeyValueStore: A low-latency datastore for CloudFront Functions 03:43 Ryan – “I found this being announced pre-invent to be kind of shocking, because this is one of those announcements where you could re-architect your entire app for better performance using this type of solution, and it’s not even big enough for the main stage. But there’s huge potential in doing that edge transformation so that you can directly serve at the edge at much lower latency. So it’s awesome.” Announcing AWS Console-to-Code (Preview) to generate code for console actions  *No Terraform yet, but hopefully that will come soon!  05:18 Jonathan – “I think it’s great for learning too, actually. I mean, I use this in the Google console all the time because I try and put together a command line to do something and it fails miserably. And so I go and do it in the console and it generates the command line coding thing. Ah, I missed that thing, which isn’t documented anywhere.” 07:23 Storage Optimize your storage costs for rarely-accessed files with Amazon EFS Archive FlexGroup Volume Management for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is now available New – Scale-out file systems for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Introducing sha...

Welcome to episode 237 of The Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s the most wonderful time of the year – it’s almost time for re:Invent! That means it’s also time for our wishlist and predictions. Follow along, and see which ones you think have the greatest likelihood of coming to fruition.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. AWS Predictions  Jonathan GPU Support for Lambda functions   Chat Bot integration for the support portal that pulls from documentation New Baremetal Instance with more GPU’s for AI Training Justin Graviton AI Chip Capabilities Olympus with a bigger data set than Open AI and publicly available Major Improvements to Quicksight Ryan AppMesh will support serverless workloads Data Sovereignty on stage Just in time IAM Permissions powered by AI Matthew AI Chat feature in the AWS Console Carbon Emissions and Green Technology talked about during the keynote.  Predictive typing thing integrated into AWS Shell (cloud 9).    Tie Breaker:   Number of times the word Artificial Intelligence and/or AI.   Matt – 72 Ryan – 563 Justin – 142 Jonathan – 90 Honorable Mentions: Reinvent announcement of Clippy/Mascot (Jonathan) Chip Fab (Jonathan) Astro Bot upgrade (Ryan) Astrobot Robot Wars (Ryan) Extra effort/hardware on energy usage (Jonathan) IAM Permissions reducer (Matt) Security/Guardduty/SOC AI (Justin) DuckDB (Justin) AI for Opensearch (Justin) Werner masterclass on AI (Justin) Simulated worlds (Jonathan)

Welcome to episode 236 of the Cloud Pod Podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! Are you wandering around every day wondering just who has the biggest one? Chips, we mean. Of course. Get your mind out of the gutter. Did you know Azure was winning that battle for like 8 whole minutes? Join us for episode 236 where we talk about chip size, LLM’s, updates to Bedrock, and Toxicity Detection – something you will never find applied to the podcast. Not on purpose, anyway.  Happy Thanksgiving! Titles we almost went with this week: You Can Solve All Your AI Problems by Paying the Cloud Pod 10 million Dollars.  Cloud Pods Interest in AI Like Enterprises is Also Shockingly Low Llama Lambda Llama Llama Lambda Lambda… or How I Went Crazy Comprehends Detects Toxicity with the Cloud Pod You Didn’t Need Comprehend for Me to Tell You I’m Toxic The Cloud is Toxic, Run! A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. AI is Going Great!  00:39  OpenAI’s New Weapon in Talent War With Google: $10 Million Pay Packages for Researchers (listeners note: paywall article) The battle for AI talent is heating up between open AI and Google. With compensation packages but also promises of access to more hardware, better chips and more.  Open AI depends on Microsoft for its cloud resources, whereas Google owns its cloud and is manufacturing their own AI chips.  Salaries are crazy with stock compensation with Open AI saying their stock compensation could be worth as much as 5-10m.   Of course assuming that recruits start before the company goes public or gets completely acquired by MS.  So, bottom line? Money. Are you shocked? We’re shocked.  01:30 Jonathan – “I guess it’s quite a concern actually that since Google bought DeepMind they have pretty much two-thirds of the entire global AI talent at their own disposal. So I guess this is a desperate needs, call for desperate measures kind of thing.” 01:49 Nvidia Unveils New AI Chip, Upping Ante with AMD (listeners note: paywall article) Nvidia on Monday announced a new graphics processing unit, the H200, which next year could become the most advanced chip on the market for developing AI...

Welcome to episode 235 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week a full house is here for your listening pleasure! Justin, Jonathan, Matthew, and Ryan are talking about cyberattacks, attacks on vacations (aka Looker for mobile) and introducing a whole new segment just for AI. You’re welcome, SkyNet.  Titles we almost went with this week: AI is worth investing in – says leading AI service provider, Microsoft Join The Cloud Pod for the ‘AI Worth Investing In’ Eye-Roll Extravaganza The Cloud Pod: Breaking News – Microsoft Discovers Water is Wet, AI Worth Investing In Jonathan finally wins the point for predicting ARM instances in Google Cloud ️Looker for Mobile: Ruining vacations one notification at a time ️Microsoft helps bring cloud costs into FOCUS ️Focus only on the path forward… not the path behind you.  GPT-4 Turbo… just be glad its not Ultra GPT-4 I can only flinch at the idea of Finch The Cloud Pod finally accepts AI is the future A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. New Segment – AI is Going Great!  01:24 New study validates the business value and opportunity of AI  You may be shocked to find out that there is value in AI for your business!  To help you understand, Microsoft paid IDC to make a study that provides unique insights into how AI is being used to drive economic impact for organizations.   2000 business leaders and decision makers from around the world participated in the survey. 71% of respondents say their companies are already using AI, and 22% said within 12 months they would be using it.  92% of AI deployments take 12 months or less Organizations are realizing a return on their AI investment within 14 months For every $1 a company invests in AI, it is realize an average return of $3.5x 52% report that a lack of ski...

Welcome to episode 234 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin and Ryan are bringing you all the latest news from the cloud, including latest earnings news (you know you want it), a discussion about whether cloud is “bad” from one of repatriation’s biggest advocates, Oxide’s new cloud computer (it’s SO pretty) and a look at some of latest updates on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.  Titles we almost went with this week: ☁️The Cloud Pod is Sovereign  We Avoid the Oxide Rust at TCP A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Pre-Show 01:00 Follow Up: Wait – Is Cloud Bad? We’ve talked previously on the show about DHH – David Heinemeier Hansson – who is the one big example of cloud repatriation.  Well, maybe not the biggest  but the most vocal for sure when it comes to advocating for a return to on-prem.  Forrest Brazel wrote in his recent newsletter about the back and forth between pro-cloud people and those who support DHH’s move from AWS back to his DC. I think his rebuttal is the best one out there.  He basically broke down the decision on cloud or datacenter to a 2×2 box… Low IT Competence with Low Growth or High Growth, and High IT Competency with Low Growth or High Growth.   He basically says Basecamp falls into High IT Competency with low growth, which makes datacenter more attractive.  03:43 Justin- “Kelsey Hightower pointed out rightfully the 15 years of cloud helped DHH even be able to do this, because being able to do a cloud exit of the size and the complexity of what he does have without cloud technologies that enabled some of those things, it would have been difficult for him to do this going back. Declarative infrastructure, containerization – all that stuff is big cloud advances that were brought to the world that he’s not benefiting from in his data center…” General News this Week: 06:30  Oxide Launches the World’s First Commercial Cloud Computer If you’re looking at the infrastructure you should run your repatriation on, we would like to suggest you take a look at Oxide Computers. F...

Welcome to The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Ryan are here to fill you in on all the latest and greatest happenings in the cloud, including news about your SSL & TLS certificates, MSK Replicator, and the Azure Incubations Team. Did you know about them? Neither did we!  Titles we almost went with this week: ☁️The Cloud Pod Replicator… Replicating Snark to all the Kafkas Mirror Mirror on the wall,  Which Events? We Want Them All.  The Radius of my Patience for my Developer Portals is Shrinking Oracle Java Plugin for VSCode… it’s a trap! A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News this Week: AWS 01:20  Rotate Your SSL/TLS Certificates Now – Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora Expire in 2024 If you want to have some “fun” you need to update the RDS SSL certificate for your db instances before they expire in 2024.  This impacts really any DB created before 2020.   You can choose CA certificates that expire in 40 years or 100 years.  This was more complicated than we realized when we did this on a database instance recently, and this step-by-step guide would have been great when we did it a month or so ago.  Step 1: Identify your impacted DB’s Step 2: Update your database client and apps… this was the trickiest part for us.  Step 3: Test CA rotation on a non-production RDS instance Step 4: Rinse and Repeat on Production.  01:45 Justin- “I definitely went for the 100 years to fake because I never want to do this again… This is not for the faint of heart, if you’re not familiar with how your database apps work, and do proceed with caution.” 05:48 Justin- “Well, so the 40 year one is a 2048 bit RSA certificate. The 100 year one is an RSA 4096 or an ECC 384 compiled. So it’...

Welcome to The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Jonathan and Ryan, are talking all about EC2 instances, including changes to AWS Systems Manager and Elastic Disaster Recovery. And speaking of disasters, we’re also taking a dive into the ongoing Google DDOS attacks. Plus, we’ve even thrown a little earthquake warning into the podcast, just for effect.  Titles we almost went with this week: A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News this Week: 01:08 Why AMD’s Upcoming Chips Won’t Be the Savior AI Startups Are Hoping For  A few weeks ago many got excited about the new AMD chips coming to help with AI workloads.  The Instinct MI300A has often been touted as an alternative to Nvidia’s H100.  But… it’s not as easy to use those chips.   The startup that tweeted about using the new AMD chips has been working on it for multiple years, and most startups who would want to switch would have to throw out their code and start from scratch. We’re not super sure about that claim, but we shall see… Plus, Nvidia has a 20 year head start when it comes to Cuda and other development tools for AI.  It’s not all bad news though – AMD does have some advantages that may make it worth it, including a chip that combines the GPU, which performs multiple computations simultaneously, and a CPU which executes more general instructions and manages the systems broader operations.  (Nvidia plans to do the same with the Grace Hopper Superchip).  The AMD chips also have more memory than the H100 at 128gb vs 80gb.  02:20 Ryan – “Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting how complex these have become, right? When it used to just be – sort of – you had optimized at the computer level and maybe at the OS level, but now the workloads are so specific because they’re so demanding, and then power is also very challenging. So that’s kind of neat. I’m kind of glad I don’t have to deal with it much.” 03:38 Report: Amazon will use Microsoft 365 cloud productivity tools in $1B ‘megadeal’  Amazon has reportedly committed 1B to license M365 cloud productivity software for 1 million of its corpo...

Welcome to The Cloud Pod episode 231! This week Justin and Matthew are discussing updates to Terraform testing for code validation, some new tools from Docker, look into the now generally available AWS DataZone, and dig into the evolution of passkeys over at Google. Slide into the passenger seat and let’s check out this week’s cloud news.  Titles we almost went with this week: ‍The Cloud Pod wants to validate your code The Cloud Pod can now test in parallel  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News this Week: 01:17 Terraform 1.6 adds a test framework for enhanced code validation  At Hashiconf this week, they announced Terraform 1.6 is now available for download.  The most exciting feature? We’re so glad you asked!   The new terraform test framework that deprecates and replaces the previous experimental features added in 0.15.  Terraform test allows authors to consistently validate the functionality of their configuration in a safe environment. Tests are written using familiar HCL syntax, so there is no need to learn a new language to get started.  Config-Driven import introduced in Terraform 1.5 gets improvements to support variable driven ID attributes. Making it easier than ever to import existing items.  Cli Improvements Several changes are coming to the S3 Backend remote state in this release to better align with the SDK and the official terraform AWS provider.  It should still work but you may receive warnings about deprecated attributes. May the odds be ever in your favor.  You can check out the Testing Terraform overview page here, or the Write Terraform tests tutorial here.  03:22 Justin – “ One of the interesting things that, you know, that wasn’t part of this particular announcement is that they’re also adding an ability to use AI to help you with yo...

Welcome to The Cloud Pod episode 230, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re sailing our pod across the data lake and talking about updates to managed delivery from Kafka. We also take a gander at Bedrock, some new security tools from our friends over at Google. We’re also back with our Cloud Journey Series talking security theater.Stay Tuned!   Titles we almost went with this week: Security and Delivery Within an Hour… Sacrilegious! Unlock Global Innovation with Sovereign Cloud Microsoft… What in the World Are You Doing? ⛵If I ever own a sailboat, I will name it Kafka.  And the Oscar for Security Theater goes to… A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News this Week: 01:15 Microsoft fans… This isn’t going to be pretty. You were warned.  Microsoft Warns of Cyber Attacks Attempting to Breach Cloud via SQL Server Instance  Microsoft…The Truth Is Even Worse Than You Think Microsoft comes under blistering criticism for “grossly irresponsible” security In what has turned out to be a not so great week for Microsoft (and their customers) the software giant has released an urgent warning for SQL server instances running on Azure. **Insert meme of dog saying it’s fine surrounded by fire here** Microsoft has detailed a new campaign in which attackers unsuccessfully attempted to move laterally to a cloud environment through a SQL server instance. The attacker initially exploited a SQL injection vulnerability in an app, and then was able to gain access and elevated permission on MS SQL instance deployed in Azure VM.  The threat actor than attempted to move horizontally by abusing the server’s cloud identity, which could possess elevated permissions (least privilege folks) MS says it found no evidence that the attacker successfully moved. Considering the recent criticism by Tenable CEO who threw them under the bus for not fixing a major vulnerability for over 90 days, this warning and confirmation se...

Welcome episode 228 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are taking a look at Magic Quadrant, Gemini AI, and GraalOS – along with all the latest news from OCI, Google, AWS, and Azure.  Titles we almost went with this week: The CloudPod wonders if Anthropic’s Santa Clause will bring us everything we want in an AI Bot. The Cloud Pod recommends protection to achieve Safer Google rides the gemini rocket to AI JPB The only Copilot I need Azure, is Booze GraalOS, or what we now call ‘the noise our CFO makes when he receives the Oracle audit bills’ The hosts of the Cloud pod would like to understand how to properly pronounce GraalOS Is Oracle even on the magic quadrant for cloud? RedHat Puts lipstick on the pig and calls it OpenStack A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News this Week: 00:56 Red Hat rebrands OpenStack Platform for building and managing private clouds  Red Hat is rebranding the Red Hat OpenStack Platform, which will now be known as Red Hat OpenStack services on OpenShift. You know, because let’s add containers. What could go wrong?  We didn’t know anyone was still trying to openstack at this point – did you?  “By integrating Kubernetes with OpenStack, organizations see improved resource management and scalability, greater flexibility across the hybrid cloud, simplified development and DevOps practices and more,” said Sean Cohen, director of product management in Red Hat’s Hybrid Platforms organizations. Per Holger, Mueller openstack has gotten a lot of popularity in the Telecommunications industry where they use it to build private clouds to run their networks… *adds to the list of don’t work there… telecommunications companies* 02:32 Justin – “I mean, OpenShift is just like Convox. It’s a plat...

Welcome episode 228 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts are Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan –  Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod gets scanned for a malware infection The Cloud Pod gives up on security  The Cloud Pod burns cash on a new Mac instance ⚔️Copilot’s Copyright Crusade – Microsoft’s Got Your Back in Copyright Battles ☁️The Cloud Pod loves it when the clouds come together The Cloud Pod doubts 90 day account expirations are a good idea Matt brings a bit of class to the Cloud Pod A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News this Week: AWS 02:56 Amazon EC2 R7a Instances Powered By 4th Gen AMD EPYC Processors for Memory Optimized Workloads AND New Amazon EC2 R7iz Instances are Optimized for High CPU Performance, Memory-Intensive Workloads Amazon has a couple of new instances for us this week, including Amazon R7a, which is powered by the 4th generation AMD EPYC (Genoa) processors with a maximum frequency of 3.7ghz – this has 50 percent higher performance compared to the previous generation instances.  The R7a supports the AVX-512, Vector Neural Network Instructions and Brain Float Point (bfloat16https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bfloat16_floating-point_format). It also supports Double Data rate 5 (DDR5) memory.  From 1 vcpu and 8gb of ramp to 192 vcpu 1.5tb of memory Not excited for AMD? Would you rather pay more money for an Intel version? Well fear not! Also available is the new R7iz instances – which are the fastest 4th generation scalable-based (sapphire rapids) instances with 3....

Welcome episode 227 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts are Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan – and they’re REALLY excited to tell you all about the 161 one things announced at Google Next. Literally, all the things. We’re also saying farewell to EC2 Classic, Amazon SES, and Azure’s Explicit Proxy – which probably isn’t what you think it is.  Titles we almost went with this week: Azure announced a what proxy?  The Cloud Pod would like you to engage with our email. Oracle Rover to Base… Come In Rover ️A snarky look at 160 Google Next Announcements Google Next’s got 161 Announcements and AI ain’t one How high can you count, Google can count to 161 ⚖️The cloud pod would like to get consensus on the definition of light weight A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News this Week: AWS 00:36 Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell Werner has a blog post talking about the end of Ec2-classic, with the final EC2-Classic instance being turned off on August 15th, 2 years after the announcement.  He points out that the reason it was “classic” is because of the network architecture. All instances launched on a giant 10.0.0.0/8 flat network shared between all customers.  The process for end users was simple, but it was highly complex for AWS at the time.  The m1.small that launched was equivalent of 1 virtual CPU powered by a 1.7ghz Xeon processor with 1.75gb of ram, and 160gb of local disk, and 250mb/s of network bandwidth. For the low price of $0.10 per clocked hour.  Werners blog even ran on the m1 small for 5+ years before he moved it to the Amazon S3 website feature.   VPC’s introduced in 2013, allows AWS customers to have their own slice of the cloud.. But classic still lived for another decade.  The EC2 team kept classic running until every instance was retired or migrated, providing the necessary documentation, tools and support from engineering and account management through the process.  Werner shows that this is one of the best examples of delivering cloud for today’s workloads as well as tomorrow, and how AWS won’t pull the rug out from under you.  ...

Welcome episode 226 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Matt and Ryan chat about all the news and announcements from Google Next, including – surprise surprise – the hot topic of AI, GKE Enterprise, Duet, Co-Pilot, Code Whisperer and more! There’s even some non-Next news thrown into the episode. So whether you’re interested in BART or Bard, we’ve got the news from SF just for you.  Titles we almost went with this week: ️The cloud pod sings a duet, guess who was singing You get AI, you get AI, Everyone Gets AI Does a Mandiant Hunt, Or does a Hunter mandiant?  ️The Cloud Pod goes into ROM Mode  Does a mandalorian Hunt, Or does a Hunter a mandalorian?  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News this Week: 01:23 Introducing Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding   So you know Github Copilot, Duet AI, and Codewhisperer…. But do you know Code LLama? (Meta you better get good stickers on this) Meta has released the source code for the Llama 2 based Code Specialized LLM in three sizes 7B, 13B, and 35B parameters.   Each model is trained with 500b tokens of code and code-related data.  The 7B and 13b base and instructor models have also been trained with fill-in-the-middle capability allowing them to insert code into existing code.  The 7B model can run on a single GPU, the 34B model however returns the best results and for the best for coding assistance… while the 7b and 13b are great for real-time code completions.  Training recipes for Code Llama are available on the Github Repository.  04:08 Matthew – “It’s interesting; if you go deep into the article there, they start to digress into like ‘Hey, this 7 and the 13 billion are better for near real time response back’ and the 34 billion…  is better for fine tuning for yourself. So they really go into a little bit more detail of how to do it. And, you know, I think they also put out some code snippets if you kind of dive into it a little bit more, which I thought was very nice.” 05:32 OpenTF Announces Fo...

Google Next Eve! Welcome episode 225 of The CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan are your hosts this week as we discuss all things Google Next! We talk schedule offerings, make our predictions about announcements, and prepare to be generally wrong about everything. Also – do you like stickers? Everyone likes stickers! Be on the lookout for us, and maybe you can have one.  Titles we almost went with this week: None! Google Next is the next big thing, so of course it’s the title.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Pre-Show 01:23 Following up on some HashiCorp News:  HashiCorp updates licensing FAQ based on community questions  Hashicorp has responded in their FAQ to some of the concerns we brought up when we talked about them moving to the BSL license in our last show.  Question: Can I host the HashiCorp products as a service internal to my organization? Answer: Yes. The terms of the BSL allow for all non-production and production usage, except for providing competitive offerings to third parties that embed or host our software. Hosting the products for your internal use of your organization is permitted. HashiCorp considers an organization as including all of its affiliates. This means one division can host a HashiCorp product for use by another internal division. Q: What is a “competitive offering” under the HashiCorp BSL license? A: A “competitive offering” is a product that is sold to third parties, including through paid support arrangements, that significantly overlaps the capabilities of a HashiCorp commercial product. For example, this definition would include hosting or embedding Terraform as part of a solution that is sold competitively against our commercial versions of Terraform. By contrast, products that are not sold or supported on a paid basis are always allowed under the HashiCorp BSL license because they are not considered competitive. Q: What does the term “embedded” mean under the HashiCorp BSL license? A: Under the HashiCorp BSL license, the term “embedded” means including the source code or object code, including executable binaries, from a HashiCorp product in a competitive product. “Embedded” also means packaging the competitive product in such a way that the HashiCorp product must be accessed or downloaded for the competitive product to operate. Q: What if HashiCorp releases a new product or feature in the future that makes my project competitive? A: If HashiCorp creates an offering in the future that is competitive with a product you...

Welcome to episode 224 of The CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, your hosts Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan discuss some major changes at Terraform, including switching from open source to a BSL License. Additionally, we cover updates to Amazon S3, goodies from Storage Day, and Google Gemini vs. Open AI.  Titles we almost went with this week: None! This week’s title was ✨chef’s kiss✨ A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Pre-Show  General News this Week: 00:41 AWS and HashiCorp announce Service Catalog support for Terraform Cloud  AWS is catching up with GCP, with now native support for Terraform in Service Catalog. The new integration is expanding on the previous support for Open Source; they now support the Terraform Cloud service.  This new feature is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Service Catalog is available. 02:07 HashiCorp adopts Business Source License Do you use tools like N0 or ScaleSet? Or perhaps some of the other Terraform-adjacent things? You **may** be in some trouble.  Despite being ok with Amazon and GCP integrating their open source – and now Terraform cloud offering – Hashicorp is mad at companies adopting their technology and productizing it, forcing them to move to the new BSL (Business Source License) model.  This covers all Hashicorp products, not just Terraform.  HashiCorp points out that their approach has enabled them to partner closely with cloud providers to enable tight integrations for their joint users and customers, as well as hundreds of other technology partners.   There are vendors who take advantage of pure OSS models, and the community work on OSS projects, for their own commercial goals, without providing material contributions back. (GASP!)   Hashi doesn’t think this is “the spirit of open source.” 

Welcome episode 223 of The CloudPod Podcast! It’s a full house – Justin, Matt, Ryan, and Jonathan are all here this week to discuss all the cloud news you need. This week, cost optimization is the big one, with a deep dive on the newest AWS blog. Additionally, we’ve got updates to BigQuery, Google’s Health Service, managed services for Prometheus, and more. Titles we almost went with this week: ‍I swear to you Mr. Compliance Man, Mutator is not as bad as it sounds Oracle Cloud customer  – or how we let Oracle Audit us internally at will  ️We are all confused by the lack of AWS news ✨The CloudPod copies other Podcast’s Features Get AWS spin on savings with Cost Optimization Flywheel  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News this Week: AWS No AWS news – so that should tell you we’re DEFINITELY getting close to announcement season.  GCP 01:35 Introducing new SQL functions to manipulate your JSON data in BigQuery  Enterprises are generating data at an exponential rate, spanning traditional structured transactional data, semi-structured like JSON and unstructured data like images and audio.  Beyond the scale, the divergent types present processing challenges for developers, sometimes requiring a separate processing flow for each.  BigQuery supported semi structured JSON at launch eliminating the need for processing and providing schema flexibility, intuitive querying and the scalability benefits afforded to structured data.  Google is now releasing new sql functions for Bigquery JSON, extending the power and flexibility of their core JSON support. These new functions make it easier to extract and construct JSON data and perform complex data analysis.  Convert JSON values into primitive types (INT64, FLOAT64, BOOL and STRING) Is anyone else insulted that STRING is considered primitive?   easier and more flexible way with new JSON LAX functions Easily update and modify...

Welcome episode 222 of The Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we take an in depth look at the latest earnings reports from all the major players, changes to IPv4 costs (inflation), Healthscribe, and all the news (in cybersecurity) that’s fit to print.  Titles we almost went with this week: The CloudPod can finally read the doctors notes with HealthScribe Amazon Healthscribe it’s like transcription, but for doctors who use big words You get an LLM, you get an LLM; apparently EVERYTHING at Amazon gets an LLM ☁️Should The Cloud Pod rename itself C?  Musk Flips Twitter the Bird (just for Jonathan) A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Pre-Show 00:49 Follow up: Public Preview: Customer Managed Failover for ADLS Gen2  The guys didn’t talk about this when it came up, as it didn’t get a full blog post and we killed lightning round – but Matt has **thoughts!**  Azure storage strives to give you an effective disaster recovery offering and are now supporting customer-managed failover for ADLS Gen 2 accounts.  Whether you are performing testing or facing a true disaster your primary endpoint can now initiate a failover from our primary endpoint to your secondary endpoint.  01:40 Matt – “It’s just one of those features that I’m just dumbfounded that didn’t exist day one. You know, encryption, DR – these things should just be there. And the fact that it’s ADLS has been around for a decent amount of time.” General News this Week: 03:06 The big news this week is EARNINGS: MSFT – Microsoft’s stock falls as demand for cloud services cools  Microsoft beat expectations, both for the last quarter and for when they were going to announce. It was early!  Net income of 20.1 billion for Fiscal 4th quarter 2023; which is up 20% from a year earlier.  Revenue rose to 56.19 Billion, ahead of Wall Street’s expectation of 55.47 billion Stock still dropped 3% in after hours trading and is basically down 5...

Welcome episode 221 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew look at some of the announcements from AWS Summit, as well as try to predict the future – probably incorrectly – about what’s in store at Next 2023. Plus, we talk more about the storm attack, SFTP connectors (and no, that isn’t how you get to the Moscone Center for Next) Llama 2, Google Cloud Deploy and more!  Titles we almost went with this week: Now You Too Can Get Ignored by Google Support via Mobile App The Tech Sector Apparently Believes Multi-Cloud is Great… We Hate You All.  The cloud pod now wants all your HIPAA Data The Meta Llama is Spreading Everywhere The Cloud Pod Recursively Deploys Deploy A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: 00:33 HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey 2023: The tech sector perspective  We didn’t find anything in the survey particularly interesting, until they broke it down by respondents who are actively in the tech industry.  Despite strong Macro pressure and recent earnings reports about slowness in growth, 48% of respondents increased their cloud spend in the last 12 months 94% of tech industry respondents indicated that multi-cloud works, citing that it has advanced or achieved their company’s business goals.   Sure, Jan.  91% of tech companies rely on platform teams.  01:37 Justin – “The thing about that is, I could see the value for Saas vendors, right? Especially if you’re dealing with large data ingestion. I think we were talking to New Relic, for example, when they launched a New Relic on Azure.It saves their customers a bunch of money because they’re not doing egress charges out to the internet to AWS to basically get the New Relic data in. And they see that as a strategy that helps customers reduce money and also helps increase adoption as well as partnership opportunities.” AWS 05:11 AWS Summit New York  just happened, and there were a lot of announcements (and protests.) We won’t spend a lot of time going over each of these in the show, but the link are available for you to peruse at your leisure. 

Welcome episode 220 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew discuss all things cloud, including virtual machines, an AI partnership between Microsoft and Meta for Llama 2, Lambda functions, Fargate, and lots of security updates including the Outlook breach and WORM protections. This and much more in our newest episode.  Titles we almost went with this week: Too Many Bees died for Honeycode Microsoft announces that AI will only cost you 3 arms and a leg.   The Cloud Pod also detects Recursive Loops in cloud news The cloud pod disables health checks bc who needs them A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: AWS 02:02 Detecting and stopping recursive loops in AWS Lambda functions Do you utilize AWS Lambda? Here’s an update for you.  AWS Lambda is introducing a recursion control to detect and stop lambda functions running in a recursive or infinite loop.   This supports Lambda Integrations with SQS, SNS or directly via the Invoke API.   Lambda defects functions that appear to be running in a recursive loop and drops the request after exceeding 16 invocations This can help reduce costs from an unexpected lambda invocation because of recursion.  You’ll receive notification that this action was taken through the AWS Health Dashbboard, email or by configuring Amazon Cloudwatch Alarms.  You can turn this off by reaching out to AWS support, if you have a valid use-case where recursion is intentional, or if you need to loop something through more than 16 times....

Welcome episode 219 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Today your hosts are Justin and Jonathan, and they discuss all things cloud, including clickstream analytics, databricks, Microsoft Entra, virtual machines, Outlook threats, and some major changes over at the Google Cloud team.  Titles we almost went with this week: TCP is not Entranced with Entra ID The Cave you Fear to Entra, Holds the Treasure you Seek Microsoft should rethink Entra rules for their Email A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: AWS 00:47 Clickstream Analytics on AWS for Mobile and Web Applications Want some solutions? Don’t we all! Well, for clickstream analytics at least, Amazon has released an update that has pre built solutions using Amazon components.  Covers iOS and Android  You can now deploy an end-to-end solution to capture, ingest, store, analyze and visualize your customers’ clickstreams inside your web and mobile applications.  This solution is built using standard AWS services to allow you to keep your data in the security and compliance perimeter of your AWS account and customize the processing and analytics as you require, giving you the full flexibility to extract value for your business.  The new solution leverages ECS+Kafka/Kineses/S3, EMR, Redshift and Quicksight You can use plugins to transform the data during processing via EMR AWS has provided you to build in ones for User Agent enrichment and IP address enrichment. You can also export your source server inventory list to a CSV file and download it to your local disk. 

Welcome to episode 218 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Today your hosts Justin, Ryan, and Matt discuss all things cloud – including migration services, AppFabric, state machines, and security updates, as well as the idea of shifting left versus (or in addition to) shifting down.  Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod Prefers to be Bought by Anyone but IBM What Does the F(in)O(ps)X say?  The Cloud Pod Leverage appFabric for your SaaS Security A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: 01:21 IBM acquires hybrid cloud software company Apptio for $4.6B IBM is acquiring software company Apptio Inc for 4.6B in cash.  THe move comes five years after Vista Equity bought the firm for 1.94B Apptio was created in 2007, and was notable as the first company Andreeson Horowitz invested in. Apptio owns Cloudability, among other features.  Apptio offers cloud-based technology and hybrid business management software for managing business in the IT field.   IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said in a statement “Technology is changing business at a rate and pace we’ve never seen before. To capitalize on these changes, it is essential to optimize investments which drive better business value, and Apptio does just that. Apptio’s offerings combined with IBM’s IT automation software and watsonx AI platform, gives clients the most comprehensive approach to optimize and manage all of their technology investments.” 2:30Ryan – “The last time I played with Apptio was very early in my cloud experience and Apptio was struggling to understand how to sort of port their methodologies into cloud. It worked really well in the data center and for IT shops, for tracking assets and managing visibility into cost and financials there, but it really struggled with stuff like dynamically changing instance groups and that sort of thing. It made sense when they bought Cloudability, and I haven’t played with it since.” 04:39 Justin goes to FinopsX!   06:10Justin –  “I did have an opportunity to talk to some startups. they’re on the floor and they’re thinking about kind of the next generation and what that looks like and you’re really talking about bringing AI and LLM technology into FinO...

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Today your hosts Justin, Jonathan, and Matt discuss all things cloud and AI, as well as some really interesting forays into quantum computing, changes to Google domains, Google accusing Microsoft of cloud monopoly shenanigans, and the fact that Azure wants all your industry secrets. Also, Finops and all the logs you could hope for. Are your secrets safe? Better tune in and find out!  Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod Adds Domains to the Killed by Google list The Cloud Pod Whispers it’s Secrets to Azure OpenAI The Cloud Pod Accuses the Cloud of Being a Monopoly The Cloud Pod Does Not Pass Go and Does Not collect $200 A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: 01:27 Vault 1.14 brings ACME for PKI, AWS roles, and more improvements  HashiCorp recently announced the general availability of ACME for PKI.  Vault 1.14 focuses on Vault’s core secrets workflows as well as team workflows, integrations, and visibility. This allows you to use Vault to manage your TLS certificates, using the ACME protocol. This allows you to use Vault to manage your AWS IAM roles, making it easier to grant access to your applications. Vault has also been optimized for better performance, especially for large deployments. A number of bugs have been fixed, improving the stability and security of Vault. The Vaults Secrets Operator connects Vault secrets directly into native Kubernetes secrets.  Overall, Vault 1.14 is a significant release with a number of new features and improvements. If you are using Vault, I recommend upgrading to the latest version. AWS 03:36 Announcing the AWS Amplify UI Builder Figma Plugin  Finally! A plug...

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Today your hosts are Jonathan and Matt as we discuss all things cloud and AI, including Temporary Elevated Access Management (or TEAM, since we REALLY like acronyms today)  FTP servers, SQL servers and all the other servers, as well as pipelines, whether or not the government should regulate AI (spoiler alert: the AI companies don’t think so) and some updates to security at Amazon and Google.  Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod’s FTP server now with post-quantum keys support The CloudPod can now Team into your account, but only temporarily  The CloudPod dusts off their old floppy drive  The CloudPod dusts off their old SQL server disks The CloudPod is feeling temporarily elevated to do a podcast The CloudPod promise that AI will not take over the world The CloudPod duals with keys The CloudPod is feeling temporarily elevated. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: No general news this week! Probably because no one wanted to talk to us.  AWS 00:49 Amazon EC2 Instance Connect supports SSH and RDP connectivity without public IP address You can now connect via SSH and RDP to EC2 instances without using public IP addresses.  With EIC endpoints, customers have remote connectivity to their instances in private subnets, eliminating the need to use public IPv4 addresses for connectivity.  Previously you would have needed to create bastion hosts to tunnel SSH/RDP connections to instances with private IP addresses, but that created its own set of problems because bastion hosts would have to be patched, managed and audited as well as incur additional costs.  EIC endpoint combines AWS IAM-based access controls to restrict access to trusted principles with network-based controls such as security group rules.  It provides an audit of all connections via AWS cloud trail, helping customers improve their security posture.  01:31 Matt- “It’s nice to see Amazon still coming up with more solutions to not have things be public; and really try to get their customers to not use all the older-school technology.” 03:02

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Ryan, Jonathan, and Matt are your hosts this week as we discuss all things cloud, including updates to Terraform, pricing updates in GCP SCC, AWS Blueprint, DMS Serverless, and Snowball – as well as all the discussion on Microsoft quantum safe computing and ethical AI you could possibly want!  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: 00:57 Terraform AWS provider updates to V 5.0 Announced this week from Hashicorp, Terraform AWS provider updates to version 5.0 The updates include support that they say will help them “focus on improving the user experience.”  Support & improvements for general tags was added, which can now be set at the provider level – applying them across all resources.  Thanks to new features in Terraform plugin SDK and the Terraform plugin framework issues related to inconsistent final plans, identical tags, and perpetual diffs are now solved.  More information on the default tags can be found on the changelog.  04:11 Jonathan – “It’s kind of cool – it’s a neat hack as well as a way of AWS providing a really useful feature without having to do any work on the cloud platform itself. Just implement the tool that does the deploying rather than having a service which could do it for you.” AWS 05:28 **NEW** AWS DMS Serverless  Recognizing that many organizations were migrating to cloud platforms due to huge amounts of data, AWS has launched their cloud Database Migration Service back in 2016.  To make the migration even more seamless, AWS has now announced DMS Serv...

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, Matthew are your hosts this week as we discuss all things cloud and AI, as well as Amazon Detective, SageMaker, AWS Documentation, and Google Workstation.  Titles we almost went with (and there’s a lot this week) The Cloud Pod becomes the cloud docs The Cloud Pod loves inspector gadget The Cloud Pod documents the documentation The Cloud Pod bangs its shin, since geospatial abilities are lacking The Cloud Pod bangs its shin, since we lack geospatial abilities The Cloud Pod bangs its shin, if only we had geospatial abilities Unlike the Cloud Pod, Alibaba Cloud exits the stage Retiring AWS Documents on Github… or how we laid off too many people in our document team and can’t support this albatross anymore ️Microsoft Builds AI tools at its Build Conference and Wants you to Build More A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: 01:29 Alibaba to Exit Cloud Business After Beijing Undercuts Potential Alibaba is apparently planning to spin out its $12 Billion dollar cloud business.  It’s unclear if Alibaba is bowing to market pressures or political pressures; in 2020 Beijing became increasingly suspicious of cloud services operated by private firms, and started cracking down on internet services.  Alibaba Cloud drew regulatory ire in 2021 for discovering and sharing a flaw before informing authorities (there goes their citizenship score), and was investigated for its role in China’s largest cybersecurity leak.  Analysts value it at 30B, and was a once thriving operation that harbored the potential to AWS level of market control in China.  “This full spinoff plan involving AliCloud is both bold and puzzling, “Nomura Holdings Inc analysts Jialong Shi and Thomas Shen wrote in a note. “Their current valuation for the unit stands at about $31 billion. AliCloud is BABA’s organic business and is still deemed as one of the long-term drivers for the group even though its growth temporarily slowed down in recent quarters due to macro headwinds. That is why we find it puzzling that BABA has decided to fully spin off this business instead of retaining a minority stake at least. 04:30 Justin – “We’re basically entering a very Cold War period between the US and Chinese. And so that’s gonna be interesting to see how that continues to shake out. I saw some articles this week as well, like in the information about VC firms trying to exit their investments in China and just realizing that it’s not gonna be the growth engine they expect it to be. I mean, we talked about here on the show even some of the supply chain issues with China, with the clou...

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, Matthew are your hosts this week. Join us as we discuss all things cloud, AI, the upcoming Google AI Conference, AWS Console, and Duet AI for Google cloud.  Titles we almost went with this week: You can finally lock yourself out of the AWS Console!  Google IO delivers the AI… hopefully soon to be renamed Google AI Conference ️Azure announces major MySQL upgrade! Azure can now update mysql without taking itself offline A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: 01:10 – Terraform is in the news!  Terraform Cloud updates plans with an enhanced Free tier and more flexibility A bunch of new updates are coming to Terraform Cloud These update will provide access to **premium** features, up to 500 resources in the free tier There are also new paid offerings for management capabilities, scaling currency, and enterprise support.  Consistent billing metrics based on managed resources, scaling concurrency, and enterprise support area available across all tiers. But let’s be honest – who needs consistent billing metrics? Half the fun is in the guessing! New Features Include: Premium security features such as SSO and Policy as Code on all tiers (yes, even the free ones for the poors like us.) Make it “easy and frictionless” for smaller teams and organizations to get started with their first use cases.  And -finally- updated paid tiers provide easy upgrade paths for organizations as their usage scales, and they have more advanced use cases. Consumer Advice Time! The updated pricing models include a “per resource” charge. That has the potential to get REAL messy over 500 devices.  Of course, it’s an option to stay on the legacy models, but the “carrots” – like SSO and Sentinel/OPA support – are pretty good, so you really just need to do a cost benefit analysis for your particular situation.  02:35 Ryan – “Yeah, I mean, the licensing for Terraform products for cloud and both enterprises always been rough, right? Like starting off per us...

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, Matthew and Peter are your hosts this week as we discuss all things cloud and AI,  Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod is better than Bob’s Used Books The Cloud Pod sets up AWS notifications for all The Cloud Pod is non-differential about privacy in BigQuery The Cloud Pod finds Windows Bob The Cloud Pod starts preparing for its Azure Emergency today A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: 00:40 – News this week starts out with TCP’s own news – Peter’s podcasting career is riding off into the sunset. He claims he’ll actually start listening, but we’ll see…we’re always happy for more listeners though, no matter how we get them.  02:18 – FinOps Foundation debuts new specification to ease cloud cost management Have we mentioned the FinOps User Conference? I can’t remember if we’ve mentioned that at all… In any event, join the fun June 27th through the 30th in beautiful and sunny San Diego, and be immersed in all things FinOps. It’s a dream vacation opportunity!  In the meantime, the Finops foundation has announced FOCUS, an open-source initiative designed to help companies more easily track their cloud costs, which will initially launch at the conference.  The goal of the initiative is to develop a standard specification for organizing cloud spending and usage data.  According to FinOps, FOCUS will also provide a number of related data management capabilities, MS and Google will join the steering committee tasked with managing the project.  “FOCUS will solve problems that organizations maturing their cloud adoption now face,” said Udam Dewaraja, the chair of the FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS working group. “Today, there’s no clear way to unify cost and usage data sets across different vendors.” FOCUS introduces standardized terminology for describing cloud expenses and usage metrics, provides a standardized schema, or a data format in which financial information can be organized. A schema specifies technical details such as the maximum number of expenses that should be included in each database row....

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan and Matthew are your hosts this week as we discuss all the latest news and announcements in the world of the cloud and AI – including what’s new with Google Deepmind, as well as goings on over at the Finops X Conference. Join us!  Titles we almost went with this week: The Cloud Pod DeepMinds bring you the Cloud News The Cloud Sounds Better When Tuned Properly ☁️The Cloud Pod Delegates Itself to Multiple Organizations  ️The Cloud is Flush with Cash but Still Raining on Employees. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:  Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: 00:43 – Finops X Foundation Conference is just around the corner  This is a great opportunity to meet with other Finops users and share knowledge, collaborate on Chalk Talk, and network in beautiful San Diego, CA. There will even be an awards ceremony on an aircraft carrier, and you KNOW you want to be there for that.  Do you like stickers? Of course you do. Everyone likes stickers! Be on the lookout for Justin – he’ll be there! And if you ask nicely (or even just sort of nicely) he’ll give you a TCP sticker, so that right there is a great reason to attend.  The conference is June 29th – 31st, and registration can be found on the Finops Foundation website. See you there!   02:51 It’s earning season. Listener discretion is advised.  Let’s start with Microsoft At their earnings report on Tuesday, Microsoft is reporting $52.9 billion revenue, up 7% from the previous year. Expectations were set at $51 billion.  Much of this is driven by AI (because what isn’t driven by AI these days.)  Overall profits were up 9% from last year, coming in at $18.3 billion.  Microsoft Azure helped with these numbers by recording a 22% increase, vs. a 34% increase seen last year.   03:51 Ryan- I’m surprised with some of the numbers, just because I wasn’t expecting – after so many years of growth – that it would continue to rise despite the economic dip.” Moving on to Google Earnings…  Google earnings were recorded at $69.79 billion,...

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan and Jonathan are your hosts this week as we discuss all the latest news and announcements in the world of the cloud and AI – including Amazon’s new AI, Bedrock, as well as new AI tools from other developers. We also address the new updates to AWS’s CodeWhisperer, and return to our Cloud Journey Series where we discuss *insert dramatic music* – Kubernetes!  Titles we almost went with this week: ⭐I’m always Whispering to My Code as an Individual Azure gets an AI, Google gets an AI… and Amazon finally gets an AI ‍You can now creep out your copilot by whispering to your code ✍️AI fails to generate an interesting show title this week A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:  Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: AWS News @01:36 – Codewhisperer is now generally available – and includes a free tier!  -Besides just the availability, this new real-time AI coding companion also includes a FREE individual tier open to all developers. This is a (good!) surprise to us.  -The free tier works with many popular IDEs, including VS Code and Intellij IDEA among others.  -Codewhisperer can assist in productivity by creating code for repetitive or routine tasks – Cost wise, Codewhisperer is pretty much in line with other products like GitHub Copilot.  – Python, Java, Javascript, Typescript, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell Scripting, SQL and Scala  -The downside: security is fairly limited (Python and Java, for instance)  02:50 Jonathan: “I’m super happy that they’ve launched with so many languages supported, and so much support for different IDE’s. It’s a great launch. It’s definitely a time saver, and I’d pay the $20 a month for the service even if there wasn’t a free tier.” (But maybe we don’t say that too loudly, or the free tier will disappear…) And speaking of that free tier – 04:49 Jonathan: “I expect the reason there’s a free tier is so that they get much more data from user experiences, and can retrain the model based on people’s feedback.” 05:24 Ryan: “It’s edging us closer to code writing code.” -One of the things that is important to point out from our discussion today is that you can get a bit more for your money from

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan and Matthew are your hosts this week as we discuss all the latest news and announcements in the world of the cloud and AI. Do people really love Matt’s Azure know-how? Can Google make Bard fit into literally everything they make? What’s the latest with Azure AI and their space collaborations? Let’s find out! Titles we almost went with this week: Clouds in Space, Fictional Realms of Oracles, Oh My.  The cloudpod streams lambda to the cloud A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:  Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. News this Week: General News @00:57 – Interesting article – What is Open AI doing that Google Isn’t  (Besides making a usable product, obviously.)  -Google AI lab is separate, meaning researchers are separate from the engineers, versus Open AI where they are one combined team, which – go figure – works out better. -The article goes on to question whether Google is “losing their edge” which, as the number 3 player in the AI industry, is pretty evident. The guys discuss the two services, as well as how Bard can be crammed into every product Google makes.  02:49 Ryan: “I find it kind of fascinating that Open AI, because they were first to market, gets to dictate what AI is.” @07:01 Are you an AI developer? Are you looking to build out your own models? -Good luck. Finding the hardware to do that continues to be an issue.  The Information put out an article about a shortage of servers at all the major cloud companies, including AWS, Azure, GPC, and OCI. The biggest issue is a shortage of GPUs and GPU processors, which was one of the first and main resources to have supply chain issues.  Desktop computer GPUs are having less issues with supply. Some of that is thanks to the bottom falling out of the Bitcoin market (no need for mining anymore.) 07:57 Ryan – “It’s a run on a limited resource, and GPU’s – they were the first to hit supply chain issue… it’s always been sort of a scarce resource. When I first heard of GPU’s being used for machine learning and those types of workloads, there weren’t enough of them, and it wasn’t really embedded in the type of hardware you need to run in a data center. 09:07Justin – “A lot of GPU returns and GPU availability in the desktop market, which those GPU’s are better suited for doing high computational work of 3D and things that are required for getting to bitcoin… so you could use desktop GPUs but your experience won’t go as far.” Unfortunately the smart Bri...

AWS Puts Up a New VPC Lattice to Ease the Growth of Your Connectivity AKA Welcome to April (how is it April already?) This week, Justin, Jonathan, and Matt are your guides through all the latest and greatest in Cloud news; including VPC Lattice from AWS, the one and only time we’ll talk about Service Catalog, and an ultra premium DDoS experience. All this week on The Cloud Pod.  This week’s alternate title(s): AWS Finally makes service catalogs good with Terraform Amazon continues to believe retailers with supply chain will give all their data to them Azure copies your data from S3… AWS copies your data from Azure Blobs… or how I set money on fire with data egress charges News this Week: AWS @00:56 –  Lots from AWS – Terraform and Service Catalog, Supply Chain and its crazy pricing, and VPC Lattice  –Self-service provisioning of Terraform open source configured with AWS Service Catalog. This means you can define your service catalog resources with either cloud formation *or* Terraform. And yes, Service Catalog inception is potentially a viable thing.  Matt: “It’s useful when you want to give people who don’t know what they’re doing very specific things; if you’re in a large organization, really just defining exactly what people can do…but to me it really starts to remove a lot of the innovation… but if you really want your teams to leverage the cloud and innovate I feel like it does start to limit some of the different aspects of the cloud.” Justin: “Don’t drink the ITSM kool-aid on Service Catalog.” @ 04:32 – AWS Supply Chain is now generally available; and yes, this is the same Supply Chain that was introduced at re:Invent. AWS says it will help mitigate risks, lower costs, increase visibility and help give actual insights on the supply chain. -Honestly, we’re talking about Supply Chain because the pricing is all over the place. For example, the first 100,000 Supply Chain insights are .40/each; the next 900,000 are .13/each, and over 900,000 its .065/each.  @ 09:26 – VPC Lattice is finally here! Also announced at re:Invent, this gives you the ability to connect, secure, & monitor communications between services. It also gives the ability to refine policies for both traffic management and network access.  -Since the announcement, a few new capabilities have been added, including the ability to use custom domains, deploy open source AWS gateway API controllers to use Lattice with a Kubernetes-native experience, as well as giving the ability to configure SSL/TLS certificates when using HTTPS that matches the custom domain.  You ca...

This week on the podcast, Justin, Jonathan and Ryan are joined by Matt Kohn and can be found chatting about all things microservices and containers – including new Security Copilot features.  In our cloud journeys, we discuss just what defines a microservice (spoiler: the guys actually agree for once) and whether or not those microservices require containers. Also on the agenda, IS Kubernetes the new Monolith?  News this Week: @4:00 – HashiCorp has announced quite a few updates for Terraform, including a number of innovations for the cloud version. This includes: -A *new version of the UI (*not actually new if you use the cloud version) and a new cross organizational provider, which will allow users to share via a private registry across an organization.  -They introduced Projects, which will give the ability to organize workspaces and ownership boundaries within Terraform.  -An Auth update will give enhanced integration between Terraform and GitHub.com -But wait, there’s more from HashiCorp! Among the updates is a new and improved pipeline model called the TFE Taskworker. This will let Terraform offer features like OPA support, dynamic provider credentials, and drift detection.  From Justin: “And OPA is exactly what you thought – they’re getting rid of Sentinel. No. They’re not. They’re giving you OPA AND Sentinel so you can use either/or or both of them.” Terraform Enterprise adds projects, drift detection, and more AWS @7:57 In AWS News –  We discussed a few weeks ago the new app migration service from AWS; well, they’ve added three new features!  -Import/Export: You can use the App Migration Service to import source environment inventory list from a CSV file (snazzy!) as well as exporting that same data for reporting purposes, offline reviews, and update integration.  – New dashboard for server migration metrics and added 8 additional predefined actions, such as converting licenses to Amazon licensing.   – ALB’s now support TLS 1.3 (Did anyone else realize they hadn’t already offered that update?) Matt: “I think what scares me more is the Windows update version; they have a runbook that will just do the upgrade for you. I feel like that **definitely** will never end well.” AWS Application Migration Service Major Updates: Import and Export Feature, Source Server Migration Metrics Dashboard, and Additional Post-Launch Actions GCP  @14:04 – Nothing of interest from GCP this week. Still trying to get Bard to work, go figure. Google recently discussed their “shared agenda for sensible AI progress” which is essentially an “if you can’t beat ‘em – regulate ‘em” ideology. SIDENOTE: Weird Amazon returns policies  SIDENOTE: AI Startup Replika – it goes where you th...

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the new Amazon Linux 2023, Google Bard,  new features of Google Chronicle Security Operations, GPT-4 from Azure Open AI, and Oracle’s Kubernetes platform comparison. They also talk about cloud-native architecture as a way to adapt applications for a pivot to the cloud. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS: Amazon announces General Availability of Amazon Linux 2023. GCP: New capabilities available on Google Chronicle Security Operations Azure: Azure announces preview of GPT-4 in Azure Open AI Service. Oracle: Oracle compares its Kubernetes platform with that of Hyperscalers.  Top Quotes “The goal of Cloud Native architecture is to develop scalable resilient ports of applications that you can easily deploy and manage in a modern Cloud environment” “You maximize the benefits of the platform you’re on and you minimize the weaknesses of it when you design for that platform” “There’s nothing that prevents you from going to the cloud if you’re not cloud-native, I just think you don’t get the advantages of the cloud native and what the cloud brings to you” AWS: Amazon announces General Availability of Amazon Linux 2023. Amazon Linux 2023, a Cloud-Optimized Linux Distribution with Long-Term Support ️️ This third generation of Amazon Linux Distributions includes security policies to apply the common industry guidelines. GCP: New capabilities available on Google Chronicle Security Operations. 0️⃣ Chronicle Security Operations Feature Roundup These New features enable a speedy response to threats. Azure: Azure announces preview of GPT-4 in Azure Open AI Service. 0️⃣ Introducing GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service As billing starts on the 1st of April, customers can begin harnessing Open AI’s most advanced model. Oracle: Oracle compares its Kubernetes platform with that of Hyperscalers. 0️⃣ Kubernetes cloud cost comparison: Who provides the best value? They highlight both serverless and managed K8 services and compare some specific services offered by both. The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Native Architecture. Cloud-Native architecture is an approach to building and running applications that use Cloud computing principles and technologies. Some benefits are scalability, reduced time to market, better utilization of resources, integrated management and monitoring as well as efficiency with large or small-scale work. While it is possible to move to the cloud without being cloud-native, the benefits may be reduced and there are no provisions for the typical challenges in the cloud space. Other Headlines Mentioned:

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team discusses Amazon Pi Day, Google’s upcoming I/O conference, the agricultural data manager by Microsoft, and the downturn in net profits of Oracle. They also round up cloud migrations by highlighting tools from different cloud service providers that are useful for the process. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS: Amazon celebrates Pi Day with live twitch streams. GCP: Google announces their I/O conference to take place near their headquarters in Mountain View. Azure:To increase global food production, Microsoft has created an agricultural data manager. Oracle: Net income for Oracle this quarter dropped to 1.9 billion.   Top Quotes “It’s been the thorn in the side of every migration I’ve been a part of… ‘how are we going to operate FTP securely in the cloud?” “It is not about where you are in the future to Amazon, it’s about where you are today… that’s why Google and Azure have some success seen as Amazon because they come in and they realize the true long-term value of the customer not the immediate short-term value of the Amazon approach” AWS: Amazon celebrates Pi Day with live twitch streams. Celebrate Amazon S3’s 17th birthday at AWS Pi Day 2023 ️️ They also announced 7 new capabilities across their data services. GCP: Google announces their I/O conference to take place near their headquarters in Mountain View. 0️⃣ Google I/O 2023 developer conference to kick off on May 10 The full agenda will be published in the next few weeks. Azure: To increase global food production, Microsoft has created an agricultural data manager. 0️⃣ Announcing Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture: Accelerating innovation across the agriculture value chain With the rising rate of hunger, this manager will provide solutions by maximizing agricultural data. Oracle: Net income for Oracle this quarter dropped to 1.9 billion. 0️⃣ Oracle’s stock heads south on revenue shortfall Despite the drop, and the gap from other cloud providers, they only slightly missed Wall Street expectations.  The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Migration Tools. The final part of Cloud Migrations Migrations; cloud tools to help with your migration. AWS has the highest amount of tools for cloud migrations; GCP and Azure also have some useful tools, but the least is OCI Foghorn Consulting can help clients with planning out their migration program. Other Headlines Mentione...

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team talks about the new AWS region in Malaysia, the launch of AWS App Composer, the expansion of spanner database capabilities, the release of a vision AI by Microsoft; Florence Foundation Model, and the three migration techniques to the cloud space. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS: AWS announces upcoming region in Malaysia. GCP: Google launches new capabilities to Spanners regional and multi-regional capabilities Azure: The Florence Foundation Model from Microsoft.. Top Quotes “I think that these migration projects end up getting sort of pigeonholed over time into things that they’re not” “The reality is like ‘What are you really trying to get out of your migration for the business?” “The hybrid migration model lets you realize the benefits of cloud incrementally as you go” AWS: AWS announces upcoming region in Malaysia. AWS Region in Malaysia ️️ This region is expected to have 3 AZ’s but there is no timeline for when it will come online GCP: Google launches new capabilities to Spanner’s regional and multi-regional capabilities. 0️⃣ Rapidly expand the reach of Spanner databases with read-only replicas and zero-downtime moves These include Configurable read-only replicas, Spanner’s zero-downtime instance, and the more affordable cost of multi-regional configurations.  Azure: The Florence Foundation Model from Microsoft. 0️⃣ Announcing a renaissance in computer vision AI with Microsoft’s Florence foundation model This new vision AI helps customers connect their data to natural language interactions to gain insights from their image and video resources. The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Migration Techniques There are three Migration Techniques; Hybrid, Cloud Native, and VMWare Migrations. One common mistake people make is believing they won’t get value from the migration till it is completed. Generally, it may be hard to decide which is the most successful because this depends on the definition of success as applied to individual businesses. Other Headlines Mentioned: AWS Application Composer Now Generally Available – Visually Build Serverless Applications Quickly Subscribe to AWS Daily Feature Updates via Amazon SNS Azure WAF guided investigation...

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team talks about the possible replacement of CEO Sundar Pichai after Alphabet stock went up by just 1.9%, the new support feature of Amazon EKS for Kubernetes, three partner specializations just released by Google, and how clients have responded to the AI Powered Bing and Microsoft Edge. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS: The new Amazon EKS release: the “combiner”. GCP: Google rolls out new partner specializations Azure: Microsoft releases AI-Powered Bing and Microsoft Edge. Top Quotes “It’s always going to be a race for these cloud providers to manage every software, in general, to stay up to date because it’s challenging” AWS: The new Amazon EKS release: the “combiner”.. Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.25 ️️ The most notable change in version 1.25 is the removal of Pod Security Policies PSPs. GCP: Google rolls out new partner specializations. 0️⃣ Three new Specializations help partners digitally transform customers These new specializations are Datacenter modernization services, DevOps services and Contact Center AI services. Azure: Microsoft releases AI-Powered Bing and Microsoft Edge. 0️⃣ The new Bing preview experience arrives on Bing and Edge Mobile apps; introducing Bing now in Skype With positive feedback, they will be launching the Bing and Edge mobile apps. Other Headlines Mentioned: Alphabet Needs to Replace Sundar Pichai Announcing Amazon ECS Task Definition Deletion New – Amazon Lightsail for Research with All-in-One Research Environments Microsoft Azure innovation powers leading price-performance for SQL Server AWS Security Hub launches 7 new security best practice controls AWS App Runner introduces web application firewall (WAF) support for enhanced security

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the AWS systems manager default enablement option for all EC2 instances in an account, different ideas from leveraging innovators plus subscription using $500 Google credits, the Azure Open Source Day, the new theme for the Oracle OCI Console, and lastly, different ways to migrate to a cloud provider. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS: AWS systems manager has a new default enablement option for all EC2 instances. GCP: Leveraging the innovators plus subscription to create ideas on how to use Google cloud credits. Azure: About Azure Open Source Day Oracle: Oracle redesigns OCI Console UI Top Quotes “There’s a lot to understand about your product and the way it works before you can even think about a cloud migration” “In the cloud, we always tell to plan for failure” “If you’re selling to your business the need to innovate… and you’re going to move on a cloud journey, then you need to actually deliver on those things” AWS: AWS systems manager has a new default enablement option for all EC2 instances Announcing the ability to enable AWS Systems Manager by default across all EC2 instances in an account ️️ Using DHMC, core system manager capabilities are now available to all EC2 instances in an account. GCP: Leveraging the innovators plus subscription to create ideas on how to use Google cloud credits 0️⃣ What would you build with $500 in Google Cloud credits included with Innovators Plus The innovators plus subscription offers $500 in credits and vouchers for certification. Azure: About Azure Open Source Day 0️⃣ 7 reasons to join us at Azure Open Source Day This virtual event will take place on the 7th of March from 9 to 10:30. Join the Azure Collective on Stack Overflow Oracle: Oracle redesigns OCI Console UI 0️⃣ Introducing Redwood Theming for Oracle Cloud Although the changes are cosmetic, usability enhancements are expected. . The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Migrations Cloud migration means moving your workload to a cloud provider, and the first part of this journey is the discovery phase. After inventory and assessment, the next step is to decide exactly how to move to the cloud which can be any one of five methods. It is imperative to consider your products and existing operational processes when migrating to a cloud provider.. Other Headlines Mentioned:

EKS on Snow Devices On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team highlights the new Graviton3-based images for users of AWS, new ways provided by Google to pay for its cloud services, the new partnership between Azure and the Finops Foundation, as well as Oracle’s new cloud banking, and the automation of CCOE. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS: Users now have access to the new Graviton3-based images. GCP: Google provides new ways to pay for Google Cloud Service. Azure: Microsoft becomes a premier member of the Governing board at the Finops Foundation. Oracle: Oracle introduces Oracle Banking Cloud Services Top Quotes “It’s important to sort of have that structure; even if you’re starting with a single account or project, you want to make sure you’re building something that can grow to multiples as you keep it” “There’s lots of things that you want to probably be automating; all the policies, all the governance, how you validate membership… that should all be really thought about from an automation perspective from day one” AWS: Users now have access to the new Graviton3-based images. New Graviton3-Based General Purpose (m7g) and Memory-Optimized (r7g) Amazon EC2 Instances ️️ The new M7g and R7g come in medium to 16xlarge. GCP: Google provides new ways to pay for Google Cloud Service. 0️⃣ Introducing new cloud services and pricing for ultimate flexibility Flex Agreements and Flexible Cuds were also announced in relation to this. Azure: Microsoft becomes a premier member of the Governing board at the Finops Foundation. 0️⃣ Microsoft joins the FinOps Foundation Azure hopes to define specifications and help evolve best practices globally Oracle: Oracle introduces Oracle Banking Cloud Services. 0️⃣ Redefining Banking SaaS—Introducing Oracle Banking Cloud Services Their approach is defined by 9 core elements related to security, resilience, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and others. . The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) This final installment of CCOE focuses on automating the CCOE and tracking CCOE metrics for adoption. Tagging is a crucial part of the security, access, or cost management strategy, which should be developed early, and as such cloud resources should be retrofitted for it and older ones should be tagged. One of the ways for a CCOE to demonstrate its value through automation is the metrics of adoption.  Other Headlines Mentioned:

AI Products & Earnings On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team talks about the announcement of Amazon VPC resource map, Google’s new AI product, the new Bing AI-powered search engine, and why multiple accounts are necessary for data centers to carry out work seamlessly in the cloud. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.  This week’s highlights AWS: AWS announces Amazon VPC resource map GCP: Sundar introduces Google’s new AI product, Google Bard. Azure: Microsoft announces the resurgence of Bing now powered by Open AI and Edge browser. Top Quotes “How was Google the first one to start looking into AI and still be late to the market?” “That’s why you have a center of excellence; they’re positioned centrally to be able to orchestrate all the different moving parts and be able to facilitate the communication between all the different projects and parts of not only your business but also your cloud provider’s business as well” “I think it’s important to not try to answer the next ten years of problems but also to try to build in circuit breakers or flexibility into your designs so that you can quickly adapt” AWS: AWS announces Amazon VPC resource map. New – Visualize Your VPC Resources from Amazon VPC Creation Experience ️️ This feature shows users their existing VPC resources and routing on a single page in order to simplify VPC creation on AWS. GCP: Sundar introduces Google’s new AI product, Google Bard. 0️⃣ An important next step on our AI journey It is a conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, being made available to trusted testers before the public. Azure: Microsoft announces the resurgence of Bing now powered by Open AI and Edge browser. 0️⃣ Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge, your copilot for the web The new Bing search engine will include a new chat experience and better search with complete answers, as well as other features. The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) The complexity of the workload being managed at data centers makes multiple accounts imperative for ease of processing. Despite the evolution in projects and accounts, there are some poorly thought out aspects, for example, shared VPC. The onus is on cloud users to identify what they need to communicate intrasystem and what they can have in complete isolation. Other Headlines Mentioned: Google suffered ‘pullback’ in ad spending over holidays, Alphabet stock falls after earnings

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the upcoming 2023 in-person Google Cloud conference, the accessibility of AWS CloudTrail Lake for non-AWS activity events, the new updates from Azure Chaos studio, and the comparison between Oracle Cloud service and other Cloud providers. They also highlight the application and importance of VPCs in CCOE. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.  This week’s highlights AWS: AWS CloudTrail Lake now allows users to consolidate, immutably store, and analyze activity events from non-AWS sources. GCP: Google Cloud 2023 Next conference will be in-person. Azure: New updates are available in the Azure Chaos studio. Oracle: Oracle creates a page comparing its cloud services with AWS and others. Top Quotes “A transit gateway effectively is saying we’re going to let you make multiple VPCs into one VPC, which is awesome” “When you’re designing VPC networking, make sure you’re aware of the cost involved in cross-zone communication because it’s not free and it can be quite significant” AWS: AWS CloudTrail Lake now allows users to analyze activity events from non-AWS sources. New – AWS CloudTrail Lake Supports Ingesting Activity Events From Non-AWS Sources ️️ Initially, AWS cloud lake was a service to access, analyze and store user and API activity from AWS as a source, but now users can set up custom events or integrate with other providers. GCP: Google Cloud 2023 Next conference will be in-person. 0️⃣ Google Cloud Next This will be the first in-person Next conference since 2019. Azure: New updates are available in the Azure Chaos studio. 0️⃣ Chaos studio – Public preview updates for January 2023  These updates include the availability of dynamic targeting, enabling service tags, VMSS SHutdown 2.0, and others. Oracle: Oracle creates a page comparing its cloud services with AWS and others. 0️⃣ Compare cloud services across OCI and other cloud providers, highlighting its equivalents to AWS, Azure and GCP The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) VPC means Virtual Private Cloud and is a service tied to almost every aspect of the cloud, especially in AWS. Security requirements are crucial to consider with VPCs which would include ACLs and VPC Flow Logs. Another consideration for VPCs is connectivity back to your private data center which may be through a VPN connection or a direct connect point-to-point from a third party or your data center into the cloud provider itself. Other Headlines Mentioned: Native OPA Support in Te...

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team sits to talk about AWS’s new patching policies, the general availability of Azure OpenAI, and the role of addressing IM or access management challenges in ensuring the seamless transition to the Cloud. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS announces new patching policies, Azure OpenAI service is now generally available. IM/Access Management in CCOE… Top Quotes “I think it(access management) should be the first challenge that’s tackled, and I usually try to approach it as such but it’s also sort of hard to do when it starts off as an experiment…and you have to retrofit it in” AWS: Announcement of new patching policies AWS Systems Manager announces Patch Policies, enabling cross account and cross Region patching ️️ This allows users to deploy policies to enforce patch compliance across their AWS accounts and regions… Azure: Azure OPN AI service is now generally available. 0️⃣ General availability of Azure OpenAI Service expands access to large, advanced AI models with added enterprise benefits 0️⃣ This is Close to Jonathan’s prediction that Azure will launch a ChatGPT service, and more businesses can now access the most advanced AI models with pricing based on the mode of use.. The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) IM or Access management should be the first area people look at and the first challenge to be tackled, while also defining data protection boundaries. CCOE also provides the opportunity to identify activities in production that are unnecessary and should be changed. Permissions are the least important part of your IM journey; permissions change and would need to be evaluated continually. Other Headlines Mentioned: Announcing the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Perth and Santiago AWS Clean Rooms is now available in preview AWS announces changes to AWS Billing, Cost Management, and Account consoles permissions AWS CloudTrail vulnerability: Undocumented API allows CloudTrail bypass EC2 Image Builder adds Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks for security hardening of Amazon Machine Images

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon announces massive corporate and tech lay offs and S3 Encrypts New Objects By Default, BigQuery multi-statement transactions are now generally available, and Microsoft announces acquisition of Fungible to accelerate datacenter innovation. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News: Amazon to lay off 18,000 corporate and tech workers. [1:11] Episode Highlights ⏰ Amazon S3 Encrypts New Objects By Default. [3:09] ⏰ Announcing the GA of BigQuery multi-statement transactions. [13:04] ⏰ Microsoft announces acquisition of Fungible to accelerate datacenter innovation. [17:14] Top Quote “And it’s interesting that, you know, the way they’re phrasing this where it’s, you know, it’s it’s moving these traditional things that have been in relational databases for a long time, but it’s the it’s the, the analytical, sort of big data sort of offerings, and it’s interesting to see how that transforms over time.” [15:16] AWS Amazon S3 Encrypts New Objects By Default. [3:09] AWS App Runner now integrates with AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. [8:26] GCP Announcing the GA of BigQuery multi-statement transactions. [13:04] Azure Azure Confidential Computing on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors with Intel TDX. [15:38]

For our New Years Resolution, we decided to change some of our show. First, we have cut the lightning round in favor of our new Cloud Journey series, where we will talk about core cloud concepts over several episodes. We are also covering only the larger stories from the cloud providers, we still want to provide you with all of the news, so you’ll find it in the show notes; if you enjoy the aggregation, subscribe to our newsletter to get the show notes to get your mailbox weekly.  Share your feedback through our website or join our slack team.  On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team follows up on the news from Salesforce’s last episode, as workforce cuts ensue as a fallout of the noted decline in productivity, with more on 2023 predictions from Peter, including general expectations in the tech space, while also highlighting the new Graph-explorer tool by Amazon Neptune, GCP security trends for the coming year, the CES Conference and CCOE from the new Cloud Journey Series. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions focused on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS: Amazon Neptune announces a new open-source low-code visual exploration tool, the Graph-explorer. GCP releases an article on security trends to expect in 2023. The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) Top Quotes “A lot of traditional security operations has been at the infrastructure level; tracking packets and using the header information of those packets for identification, and none of that really works on cloud anymore” “It’s not just how to use cloud technology, which is what the IT teams were focused on, it’s how do you provide the value of cloud into your business and succeed?” “Understanding the advantages of why you want to adopt Cloud is really important for a business, even before they start the CCOE”  Follow up: After discussing Salesforce and their “less productive” employees a few weeks ago, Salesforce has followed up by laying off 10% of their workforce. After missing last week’s episode, Peter shares his 2023 prediction; The recession will be more severe than expected, resulting in significant layoffs as companies are forced to get more competitive with automated solutions. Peter’s favorite announcement for 2022; Aurora Serverless V2 5 things to look out for in tech Five Things to Watch in Tech 2023 Big Changes ahead in 2023 for big tech with poor valuations, justifying their software against slashing budgets and the next big thing; is it AI, AR, VR? AWS: Amazon Neptune announces Graph-explorer

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team wraps up 2022 so far, comparing predictions made with the events so far while projecting into 2023 as the year comes to a close. They discuss the S3 security changes coming from Amazon, the new control plane connectivity options with GCP, and Microsoft’s achievement, finally topping a list within the cloud space. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Starting in April, Amazon will change defaults around S3 security. The new control plane connectivity and isolation options are coming to GKE clusters Finally, Microsoft is Number #1 In a Cloud Thing. Salesforce Founder, Marc Benioff says employees hired during the pandemic are facing much lower productivity. Open AI’s new chat AI and AI playground create much buzz but with high compute costs, it will be monetized soon. A lookback at 2022 predictions by our hosts, none of which came true. The team gives 2023 predictions surrounding Microsoft, data Sovereignty and AI and No-code solution convergence Top Quotes “The problem with low-code No-code… is that the gap between those solutions and the bespoke development that you typically would meet is mountains of distance but with this [Open AI’s new chat AI] ..now I just have to tell the computer what I’m trying to do…and then the computer can determine what type of code to write for that” 2023 Predictions Jonathan: Microsoft will release in preview of an Azure branded Chat GPT Justin: Data Sovereignty will drive single panes of glass against multi-cloud Ryan: An influx of all of the AI and No-Code solution convergence Favorite Announcements Ryan Announcing Amazon CodeCatalyst, a Unified Software Development Service (Preview) Announcing new workflow observability features for AWS Step Functions Source Protect for Cloud Code gives developers real-time security feedback as they work in their IDEs #46 Justin Accelerate Your Lambda Functions with Lambda SnapStart Microsoft announces new collaboration with Red Button for attack simulation testing Google + Mandiant: Transforming Security Operations and Incident Response Raising the bar in Security Operations: Google Acquires Siemplify Jonathan

On The Cloud Pod the team reviews the multi-billion-dollar DOD contract formerly known as Jedi awarded to big tech companies; Microsoft buys a stake in LSE, raising questions; Werner shares his 2023 tech predictions and posts the Distributed Computing manifesto to his blog; and lastly, at Azure, Bell hits bumps while trying to make Microsoft safer. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights The Pentagon awards a cloud-computing contract that can reach up to $9 billion in total through 2028 to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. Microsoft buys 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange AWS: Werner posts the Distributed Computing Manifesto to his blog All Things Distributed and shares his 2023 tech predictions. GCP: Break down data silos with the new cross-cloud transfer feature of BigQuery Omni Azure: Bell hits obstacles in his push to make Microsoft more secure as feedback suggests the bar is being set too high. Top Quotes “The long and the short of it is that slowly over time, the ship date when buying something on Amazon or anywhere else gets closer to real-time and the cost to get it to you gets lower” “All software has defects since it’s created and configured by humans, [But] the pattern of security incidents [and] defects in Azure reported by third parties and the related severity suggests that even Microsoft is challenged in adopting proper security controls in cloud-native development pipelines, like many enterprises.” AWS: ALL THINGS DISTRIBUTED – WERNER VOGELS’ BLOG Werner posted the Distributed Computing Manifesto to his blog “All Things Distributed”. ️️ The manifesto highlights the challenges Amazon was facing at the end of the 20th century, and hints at where it was headed. He also shared his 2023 tech predictions on the blog involving cloud technology, simulated worlds, silicone chips supply chain transformation, and smart energy.. GCP: Break down data silos with the new cross-cloud transfer feature of BigQuery Omni 0️⃣ GCP launched big query Omni in 2021 to help customers break down data silos. They have now added support for SQL-supported Load Statements that allowed AWS/Azure Blob data to be brought into big query as a managed table for advanced analysis. Feedback confirms improvements in usability, security, latency, and cost audibility.  Azure: Bell hits obstacles in his push to make Microsoft more secure. ⬆️ After spending 23 years at Amazon, Charlie Bell, the most senior cybersecurity executive now at Microsoft, faces resistance to preventing and responding to software vulnerabilities believing that he was setting the bar too high. If there are flaws in the software they write that leads to vulnerabilities for downtime, developers in bell’s unit can expect to be paged and asked to fix it. This is long-standing practice at AWS but a new conc...

The Cloud Pod recaps all of the positives and negatives of Amazon ReInvent 2022, the annual conference in Las Vegas, bringing together 50,000 cloud computing professionals.  This year’s keynote speakers include Adam Selpisky, CEO of Amazon Web Services, Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Data and Machine Learning at AWS and Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO.  Attendees and web viewers were treated to new features and products, such as AWS Lambda Snapstart for Java Functions, New Quicksight capabilities and quality-of-life improvements to hundreds of services.  Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, Peter and Special guest Joe Daly from the Finops foundation talk about the show and the announcements. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights ⏰ AWS Pricing Calculator now supports modernization cost estimates for Microsoft workloads. ⏰ AWS Re:Invent 2022 announcements and keynote updates. Top Quote “But if I’m putting my business data into another data lake, and I want to use the business data to inform my security data, I now have to cross the lakes to even make this connection to get that data set. So I agree with you on a pure security basis in the open schema for security data is really great. My issue is that you’re putting borders around these lakes, when you really want to bring the data together and be able to hydrate across. That’s why we have enterprise data, we analyze data warehouses, where we have all these things to bring this data together, add context to data. And I feel like this is just more removing context.” [37:20] AWS: Amazon Goes to India AWS Pricing Calculator now supports modernization cost estimates for Microsoft workloads. [1:39] Introducing Finch: An open source client for container development. [3:19] AWS opens its 30th region in India. [4:51] New for AWS backup: Protect and restore CloudFormation stacks. [5:57] Amazon ECS Service Connect enabling easy communication between microservices. [7:31] REINVENT RECAP DAY 1 KEYNOTE: Peter DeSantis [19:11] Compute [19:42] Announcing AWS Lambda SnapStart for Java functions.

RE:INVENT NOTICE Jonathan, Ryan and Justin will be live streaming the major keynotes starting Monday Night, followed by Adam’s keynote on Tuesday, Swami’s keynote on Wednesday and Wrap up our Re:Invent coverage with Werner’s keynote on Thursday. Tune into our live stream here on the site or via Twitch/Twitter, etc.  On The Cloud Pod this week, a new AWS region is open in Spain and NBA and Microsoft team up to transform fan experiences with cloud application modernization. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News [0:04]       CDK for Terraform 0.14 Makes it Easier to Use Providers Episode Highlights ⏰ New AWS region open in Spain. ⏰ NBA and Microsoft team up to transform fan experiences with cloud application modernization. Top Quote “When we set this up, they still called you by voice and you had to validate when it took up to an hour to support case. And yeah, it would take forever. Like, not only did it take you to an hour, there’s like 10 things you needed to do with a root account that you couldn’t do with an im account. Yeah, it was brutal back then.” [9:27] AWS: Amazon Goes to Spain New AWS region open in Spain. [2:00] You can now assign multiple MFA devices in IAM. [2:32] Announcing AWS CDK Support and CodeBuild Provisioning for AWS Proton. [6:16] Introducing the AWS Proton dashboard. [6:16] ‍ Incident Manager from AWS Systems Manager launches incident coordination capabilities for Incident Response. [7:00] Announcing enhanced operational incident response capabilities with AWS Systems Manager and PagerDuty. [7:21] AWS announces Amazon WorkSpaces Multi-Region Resilience. [7:56]...

RE:INVENT NOTICE Jonathan, Ryan and Justin will be live streaming the major keynotes starting Monday Night, followed by Adam’s keynote on Tuesday, Swami’s keynote on Wednesday and Wrap up our Re:Invent coverage with Werner’s keynote on Thursday. Tune into our live stream here on the site or via Twitch/Twitter, etc.  On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon Time Sync is now available over the internet as a public NTP service, Amazon announces ECS Task Scale-in protection, and Private Marketplace is now in preview. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights ⏰ Amazon Time Sync is now available over the internet as a public NTP service. ⏰ Amazon announces ECS Task Scale-in protection. ⏰ Private Marketplace is now in preview. Top Quote “And then those companies say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to performance tests and regression tests and load tests.’ Or, or, ‘It’s not broken, I don’t want to fix it.’ You know, and so they just sit there paying more money because it’s not worth the risk.” [10:37] AWS: Time for Amazon ⚖️ Amazon announces ECS Task Scale-in protection. [2:05] ⏳ Amazon Time Sync is now available over the internet as a public NTP service. [4:54] Amazon EC2 Mac instances now support Apple macOS Ventura. [6:14] Amazon RDS now supports General Purpose gp3 storage volumes. [7:49] Amazon EKS supports Kubernetes version 1.24. [10:53] New centralized Logging for Windows Containers on Amazon EKS using Fluent Bit. [15:50] Amazon EC2 announces new price and capacity-optimized allocation strategy for provisioning Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. [16:28] ...

On a slow news week, we talk about the new AWS Switzerland region, Googles 2022 State of Devops report and GCP gets those flexible committed use discounts!  Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News [4:02] Announcing the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report: A deep dive into security. Episode Highlights ⏰ Announcing the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report: A deep dive into security. ⏰ AWS opens a new region–its 28th– in Switzerland ⏰ GCP unveils flexible committed use discounts. Top Quote “Back when you only had the option of on demand or reserved instances, and you do the math… And if you run the thing, basically more than 40 hours a week, you might as well buy the Ri. You’re not getting any benefit of scaling anyway, at that point. So this is this is so much better, you get the benefit of committing to an aggregate use and the discount to that with the benefit of turning stuff off when you’re not using it.” [32:24] AWS: Amazon Isn’t Neutral About Switzerland AWS opens a new region–its 28th– in Switzerland. [19:29] Quickly find resources in your AWS account with new Resource Explorer. [21:55] GCP: Google Is Committed To Their Flexibility Announcing MongoDB connector for Apigee Integration. [24:40] GCP unveils flexible committed use discounts. [28:15] Azure: Azure Needs No Downtime 0️⃣ Zero downtime migration for Azure Front Door—now in preview. [33:57] ⚡ TCP Lightning Round (Justin 8, Ryan 7, Jonathan 4, Peter 0) [35:09] AWS Certificate Manager now supports Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm TLS certificates Amazon ElastiCache adds support for Redis 7

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon announces Neptune Serverless, Google introduces Google Blockchain Node Engine, and we get some cost management updates from Microsoft. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News [1:24] Microsoft surprises with first quarter results Microsoft drops 6% after revealing weak guidance on its earnings call 3️⃣ Alphabet announces Q3 results ✂️ YouTube shrinks Alphabet; company will cut headcount growth by half in Q4 ⚓ Amazon stock sinks 16% on weak Q4 guidance 3️⃣ Amazon announces Q3 results Amazon CFO says tech giant is preparing for ‘what could be a slower growth period’ AWS just recorded its weakest growth to date AWS named as a leader in the 2022 Gartner CIPS Magic Quadrant for the 12th consecutive year Episode Highlights ⏰ Amazon announces Neptune Serverless. ⏰ Google introduces Blockchain Node Engine ⏰ Cost management updates from Microsoft. Top Quote “Google Cloud is an important partner to HashiCorp, and our enterprise customers use HashiCorp Terraform and Google Cloud to deploy mission critical infrastructure at scale. With 70 million downloads of the Terraform Google Provider this year and growing, we’re excited to collaborate closely with Google Cloud to offer our joint customers a seamless experience which we believe will significantly enhance their experience on Google Cloud.” – Burzin Patel, HashiCorp VP, Global Partner Alliances. [39:38] AWS: Amazon Goes to Neptune Announcing

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances for high-performance model training are now available, 123 new things were announced at Google Cloud Next ‘22, Several new Azure capabilities were announced at Microsoft Ignite, and many new announcements were made at Oracle CloudWorld. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights ⏰ Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances for high-performance model training are now available. ⏰ 123 new things were announced at Google Cloud Next ‘22. ⏰ Several new Azure capabilities were announced at Microsoft Ignite. ⏰ Many new announcements from Oracle CloudWorld. Top Quote “We are pleased to have co-designed the first ASIC Infrastructure Processing Unit with Google Cloud, which has now launched in the new C3 machine series. A first of its kind in any public cloud, C3 VMs will run workloads on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors while they free up programmable packet processing to the IPUs securely at line rates of 200Gb/s. This Intel and Google collaboration enables customers through infrastructure that is more secure, flexible, and performant.” – Nick McKeown, Senior Vice President, Intel Fellow and General Manager of Network and Edge Group. [35:26] AWS: Increasing Your Large-Scale Distribution Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances for high-performance model training are now available. [1:55] AWS launches new local zones in Taipei and Delhi. [3:29] A new cost explorer console experience was just announced, and it’s Justin approved. [4:26] ➕ Amazon Connect Cases is now generally available. [6:40] GCP: What Will They Announce Next? You can now manage storage costs by automatically deleting expired data using Firestore Time-To-Live (TTL). [9:23]

Episode 185: The Cloud Pod is flush with Cache!   On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon introduces their new file cache for on premises systems, Google introduces GKE Autopilot, and Azure helps you strengthen your security even more. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.   Episode Highlights ⏰ Introducing Amazon File Cache, the new AWS cache for on-premises file systems. ⏰ Google introduces support for GPU workloads and more in GKE Autopilot. ⏰ Strengthen your security with Policy Analytics for Azure Firewall. Top Quote “I get the feeling that the multiple tenancy, in a way is probably the selling point here. That as you acquire new companies, or as you bring on new partners dynamically, it’s easier to integrate those IDPs. Whereas previously, it’s been pretty difficult to to have multiple sources of identity, I guess it sort of abstracts those and provides a single layer to the Google identity service.” [22:07” General News: We will not be recording during the week of Google Cloud Next, so our episodes will be slightly delayed–fear not, we’re recording an episode immediately after Next so we can deliver your weekly dose of cloud news ASAP. AWS: All About the Cache   Introducing Amazon File Cache, the new AWS cache for on-premises file systems. [1:28] ️ Amazon WorkSpaces introduces Ubuntu Desktops, with per month or per hour pricing. [5:35] AWS announces Amazon WorkSpaces Core, their new fully managed VDI service. [11:00]   GCP: Put Your Work on Autopilot?   Google introduces support for GPU workloads and more in GKE Autopilot. [16:04] ‍ You can now easily manage Google Cloud workforce access with Workforce Identity Federation.. [20:37] Azure: Budget Updates on the Go!

On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS announces an update to IAM role trust policy behavior, Easily Collect Vehicle Data and Send to the Cloud with new AWS IoT FleetWise, now generally available, Get a head start with no-cost learning challenges before Google Next ‘22. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.   Episode Highlights ⏰ AWS announces an update to IAM role trust policy behavior. ⏰ Easily Collect Vehicle Data and Send to the Cloud with new AWS IoT FleetWise, now generally available. ⏰ Get a head start with no-cost learning challenges before Google Next ‘22.   General News: Google Next is coming up in two weeks. [0:56] Next week’s show will be sans Justin. [1:02] AWS: More like “Announcement” Web Services   Easily Collect Vehicle Data and Send to the Cloud with new AWS IoT FleetWise, now generally available. [1:48] AWS announces an update to IAM role trust policy behavior. [7:00] Sticking with the theme of granularity, Amazon Route 53 announces support for DNS resource record set permissions. [16:29] Amazon announces AWS DataSync Discovery in preview. [18:30] ️ Cloudwatch container insights now provides lifecycle events for ECS. [21:38]   GCP: Google Next Is Almo...

On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS Enterprise Support adds incident detection and response, the announcement of Google Cloud Spanner, and Oracle expands to Spain. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights ⏰ AWS Enterprise Support adds incident detection and response ⏰ You can now get a 90-day free trial of Google Cloud Spanner ⏰ Oracle opens its newest cloud infrastructure region in Spain Top Quote “A very large percentage of MySQL HeatWave customers are AWS users who are migrating off Aurora. However, there are still some AWS customers who are not able to migrate to OCI. This is a service where the data plane, control plane and console are natively running on AWS. We have taken the MySQL HeatWave code and optimized it for AWS infrastructure.” –Nipun Agarwal, senior vice president of MySQL, Database and HeatWave at Oracle. General News: Moving from Ruby to Go, Vagrant 2.3 Introduces Go Runtime. [0:58] AWS: New Proactive Monitoring from AWS AWS Enterprise Support adds incident detection and response. [2:01] Helping to vastly reduce failover times, Amazon RDS Proxy adds support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server. [3:59] Beginning October 11th, ACM public certificates will be issued by one of the Intermediate CA’s that AWS manages. [7:46] AWS has announced direct VPC routing for AWS outposts. [10:23] ️ You can now deploy your Amazon EKS Clusters Locally on AWS Outposts. [12:12] GCP: Free Trial Here! Get Your Free Trial Here! You can now get a 90-day free trial of Google Cloud Spanner. [14:04] If you need a new way to protect your data, try Google introduced fine-grained access control for Cloud Spanner...

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon SWF launches a new console experience, Google acquires Mandiant, and Azure Space has some new products coming your way soon. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights ⏰  Amazon SWF just launched a new console experience for building distributed applications. ⏰ The Google acquisition of Mandiant (Mandoogle!) is finished. ⏰  Azure Space announced their next wave of products. Top Quote “The new certification is sort of interesting, because it’s a little bit more like the, the content isn’t new, right? But the certification is new. And so it’s an interesting metric. Like how do you, how do you ensure people are reviewing the content? You have these certifications that you measure on the completion of that? So like, it’s, I can see how it’s a little bit of like, weaponizing, you know, those metrics in order to like drive culture change, maybe within an org where there’s division over private cloud or public cloud? Or, you know, it just depends on what you want to do. But very interesting.” [17:04] General News: Hashi Corp announced that Consul Terraform Sync is generally available at the 0.7 release. [1:12] AWS: More Like Amazon SWTF? You’ve never heard of it, but Amazon SWF just launched a new console experience for building distributed applications. [4:20] Amazon SNS launches a public preview of message data protection. [6:53] ‍♂️ Your containers will now be launching faster, thanks to Seekable OCI for lazy loading container images. [10:00] GCP: Hey Siri, What Is a Mandoogle? Google Cloud Next is less than one month away. Have you registered yet? [12:16] ‍♀️ The Cloud Digital Leader certification is bringing Cloud training to those of us who aren’t technically inclined. [14:56] BeyondCorp Enterprise is giving you more ways to protect your corporate applications. [18:45] ‍The

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon announces Amazon Inspector’s new support of Windows OS for continual software vulnerability scanning of EC2 workloads, Google has several exciting announcements regarding Chronicle, Azure is announcing pretty much everything under the sun, and Oracle announces OCI Lake in beta. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights ⏰  Amazon Inspector now supports Windows operating system (OS) for continual software vulnerability scanning of EC2 workloads. ⏰  Google makes 3 announcements about Chronicle. ⏰  Azure has three–yes, three–new releases this week. ⏰ Oracle announces OCI Lake in beta. Top Quote “The picture is still opaque of what the real value of this is going to be. But the fact that it’s out there is good or, you know… it’s the classic. “I’m leaving Amazon and I have worked on this code for five years and I like doing open source. So I can keep using it. It can be that classic move.” General News: Gartner published an article indicating that SaaS vendors will be using sustainability as a basis to raise their prices. [0:34] The news out of VMWare this week can basically be summed up as: Tanzu, Tanzu, and more Tanzu. [2:38] AWS: Scanning, scanning, scanning…. Amazon Event Ruler is becoming open source. [10:50] Amazon Inspector now supports Windows operating system (OS) for continual software vulnerability scanning of EC2 workloads. [14:12] GCP: Dear Diary, today I… ️ A Chronicle blog post diary, Google made several announcements [17:09]: There are new ingestion metrics coming to Chronicle. ⏳ New YARA-L functionalities are coming that will allow you to apply more fine grained time based criteria into your detections. The Chronicle native-VirusTotal augment widget is now available. Azure: New Releases, New Releases Everywhere… Azure Managed Grafana is now generally available. [19:39] Enterprise-...

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon adds the ability to embed fine-grained visualizations directly onto web pages, Google offers pay-as-you-go pricing for Apigee customers, and Microsoft launches Arm-based Azure VMs that are powered by ampere chips. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights ⏰  Fine-grained visualizations can now be embedded directly into your webpages and applications ⏰  Google is now offering pay-as-you-go pricing for its Apigee API customers ⏰  Microsoft launches Arm-based Azure VMs powered by ampere chips Top Quote “I think I feel like SimCity 2000 lied to me. By now we should have had satellites in space collecting solar power and beaming microwave energy down to us.” General News: Due to concerns about power shortages and availability of supplies, ​​Microsoft and Amazon cancel several new planned data centers in Ireland. [1:18] AWS: Adding Visuals to Your Apps Is Getting Even Easier… Fine-grained visualizations can now be embedded directly into your webpages and applications thanks to Amazon QuickSight. [4:44] ⚙️ Amazon’s announcement of the new AWS Support App for Slack is going to streamline management of technical, billing, and account support cases. [6:24] ️ AWS Security Hub is now publish announcements through Amazon SNS, and anyone can submit via the console or CLI. [8:37] ✉️ Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports email subscription for SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). [10:37] ☁️ Amazon CloudFront launches Origin Access Control (OAC), which helps more easily secure S3 origins. [11:08] Your account login pages are becoming even more secure, thanks to AWS WAF Fraud Control. [12:38] Amazon EKS Anywhere Curated Packages now generally available....

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team weighs the merits of bitcoin mining versus hacking. Plus: AWS Trusted Advisor prioritizes Support customers, Google provides impenetrable protection from a major DDoS attack, and Oracle Linux 9 is truly unbreakable. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS Trusted Advisor offers a new Priority capability for Enterprise Support, offering a prioritized view of critical risks. Nothing’s touching Google, as it blocks the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack to date, with a whopping 46 million requests per second (RPS). The new Oracle Linux 9 comes with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7 (UEK R7) and Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK). Top Quotes   “This is really just institutionalizing the knowledge that the Enterprise customers are already getting from their account team. And it probably really helps — in the event that the AWS account team experiences churn for those customers — not to be negatively impacted. It probably makes it really easy for new people on that AWS account team to come in and know where the other team left off. I don’t think it’s really a new feature — just a new way to access data that customers are already getting.” “Ignoring those Tor nodes — which didn’t make a whole lot of traffic — that’s 12,000 requests a second per source IP, on average. That’s enormous.” AWS: A Trusty Advisor’s Priorities ‍ Finally, AWS has found a use for Mechanical Turk, with its new Priority capability for Trust Advisor. If you’ve been curious about what’s happening during domain updates of the OpenSearch Service, you now get more visibility into validation errors during blue/green deployments. Great news for license-holders and clearly by popular demand: RDS for Oracle now supports managed Oracle Data Guard Switchover and Automated Backups for read replicas. GCP: Heavily Armored Cloud Google Cloud is saying goodbye to its IoT Core service in 2023. How about...

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team chats cloud region wars to establish the true victor. Plus: AWS Storage Day offers a blockhead badge, all the fun of the Microsoft Dev Box, and Google sends people back to sleep with its Cloud Monitoring snooze alert policy. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS Storage Day 2022 marks the fourth annual event streamed live on Twitch, with its File Cache service announcement and five new available learning badges. Google now offers alert policy snoozing in Cloud Monitoring for maintenance or non-business hours. Microsoft previews its Dev Box, a managed service enabling developers to create cloud workstations. Top Quotes   “I found it completely shocking that this didn’t exist in AWS — that you only had enable/disable — when first moving over there. So this is a fantastic feature for Google Monitoring. I love it.” “This seems like one of those things I’d like, but half the fun of starting a new project is installing a new version of Python or something that completely hoses my local laptop. And I spend the next three or four days frantically trying to undo what I’ve done that breaks six other things.” AWS: It’s Storage Day! ️ AWS livestreamed its fourth annual Storage Day on Twitch, and Ryan is rather excited about getting his hands on that blockhead badge for core storage competency. Plus, the new File Cache service promises to accelerate and simplify hybrid cloud workloads. Continue to be blown away by the theory of HTTP/3 (and if you’re like Ryan, dread the day you have to troubleshoot it), as Amazon CloudFront now supports it. Now available in US regions (with a likely quick extension with increased adoption and understanding of the service): AWS Private 5G. Amazon and Splunk co-announce the release of the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) project with a lot of partners… but (interestingly) no Elastic.

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team gets judicial on the Microsoft-Unity partnership. Plus: Amazon acquires iRobot, BigQuery boasts Zero-ETL for Bigtable data, and Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks is in public preview.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights iRobot signs an agreement with Amazon for its acquisition. To what end remains known to Amazon and Amazon alone. Google offers a Zero-ETL approach for Bigtable data analytics using BigQuery. Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks is now in public preview. Top Quotes   “Almost all of Amazon’s big acquisitions have always been about something indirect. The Whole Foods acquisition was really about the logistics supply chain behind the scenes of moving that around — they kept the brand … and they have the same footprint for stores … but now they have a lot more infrastructure for AmazonFresh. And I suspect for iRobot it’s the same thing.” “This is super handy for huge datasets where you want to track trends over a long time. It’s always really difficult and you always end up compromising somewhere — by not loading or querying your full dataset, because you can’t get it from A to B, or trying to run the query against two separate data sets and combining the results. So this is a nice thing to have for those users who have data across these multiple places.” AWS: We, Robots Those who hate working in Amazon warehouses might not have to have anything to complain about anymore, as Amazon agrees to acquire iRobot. If you need to get up to speed with Graviton, you’ve now got Graviton Fast Start, which helps move workloads over to AWS. ️ VMware’s interesting cloud workload protection feels like a continued diversification away from virtualization as your main revenue stream. ☁️ CloudWatch Evidently, Amazon’s second product to help with feature flagging, adds support for creating target customer segments for feature launches and experiments. Neat!

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses why Ryan’s yelling all day (hint: he’s learning). Plus: Peter misses the all-important cloud earnings, AWS Skill Builder subscriptions are now available, and Google Eventarc connects SaaS platforms.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Earnings time is upon us once again, and it’s apparently doom and gloom all around as tears of loss are wiped away with $100 bills. AWS makes its Skill Builder subscriptions available with more than 500 courses and four new learning experiences. (The Cloud Pod is now registering signups for a virtual proctor while you take the test.) Google Eventarc for events enthusiasts unifies and integrates supported SaaS platforms.  Top Quotes   “Teams is a huge focus. The last two years have been companies figuring out how to remote work for the first time ever. That’s not a sustainable thing —  those two years’ growth is all just pandemic.” “I do like the way that they’re presenting a lot of this training. I don’t learn well in the classroom setting — I learn by doing, so any kind of hands-on labs or the jams which I’ve done in person at re:Invent are better for me to learn the internet intricacies of different services. So I love this.” General News: Earnings, Damned Earnings, and Negative Analysts  First up for reported earnings is Microsoft, where no one’s really hurting. (Wait until you see the other guys.) Sadly, Google still hasn’t figured out how to make money on GCP. Ad revenue is down. Amazon suffers slower demand amid another net loss. Rivian takes a big hit, so if you were hoping to see it turn around, it hasn’t. Of course, all of this bad news means Google and Microsoft have scaled back hiring efforts. Coupled with high inflation and bad interest rates, an economic bloodbath in the next 12 months looms.

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team gets skeptical on Prime Day numbers. Plus: AWS re:Inforce brings GuardDuty, Detective and Identity Center updates and announcements; Google Cloud says hola to Mexico with a new Latin American region; and Azure introduces its new cost API for EC and MCA customers. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS re:Inforce brings us Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Detective and IAM Identity Center releases, updates and name-changes for additional protection and headache. Google Cloud adds a third Latin American data region to its collection — this time, in Mexico. EA and MCA customers now benefit from Azure’s new Cost Details API for better HR and finance management. Top Quotes   “This must always have been their plan. Amazon did not build that block Inspection Service just so that Orca could serve their own customers. They must have had an eye on the huge customer base of people using EBS Volumes to do this exact same thing. So it’s no surprise [as they’ve] had almost two years of sole ownership of the service to deliver this to customers. I’m not surprised at all to see an enhancement like this. And it’s awesome. Really.” “Microsoft is in a lucky position, because the Windows ecosystem has been very services heavy for a long time. … They’ve got this unique position where they can deprecate … they can pivot to new APIs more quickly than AWS, who are stuck with so many customers [and it’s] very painful for them to deprecate … It’s lucky that [Microsoft] don’t have customers that would push back against this, because they’re used to constant change.” AWS: re:Inforcing Prime Numbers #️⃣ There may well be some spin in Jeff Barr’s latest brag on behalf of Amazon for its Prime Day 2022. Impressive numbers nonetheless! New malware detection for EBS Volumes with GuardDuty is the first of three announcements hot out of AWS re:Inforce — very similar to Orca Security malware snapshot and restore functions. ️ The second offering is Amazon Detective’s support for Kubernetes Workloads on EKS, for improved security investigations. There’s nothing not to like here, and it shows exactly why we use managed services. Finally, the...

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses facial recognition avoidance tactics. Plus: Waving farewell to CentOS 7 with the rise of Rocky Linux, Amazon traverses the new Cloudscape, and the U.K. heatwave spells disaster for Oracle and Google data centers. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights As CentOS is put out to pasture, say hello to Rocky Linux, named in honor of CentOS late co-founder Rocky McGaugh. Cloudscape Design System is the latest AWS open source wonder for web application building. The great British heatwave of 2022 burns Oracle and Google data centers to a crisp. Top Quotes   “It answers the question of who we shout at if there’s a bug at zero day and the community doesn’t get around to fixing it. Now we can shout at Google.” “It’s probably a sign of further issues to come unless they do some productive work. Because it’s one thing to … build a data center in Utah [where] it gets up to 45 degrees C and the sun’s heating the air under some land. And that’s a completely different situation than heating up Europe, which is … much less expected to have those kinds of temperatures so far north. … So it’s going to be time to invest in HVAC business.” General News: The Best Data Lake Is the One With Your Boat on It ️ VentureBeat offers up its top 10 data lake solution vendors this year. If you also don’t know what a data lake is, fear not (it tells you). AWS: Open Source Because They Can’t Sell It? AWS suits up for battle against Microsoft and Google with its server chip. Fire up the Graviton! Cost-saving automated and easily modifiable EBS Elastic Volumes are here. (Just watch out for a pesky potential price increase.) The very cool VPC Flow Logs for Transit Gateway will make things much more efficient. AWS announces neat new

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses shorting Jim Chanos amid the great cloud giant vs. colo standoff. Plus: Google prepares for a post-quantum world, Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are now generally available, and master of marketing Oracle introduces sovereign cloud regions for the European Union. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Future forward Google prepares for a post-quantum world, while most corporations won’t catch up for a long time. Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are now generally available (so the hidden Mac Mini under that developer’s desk can finally be replaced). Master of marketing Oracle introduces sovereign cloud regions for the European Union. Top Quotes   “Quantum computing has been taken very seriously from a security perspective. Conservative estimates [are] 10 to 20 years before we have quantum computers large enough and reliable enough to run short algorithms to factor these large primes. But we’re starting … It’s going to take a long time for businesses to actually catch on and realize and modernize and adopt this before the bad things start to happen. If they ever do.” “The big issue is from a federal government perspective: In a world where quantum computing can actually go through those primes fast enough and decrypt all this data … it’s a huge national security risk [and] a huge problem for the world. … Does it follow into the corporate world as quickly? No. Will it become a big issue when it happens? Hell yeah. There’ll be a Y2K-level disaster that we’ll have to be dealing with.” General News: Walmart Muscles In ️ Will cloud giants really drive colos off a financial cliff? Big leagues short-seller and Enron prophesier Jim Chanos seems to think so… or maybe that’s all part of his plan. Walmart saw that and said, Well, we’re doing it too: Their CTO claims they’re now the largest hybrid cloud in existence. Having 10,000 massive buildings at their disposal must be convenient. AWS: New York, New York ️ EC2 M1 Mac instances are now generally available. Thanks to Apple’s licensing agreement, they have to be turned on for 24 hours minimum. ️ Identity and Access Management gets

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses data sovereignty for future space-customers. Plus: There’s a global cloud shortage, Google announces Apigee advanced API security, and GKE Autopilot gets new networking features. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Microsoft is the latest victim in a global cloud shortage, spinning it as a temporary issue fueled by surging Teams demand and rapid Azure growth. Google announces Apigee Advanced API Security in a bid to defend against increased attacks and traffic volumes. GKE Autopilot gets new network features in the form of IP masquerading and eBPF, now generally available. Top Quotes   “The supply chain has been huge on a lot of people. You don’t hear so much from Amazon, and I don’t know if that’s related to the commerce site Amazon.com and the overprovisioning they did … If AWS went the same route and has a bunch of stock, cluster manufacturing their own chips, maybe they have a little bit more control. But everyone else is screwed.” “In the article, it just says what you can do to detect bots. But some bots are the use case [you’re] selling to the world. … On the surface, it sounds logical, but there are some ‘gotchas’ that you need to be careful of if you’re doing B2B or doing things that look bot-ish.” General News: All the Joy of the Crypto Crash Apparently the tech talent crunch (not because we suck at running Kafka) is to blame for a 68% reliance on AWS managed services. Come on, VentureBeat, you can do better than this!  ️ Microsoft is in the yellow zone because of a global cloud shortage, which it’s attributing to rapid Azure growth and increased Teams demand. GCP: The Very Apigee of Security ️ Google announces Apigee Advanced API Security to help protect against increased attacks and traffic volumes. Seems more like a WAF function than a misconfiguration issue, though. Go go go, Google: get more support for structured logs in the latest version of Go logging library.

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter finally returns with some beer-based bets about Amazon extending its TLS deadline. Plus: Terraform drift detection for managing infrastructure, chilling tales of Amazon’s CodeWhisperer ML advances, and Anthos on-premise options finally arrive for your platform of choice. Plus the cloud talks about AWS SNOWCONES in SPACE!!!!!! A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Terraform Cloud finally adds drift detection to help manage infrastructure, now generally available after its 2020 preview. Amazon’s crazy “ML-powered coding companion,” CodeWhisperer, is here for our jobs. Google expands its Distributed Cloud platform with Anthos on-premises options.  Top Quotes   “I’m surprised it’s taken so long. Because I mean, the reality is if you’re in a plan, and the plan doesn’t require any changes, then there’s been no drift. So what was the obstacle in delivering this as a feature sooner?” “Not only they’re training their own machine learning models, but they’re also generating code. Not concerned at all.” General News: Drifting in the Right Direction While everyone’s been a little afraid to pull the trigger, HashiCorp announced drift detection in Terraform cloud, which is in a public beta. Pretty exciting! ️ HashiCorp also announced the launch and free public beta of HCP Boundary, but what’s their long-term vision? AWS: Whispering Sweet Somethings to the Machine SageMaker Ground Truth now supports synthetic data generation, promising to reduce time and training costs for model operations. Getting enough data to actually train a model could be hard… (fake it til you make it?) Your new “ML-powered coding companion” CodeWhisperer now writes code for you. We’ve joked about it before, but Alexa really is one step away from upskilling to coding. Peter’s betting two beers at his local pub on Amazon extending the deadline on this one:

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses Jonathan’s penance for his failures. Plus: Microsoft makes moves on non-competes, NDAs, salary disclosures, and a civil rights audit; AWS modernizes mainframe applications for cloud deployment; and AWS CEO Adam Selipsky chooses to be intentionally paranoid. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights The Balmer era is officially dead: Microsoft curbs non-competes, drops NDAs from worker settlements, disclose salary ranges, and even launches a civil rights audit.  AWS launches their new modernization service for mainframe applications, now deployable in fully managed AWS runtime environments. AWS CEO Adam Selipsky “choose[s] to be intentionally paranoid,” as he leads the company through turbulence.  Top Quotes   “We’ve talked about how garbage those [noncompetes] are, the problems they’ve had with them, executives leaving, Amazon going to Microsoft, then getting sued and all the mess of that. So I’m super glad they’re finally starting to see a tide swell change in technology where that’s no longer a thing.” “I always felt like Amazon was going to just create a mainframe as a service offering — buy a bunch of IBM mainframes that they sell out to you — because that’s been a model of mainframe for a long time: CPU slicing, rentals and that kind of thing. But it seems like now they’re going to go down this other path where the answer is [that] you convert to a more modern architecture, which is interesting.” General News: It’s a New Era   The times they are a-changin’, as Microsoft revises its position on non-competes, NDAs, and salary range disclosure, while launching a civil rights audit. Take that, Amazon! Target CIO Mike McNamara jumps away from AWS with a scaled move toward multicloud architecture. Target allegedly has 4,000 engineers, which seems like a lot. Archera vents via Venturebeat about the unmanageability of cloud costs, calling for standardized billing. While it might be helpful and even valuable, this seems a road too far traveled.   AWS: Modernized Mainframes and Intentional Paranoia ️

On The Cloud Pod this week, half the team whizzes through the news in record time. Plus: AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, Google Distributed Cloud adds AI, ML and Database Solutions, and there’s another win for NetApp with Azure VMware Solution. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery now supports up to 300 staging and target accounts, which seems like a small number for some enterprises with thousands. With the power of Anthos, Google Distributed Cloud adds AI, ML and Database Solutions — continuing the trend of service monetization regardless of host location. Another win for NetApp, the home of choice for Azure VMware solutions optimization.  Top Quotes   “If you’re really doing auto scaling [and] traditional cloud native, you don’t use the service because you’ve already built it into your app. So this is for legacy IT operations like SAP, Oracle, and others. Three hundred or 3,000 covers small and medium business, but large enterprise has way more than that.” “When Anthos first was announced, and Outpost for AWS, we talked about how likely it was that more and more cloud-native services were going to be made available anywhere, on any cloud, in any data center. It’s definitely a pattern of monetizing the services regardless of where they’re hosted.” AWS: Bouncing Back From Disaster ️ Amazon EMR Serverless is now generally available, a cool feature running big data applications (and Outpost too). But it’s interesting that it’s been branded “serverless” when it’s clearly a managed service. ⛑️ Elastic Disaster Recovery now supports 300 staging and target accounts, but we can’t help wondering how this helps the largest enterprises. Step Functions launches a workflow-based interactive application workshop, and it looks like a golden age for developer experience is close at hand. Amazon Route 53 announces IP-based routing for DNS queries, which is going to make things complicated.

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the new Madrid region’s midday siesta shutdown. Plus: Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 billion, Azure gets paradigmatic with 5G, and you can now take the 2022 Google-DORA DevOps survey. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 billion, in one of the largest-ever acquisitions. Google Cloud and DORA team up to bring us the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Survey. Azure calls 5G a “paradigm,” but is it just hype? Top Quotes   “This is an interesting reverse on the large cloud providers getting into the silicon business, which makes sense to me — that they want to control their supply chain and optimize. … Is Broadcom going to start becoming like a cloud provider? That’s interesting. I wouldn’t suspect that.” “What [is Azure] trying to do? Are they trying to sell us on [5G]? Are they trying to change the way we develop? Because we’re just going to waste our time developing stuff that requires some of these things, and then the infrastructure is not going to be there to support it.” General News: Diversifying the Portfolio In one of the largest acquisitions ever (just shy of Dell’s EMC takeover at $67 billion and Microsoft’s Blizzard acquisition at $69 billion), Broadcom acquires VMware for $61 billion. This could have big implications for enterprise. AWS: Need for Speed If you need a lot of disk space to log transactions, you’re in luck: Amazon EC2 M6id and C6id instances buff up their storage by up to 7.6TB. Ryan’s usually doing whatever he can to avoid this, but if you need Elastic Volumes and Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) support for io2 Block Express, you’ve now got it.                                    GCP: the State of DevOps in 2022 ✅ Why do IT leaders choose Google Cloud certification for their teams?

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team talks tactics for infiltrating the new Google Cloud center in Ohio. Plus: AWS goes sci-fi with the new Graviton3 processors, the new GKE cost estimator calculates the value of your soul, and Microsoft builds the metaverse.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS fires up the Graviton3 processors for some big energy savings. Google develops the new GKE cost estimator for people who aren’t curious about cost. Microsoft Build comes out of nowhere to deliver awesome, scary AI-driven tools with much mention of metaverse (yuck). Top Quotes   “This feature isn’t developed for you because you’re curious about the cost. This is developed specifically for the people who are not curious about the cost. It’s a big red number. When they’re doing the deployment, it’s like, oh, I should probably not do that.” “I cannot wait for the robot overlords to completely school me at code. This is gonna be hilarious… and frightening.” General News: HashiCorp Extends Its Reach ️ Ryan is slightly embarrassed by how much he’s excited about the new HCL Extension for Visual Studio Code 0.1 announcement. AWS: Abiding by the Laws of Graviton3 Storage company NetApp continues to buck industry trends with Backup and FSx support for ONTAP. Don’t forget to check out the TCP Talks interview with Anthony Lye, Executive VP and General Manager of NetApp. ⚡ New AWS-designed Graviton3 Processors power Amazon EC2 C7g Instances, now generally available. 

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team struggles with scheduling to get everyone in the same room for just one week. Plus, Microsoft increases pay for talent retention while changing licensing for European Cloud Providers, Google Cloud introduces AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, and AWS announces EC2 support for NitroTPM. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Big changes are afoot with Microsoft on both pay and European licensing fronts. A very busy Google finds time to release AlloyDB for PostgreSQL.  NitroTPM gets Amazon EC2 support.  Top Quotes   “I hope that it’s the exact opposite of TK and Google Cloud — that they’re really focused on the values and the culture and providing meaningful work. Especially during the last year in the pandemic, a lot of people have realized there’s a lot of different priorities; that money is good — it doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys a lot of things that can make me happy — but it’s getting that fulfillment, and enrichment is also super important. Not just a slog.” “The problem is they’re not building power plants fast enough to support all of the power demand they have in this country. So there’s a possibility that these cloud providers may get pushback on building data centers in the region, which can have a huge detrimental impact. So keep an eye on that.” AWS: Some Dynamite Announcements AWS teams up with IBM in a SaaS-based partnership. Interesting that it’s IBM, but money talks, and there’s no better time to do it.  EC2 now supports NitroTPM and UEFI Secure Boot, which is an interesting pivot for the security-minded. ️ Open source supply chain security gets a nice big $10 million investment from AWS. ⚙️ If you need the functionality, you’ve got some nice

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses wholesome local Oakland toast for breakfast. Plus: Hybrid infrastructure is unsustainable, the AWS Proton template library expands, and Amazon angers the team by describing Step Functions as “low-code.” A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Against the trend of popular opinion, it turns out that hybrid infrastructure is a bad idea in the long term, with a few significant drawbacks. The AWS Proton template library just got bigger, so now people can find something else to complain about. Amazon annoyingly describes Step Functions as low-code, which is definitely not true. Top Quotes   “Proton was only developed as an answer for, how should we deploy onto Amazon? It’s setting yourself up just so someone can armchair-quarterback and poke holes in it. Now they’re saying, well, how would you do this? [Answer:] You have the templates. And then they’re gonna be like, the templates are cool, except it doesn’t meet my pretty edge case, so they’ll complain about that. We’ll see templates for the templates next.” “I just love the assumption that you could low-code a solution with Step Functions, just because I’ve created many a step function and state machine flow. And all it is is coding and then figuring out why the code isn’t doing what I want — because I’m not passing things correctly between the different functions. The ability for someone who can’t write code to be able to to accomplish anything is a little far fetched.” General News: Don’t Plan on Hybrid for Long… ⛈️ In the cloud court of public opinion, dissent is infrequent. Yet here’s Michael Bathon of Rimini Street claiming that hybrid is actually bad in the long-term. AWS: What Is Low-Code, Anyway? The AWS Proton template library expands — as does people’s list of things to complain about. ✍️ Amazon very irritatingly calls Step Functions low-code, with new workflow observability features.

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter’s been suspended without pay for two weeks for not filing his vacation requests in triplicate. Plus it’s earnings season once again, there’s a major Google and SWIFT collaboration afoot, and MSK Serverless is now generally available, making Kafka management fairly hassle-free. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Earnings season is upon us once again, with billions earned and lost. Who are the winners?  MSK Serverless is now generally available as a boon for Kafka management. Google and SWIFT uproot the financial world in announcing a huge cloud-based collaboration.  Top Quotes   “It’s hard to call a 32% increase for Azure earnings a slowdown, but it is definitely slower than what they saw in 2021 and the boom of the pandemic. But the overall trend is everyone’s gonna keep adopting cloud hyperscalers to host their infrastructure.” “The important thing about this is that it’s signaling a change in compliance controls; all these financial organizations with very traditionally physical hardware in Iraq in the data center [had] no way to move to the cloud. So whether it’s through advocacy or proof of process, being able to virtualize all these things is going to be huge and will open up a massive market for new customers.” General News: Earnings Are In, and It’s Looking… Good? ️ Imagine earning $116.4 billion and then still losing money. But fear not after such a rough quarter, Amazon: AWS revenue is here to save the day at 37%. ⭕ Meanwhile, Google revenue increased slightly below expectations, and GCP is still losing money — but $43 million less than last year. Finally, Microsoft has Azure to thank for its 32% growth. AWS: A Truly Kafkaesque Affair ️ MSK Serverless is now generally available, offering a reduction in the overhead of managing Kafka. ⛸️

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team establishes that Justin may be immune to COVID. Plus all the latest from the AWS Summit, Azure Red Button team up on DDOS defense, and engines are revving in the great VMware showdown.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights The AWS San Francisco Summit kicks off with a ton of new generally available stuff, but not-so-impressive attendance (looking at you, COVID). Microsoft and Red Button buddy up on DDOS defense testing initiative. AWS, Google and Oracle rev their engines for the VMware top spot.  Top Quotes   “Really shows you the power of partnership … There’s finally some easy button for testing these things. Because you always dream: Maybe I could create my own DDoS situation, which seemingly I do occasionally by accident, but intentionally would be nice this time.” “I don’t necessarily trust their math, but assuming that it’s reasonably correct, it seems like a good market for Oracle to go after if you’re gonna try to compete with those three platforms — I don’t see a ton of people moving straight to the cloud on VMware. But that’s a pretty compelling argument and potentially a way of getting VMware customers to the cloud quicker: let’s just do it now if we don’t have to get off of VMware.” General News: Great Expectations Gartner anticipates big growth (20.4%) in public cloud spending for 2022! AWS: Everything Generally Available ️ Finally, you can use IAM to control access to a resource based on the account, OU or organization that contains the resource — just how it used to be, and makes a whole lot more sense. You might be excited for the confusingly named Amazon CloudWatch for Ray — if you can work out what it is (we couldn’t). Something to do with machine learning? ️ One for the data scientists: Announcing the

On The Cloud Pod this week and with half the team gone fishin’, Justin and Peter hash it out short and sweet. Plus Google Cloud SQL Insights, Atlassian suffers an outage, and AWS finally offers accessible Lambda Function URLs. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Atlassian suffers an outage, sparking fears of data loss. AWS offers some very welcome accessibility for Lambda Functions. Google announces Cloud SQL Insights for MySQL. Top Quotes   “When Lambda first came out, before I even used it, this is how I thought it would work … then it didn’t. So it’s cool that it’s now available. I’m surprised it wasn’t the default — the starting point — before getting more complex, like API gateways.” “It’s almost required: These tools are so important when it’s a managed service and you can’t get under the covers yourself. So it’s cool, for sure. Especially when you get into how these things work with your cloud and how they interact with each other, it becomes even more important.” General News: Atlassian Made a DevOops While only 0.25% of their customer base was affected, Atlassian’s outage is not a good look. The company continues to be haunted by it, with data loss fears. Sungard is doomed. A Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing confines them to history’s unmarked grave of discarded cloud victims.  AWS: Lambda Finally Does What It Was Always Meant To ⛺ Accessible Lambda Function URLs are now yours — something that would’ve been nice when it first came out. Security Hub launches five controls and one new integration partner, in a move that seems to open the door to start using it for all sorts of n...

Google Biglake takes the feature of the week with the ability to federate data from multiple data lakes. On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the most expensive way to run a VM (Oracle wins). Plus some exciting developments, an AWS OpenSearch 1.2 update with several new features, and Azure’s having a party, so bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP). A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights The Cloud Pod goes fishing on Google BigLake with a new tackle box and a whole lot of data. AWS opens up the market with its OpenSearch 1.2 update boasting several new features and which could attract more customers. Azure implements a fancy new bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) policy. Top Quotes   “Are they saving BigOcean for the next layer of unification above when we need to aggregate multiple BigLakes?” “It is good to be able to do it, and I still pity the poor companies who need to migrate IP addresses and anchor their IPs to a provider in order to get their DVR functionality. So this now makes that possible, however bad a pattern that is in the cloud.” General News: Decisions, Decisions ️ VentureBeat discusses how to choose the right AWS region for your business, but they seem to be missing a few considerations (sovereignty, anyone?). Also, picking a region isn’t a great idea for a business (like an e-commerce site) that needs to be multiregional to survive if things go sideways. AWS: Opening up the Search Nice and Wide  Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes 1.22 — maybe AWS bribed the Kubernetes governance board because they were tired of trying to keep up with Kubernetes’ quarterly patch releases. ‍ Good news for console users who no longer have to click through five separate pages of configurations, with the new and improved Amazon EC2 console launch experience. Cue applause track:

On The Cloud Pod this week, it’s a brave new world for Ryan, who learns all kinds of things. Plus the Okta breach leads to customer outrage over not telling them for months, AWS announces its new Billing Conductor, and Google expands Contact Center AI for a reimagined customer experience.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Okta is in big trouble with furious customers after it fails to disclose a security breach… for months.  AWS announces the brand new and very welcome AWS Billing Conductor to much fanfare and great rejoicing. Google expands end-to-end with Contact Center AI for a touted “reimagining” of the customer experience. Top Quotes   “The breach is bad enough, but then the handling of the communications of it is really what seals the deal and where you really do all the damage. It’s one thing if someone attacks you and gets in through something unintended … that’s not going to shake my confidence in using a company. But someone who’s hiding it, someone who’s clearly dancing around it, makes me think that they’re not well organized.” “Google is notoriously bad for customer support … and it’s very difficult to be a satisfied customer of Google when you have to deal with their support channels. So anything they can do for anybody to make the customer experience less frustrating is good. Let’s hope that this doesn’t just turn into another agent, please situation where all you want to do is break out of the system and just speak to a real person who can apply some logic.” General News: Okta Breach Shenanigans Change your credentials immediately. Customers are raging at Okta, which manages 100 million logins but failed to disclose a security breach for months. Just who is running things over there? AWS: Money Money Money ⛳ Donald Trump’s golf courses are going to be very unhappy to learn that AWS is investing $2.3 billion in UK data centers over the next two years, taking advantage of the Moray West Wind Farm off the coast of Scotland — crea...

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses Peter’s concept of fun. Plus digital adventures with AWS Cloud Quest game, much-wanted Google price increases, and a labyrinthine run-through of the details of Azure Health Data Services. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS gamifies cloud training with the release of Cloud Quest, along with two new initiatives in a bid to build foundational cloud skills for younger people. Google announces price changes while framing it as “choice”: Some services will decrease in price while others will increase. Microsoft launches Azure Health Data Services, the details of which turn out to be super fun trying to get your head around. Top Quotes   “If you’ve ever wanted the job of living in a 3D world where a construction worker runs up to you and tells you that the server running in this weather app is failing and helping them figure this out, this game is for you. And you can earn gems and build and it feels very much like Roblox…. I give it an A for effort and an F for execution.” “One of the arguments that people have made against the cloud forever is that once you’re locked in, they’re gonna jack the rates up, and then you’re screwed because you’re stuck there. It’s that exact thing. This is now giving credence to those naysayers who traditionally will say that’s not really true. … Now we have an exact use-case: Google did it. So what’s to stop Azure and AWS from doing it?” AWS: Slay the Dragon and Rescue the Cloud New bigger and badder EC2 X2idn and X2iedn Instances for you to throw your money away on are now here — supporting memory-intensive workloads with higher network bandwidth. If you’re excited about Pi Day, Jeff Barr helps celebrate with a bragging blog post on the number of objects Amazon S3 now boasts (with some fun galaxial anecdotes to boot). ⬆️ A feature we can finally appreciate: Amazon ECS Update Service API now supports updating Elastic Load Balancers, Service Registries, Tag Propagation, and ECS Managed Tags

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team reminisces about dealing with awful database technologies, which Ryan luckily managed to avoid. Plus all things cybersecurity as Linux gets hit with a huge security emergency, Google acquires Mandiant for $5.4 billion, and Orca Security catches a major Azure cross-tenant vulnerability.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Linux is on the backfoot as it’s hit by the most severe vulnerability in years. Google has acquired the cybersecurity giant Mandiant for a cool $5.4 billion. Orca Security catches a huge Azure cross-tenant vulnerability. Top Quotes   ”But is Mandiant now going to be suddenly finding the vulnerabilities and publishing the vulnerabilities that they’re finding in Azure and AWS, and happen to maybe not mention the ones externally that are happening in GCP? They’re no longer an independent third party.” “Even with these things happening, you’re still safer running in the cloud. Even though there are outages, you’re still more highly available in the cloud. I hate to see these things in the news.” General News: Linux Is Feeling the Pain Knative is now officially a CNCF incubating project — any competitors in the market? As Linux is bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years, we take back everything we said about Windows vs Linux security. AWS: Solving Very Cloudy Problems  ️ Faster failover is the name of the game with AWS this week: its RDS for MySQL & PostgreSQL Multi-AZ deployment option comes with improved write performance. Jonathan is also very, very excited about their JDBC driver for MySQL. AWS customers can now request their CyberGRX...

On The Cloud Pod this week, order in the court! Plus tackling those notorious latency issues with AWS Local Zones, things get quick and rusty with AWS s2n-quic, and GCP flexes with Dataplex data mesh. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS takes on network latency issues — its customers’ #1 complaint — with AWS Local Zones. AWS is getting quick and rusty this week with s2n-quic, its new open-source protocol for Rust implementation. GCP announces Dataplex in Google Cloud is now generally available, enabling the creation of the data mesh view. Top Quotes   “We must be hitting some huge brick walls in web performance that are really hurting certain application workloads that require low latency, because if you look at both these announcements back-to-back, they’re really trying to improve performance.” “This is definitely a hard problem for companies to solve. Data is not going to be uniform, and you’re going to have many different sources of it, and you want it to all play nice together so it’s usable across a larger view than it used to be. I like these types of solutions, where they’re applying governance and a way of doing things that’s not just everyone reinventing these wheels — which is what we’ve been doing up until now.” General News: Order in the Court! Judge Ryan Presides ⚖️ Best Buy selects AWS as its strategic cloud provider, but Peter and Ryan argue that it may not be all that exclusive.  ☁️ VentureBeat reveals that Optimizely is partnering with Google Cloud. Justin thinks the reason the company chose GCP over AWS comes down to wanting to feel special. AWS: Goodbye Network Latency? With AWS’ announcement of the global expansion of AWS Local Zones, will its customers’ number one complaint (network latency) be finally addressed? No doubt a good move forward. AWS is also getting quick and rusty this week with the introduction of s2n-quic, the new open-source QUIC protocol for Rust implementa...

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan’s got his detective hat on. Plus Akamai steps up to CloudFare with Linode acquisition, AWS’ CloudFormation Hooks lift us up, and EPYC instances are now available. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Akamai notes CloudFare’s aggressive pivot to edge computing and acquires AWS competitor Linode for $900m. AWS announces the general availability of AWS CloudFormation Hooks, which should prove very useful. Amazon provides EPYC-powered instances, with up to 15% improvement in price-performance. Top Quotes   “When AWS announces general availability of an instance, I have never been unable to launch that instance to test it. … I can’t say the same thing for workloads on GCP.” “If you ever take a laptop that has no security patches on it and you put it on a network … it’ll be hacked within minutes. It’s crazy how bad it is, actually. This is what we always talk about: it’s when you get hacked, not if you get hacked. Because if you have vulnerabilities, there’s always a chance. It’s just a matter of time before someone figures it out.” General News: Akamai Steps Up Its Game ️ Capitalizing on existing relationships, F5 unveils its new cloud platform with a huge advantage in security — but it might be a tough sell. Akamai acquires AWS competitor Linode for $900m. Clearly Akamai saw what CloudFare was doing and thought I gotta get me some of that. AWS: Getting Its CloudFormation Hooks In AWS announces the general availability of its CloudFormation Hooks. Very nice. We wish we’d had Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer’s new security features back in December — now it’s February and no one cares about Log4j anymore. 

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan grapples with life in the confusion matrix. Plus money money money with Q4 2021 earnings announcements, shiny new digital badges from AWS, and Google Serverless Spark lights the way on data processing and data science jobs. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Q4 2021 earnings: Amazon and Microsoft are killing it with impressive cloud revenues (the only part we care about), and Google is losing money but its cloud is still growing. Nothing much from AWS (again) as performance reviews continue over there; but there are some new digital badges to show off your AWS cloud storage knowledge. Serverless Spark is now available on Google Cloud to simplify data processing and data science jobs, allowing more focus on code and logic, and less on managing clusters and infrastructure. Top Quotes   “There’s the rub: it’s in the details as usual. You do need to operate as a business and achieve that transformation together. No matter what, any kind of migration is going to have an impact on product delivery and feature roadmap, which will have an impact on the ability to sell. So it really does take everyone marching to the same tune in order to get that done, or it just causes infighting.” “The safest move is always to take a small [proof of concept], push that, and do your cloud landing zone with that… But then you’re left — at a certain point — with the thing that makes you the most amount of money [not fitting] your plans… It’s a huge risk: a lot of businesses get stuck trying to modernize. How do you justify the interruption to the revenue streams and the lack of feature delivery while you’re doing that transformation to the thing that pays all the bills?” General News: Q4 2021 Earnings Are In and It’s Looking Good Some serious cloud revenue growth reports from AWS, Microsoft, and Alphabet with growth at 40% or higher, despite Amazon losses. And if you ever want to own Google stock, now’s your chance. ⏩ Meanwhile,

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan is still AWOL. Also Amazon is on GuardDuty with credential exfiltration, Google Cloud Deploy is generally available, and Azure is suffering from more serious DDoS attacks.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. This week’s highlights Amazon’s been on GuardDuty with enhanced detection of EC2 instance credential exfiltration.  Google Cloud Deploy (GCD) is now generally available, making continuous delivery on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) easier. Azure reports that it spent the last half of 2021 dealing with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that are increasing in both severity and frequency.  Top Quotes   “The biggest risk to cloud infrastructure is that you’re one secret access key away from a big booboo.” “Last November, [Azure] had just mitigated a pretty large attack — at the time the largest in history, at least from ones that have been reported to the world. … Things have gotten worse in Q3 and Q4 — not only the levels [of attacks], but the complexity has gotten worse.” AWS: Beefing Up GuardDuty ️  The threat detection service Amazon GuardDuty — which monitors your accounts for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior — is pretty great already. In the aftermath of the Superglue issue, however, AWS is ramping things up with enhanced detection of EC2 instance credential exfiltration. ⚕️ AWS Security Hub has been integrating with AWS Health and with AWS Trusted Advisor (TA). Does this mean everything annoying gets reflagged? Thanks, TA! In a move that makes a lot of sense, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports ECS Exec and Amazon Linux 2 for workloads running on-premises with Amazon ECS Anywhere. No more yum and Red Hat-based Fedora deployment sounds great, although it would be nice to have a few more implementation details ahead of rolling it ou...

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team decides 2022 is already a long, cursed year — bring on 2023. Plus nuggets of wisdom from Gartner, Orca discovers breaksformation and Glue vulnerabilities, and 10 questions to help boards (and others) maximize cloud opportunities. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week’s highlights Gartner reveals six cloud trends for 2022: Take what you need for your organization and throw away the rest. Orca Security discovers vulnerabilities in AWS’ CloudFormation, and — more seriously — Glue. GCP releases 10 questions to help boards safely maximize cloud opportunities — which can also give you the opportunity to bag that promotion. Top Quotes   “Look at the rate of growth of cloud over the past few years. The rate of training new people could not possibly keep up. … [Organizations] want to hire someone who’s got 20 years’ experience in something that’s only been around for five years. I can see it being a real problem in terms of quality of output.” “Because Orca published a blog post, we know about this — would AWS have disclosed it to us? If there are other people out there doing research against AWS and they’re not publishing these things, there could be other things that we don’t know about, that are not being addressed. Transparency is important.” General News: Get Out the Crystal Balls  SiliconANGLE published a guest blog from Gartner’s Paul Delory on his six predictions for what is coming to the cloud in 2022. ⏩ VentureBeat has five considerations for saving more and wasting less on cloud services. We didn’t learn much, but everyone’s mileage varies. AWS: CloudFormation’s Breaking Apart and the Glue Doesn’t Stick Orca Security Research Team’s been hunting in AWS waters, and found a vulnerability in CloudFormation.

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter finally gets to share his top announcements of 2021. Plus, Google increases security with Siemplify, Azure updates Defender, and AWS comes into the new year with a lot of changes. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning, and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. This week’s highlights AWS confirms that applications can now be deployed on Amazon EKS using the IPv6 address space. Google looks to boost its security operations by acquiring SOAR provider Siemplify. Azure spent December updating Defender: was it worth it? Top Quotes   “All the cloud providers are embracing containerization and the technologies that allow containerized workloads to work well on their platform. But the side effect is that they also run equally well on everybody else’s platform.”  “[As Vice President of Google Cloud Phil Venables wrote in a blog post,] ‘The race by deep-pocketed cloud providers to create and implement leading secure technologies is the tip of the spear of innovation.’ Which is interesting, because I think this is an area where Google’s really crushed it, and I think Amazon has failed. Not failed, but not invested as much as they should have.” General News: Google Acquires Siemplify Google acquired Siemplify, a security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) provider. The hope appears to be that it will help security teams using GCP better manage their threat responses. AWS: Plenty of Non-Outage News IPv6 applications are now deployable through Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). This prevents IP exhaustion, minimizes latency, and simplifies routing configurations. On the downside, IPv6 can’t be added retroactively, and this EKS add-on only supports Linux — a dealbreaker for the team. ‍ The AWS compute optimizer has been enhanced to allow users to specify both x86 and ARM as their preferred architecture for their EC2 instance type recommendations. This is a big blow to other tools that perform the same operations.  AWS announced the general availability of the EC2 Hpc6a Instance

EDITORIAL NOTE: Your Cloud Pod hosts are on vacation until early January!! Enjoy our 2021 wrapup and look ahead to 2022 and we’ll be back in your Podcast feed mid January!  Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan are minus Peter in this episode as they review the year in cloud computing. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning, and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. This week’s highlights It’s the last podcast of 2021. The next one premieres in the third week of January. Log4j came back with a vengeance during the holiday season.   The team looks back at its 2021 predictions and forecast for 2022. Log4jackass Using AWS security services to protect against, detect, and respond to the log4j vulnerability is still an issue. Suggestions to upgrade to version 2.16 for Apache log4j security issue for EKS, ECS, and Fargate customers wasn’t enough. Customers are asked to upgrade to 2.17. By the end of 2021, it will probably be 2.22 just to get into the spirit.  Did The Team’s 2021 Predictions Come True? The hosts reviewed their 2021 predictions to see if they came true. Johnathan’s prediction about bracket computing and other quantum technology didn’t come true to break TLS. It’s still a long way off but there are now more classes in quantum programming to prepare for the cutover. Jonathan takes half a point on his merit. Peter believed The biggest blocker to cloud adoption would be costs, with individuals spending too much on poor cloud migrations. Justin believes he’s way off on this prediction. Though cost is a big consideration it’s definitely not the blocker. However, Jonathan believes more controls are needed to prevent overspending. Justin’s prediction on the verticalization of the cloud in fintech, health, retail, etc. came true. Ryan says it makes a lot of sense for industries to go this route instead of building everything out.  Ryan said work from home (WFH) would be a permanent trend, further breaking traditional security. Justin agreed on the first part but not the second on security issues. Though plenty of workers still log in through their companies’ VPNs, there is a big move to implement zero-trust security.  Favorite Announcements Of 2021 The hosts reviewed their favorite announcements of 2021. Justin is happy that

On The Cloud Pod this week, Oracle finally has some news to share. Plus Log4j is ruining everyone’s lives, AWS suffers a massive outage post re:Invent, and Google CAT releases its first threat report.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week’s highlights A critical vulnerability in Apache Log4j wrought havoc over the weekend. Cloud platforms and developers alike are racing to fix the bug, which gives hackers an opportunity to take control of systems remotely.  On the heels of re:Invent, AWS suffered a major outage last Tuesday in its US-EAST-1 region, which had staggering repercussions across the cloud.  Google Cybersecurity Action Team (CAT) releases its first Threat Horizons report, revealing its top three concerns threatening cloud users today.   Top Quotes   “It’s amazing how much of our infrastructure and applications live on these open source contributions of one or two people, and how critical they are to the entire ecosystem. And when they break or they’re vulnerable, it becomes a huge issue for us very quickly.” “Think about what Microsoft did: They started signing device drivers and signing applications that run in Windows, and everyone thought Oh, they’re just exerting control, what a terrible idea. They’re just trying to corner the market. And now, of course, 15 years later, binding authorization is probably the most critical next step in securing the cloud.” General News: The Log4j Vulnerability is COVID for Tech In light of the critical Apache Log4j 2.0 vulnerability that gives attackers the ability to to execute arbitrary code on other systems, AWS has released a hotpatch for the logging platform. The aim is to help developers mitigate risk as they work to update their systems to 2.15 or newer.  ⏩ VentureBeat reminds us that while the Log4j debacle is bad, at least organizations now have tools and processes in place to respond quickly to zero-day bugs.  ✅

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team finds out whose re:Invent 2021 crystal ball was most accurate. Also Graviton3 is announced, and Adam Selipsky gives his first re:Invent keynote.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week’s highlights Amazon’s re:Invent 2021 featured a ton of new updates, including AWS CloudWatch Evidently, AWS Private 5G, and a new AWS Sustainability Pillar.  Justin’s prediction pick — Graviton 3 — was announced on Day Two of re:Invent, along with serverless options for data analytics, and a free machine learning (ML) database for existing AWS customers.  Amazon CEO Adam Selipsky missed the mark at his re:Invent debut, announcing fewer new releases than expected to a low-energy crowd. Top Quotes   “This is Adam’s [Selipsky] first keynote as CEO of AWS… I do feel it was a missed opportunity. Number one, he didn’t drive out a ton of announcements, which everyone expected. There was a miss across the entire audience — people were expecting something they didn’t get. And then number two, OK, maybe you’re not the best public speaker: maybe you should go with a different model.” “In the keynote, the message was really clear: They’re trying to democratize access to machine learning, they’re trying to give this access to more than just the elite data scientists and programmers. And that made me think that if you expand that out to no-code in general, that’s a really powerful thing” AWS: re:Invent 2021 feat. a Mechanical Cat Amazon highlights its top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2021 and gives details of new releases and updates across the platform.  Pre:Invent: Because Every Good re:Invent needs a Warmup ‍ In support of its mission to educate 29 million people by 2025, AWS expands access to its free cloud skills training to empower learners to pursue careers in technology.  ⚠️ AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is now generally available to provid...

The Cloud Pod: Oh the Places You’ll Go at re:Invent 2021 — Episode 144 On The Cloud Pod this week, as a birthday present to Ryan, the team didn’t discuss his advanced age, and focused instead on their AWS re:Invent predictions. Also, the Google Cybersecurity Action Team launches a product, and Microsoft announces a new VM series in Azure. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week’s highlights AWS releases new G5 instances, which feature up to eight NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs. That’s super, super fast.  Google’s Cybersecurity Action Team adds Risk and Compliance as Code (rCaC) Solution. Microsoft announces the NDm A100 v4 Series, and claims another spot on the  TOP500 supercomputers list. Top Quotes     “[AWS Resilience Hub] is already building on top of the FIS, which is interesting, but at some level I just want you to execute Lambda functions that validate things for me, and then tell me that I’m resilient because I validated it with Lambda.” “Anything that empowers more dynamic and interactive web development I’m all for.” Amazon Web Services: Give Us Your Car   AWS is releasing new G5 instances, which feature up to eight NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs. For the cost of a small car every month, you too can get up to 40% better value on inferencing and graphics-intensive operations. AWS is releasing the Resilience Hub, a service designed to help you define, track and manage the resilience of your applications. Unified Search in the AWS Management Console now sources results from blogs, knowledge articles, events and tutorials. Buyer beware with this one: It will pull outdated information that is still availab...

On The Cloud Pod this week, the pod squad is down to the OG three while Ryan is away. Also AWS announces serverless pipelines, GCP releases Spot Pods, and Azure introduces Chaos Studio.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week’s highlights AWS releases Serverless Application Model (SAM) pipelines to save development teams time. These pipelines streamline CI/CD configurations for AWS applications.  In the spirit of savings, new GCP Spot Pods help GKE Autopilot users run fault-tolerant workloads while spending less money. Hooray! Azure Chaos Studio helps development teams wreak controlled havoc with a managed experimentation service, allowing them to safely build, break and optimize their apps with reckless abandon.  Top Quotes   “I think for some people when they’re looking at, OK, we’re gonna make this commitment to a different architecture, at that point in time, they’ve looked at serverless versus containerized apps, and most companies went the containerized apps route, but that might change in the next wave.”  “Python 3.10 looks really interesting. It’s got a bunch of new features … around data handling specifically, which is really what people have been using Python for for years: bioinformatics and data science. But it has really neat features around matching different schemas of data and things like that.” AWS: Finally, a Pipeline We Can Get Behind ⏲️ AWS releases Serverless Application Model (SAM) pipelines, a new feature of the AWS SAM CLI, to help users simplify CI/CD configurations for AWS serverless applications. The new feature will help development teams minimize the amount of time spent creating pipelines, while also ensuring safe deployments.  With AWS Fault Injection Simulator, users can now create and run FIS experiments that check the state of Amazon CloudWatch alarms and run SSM automations. We hope the only fault injections you have are in your EC2 instances, not in your Thanksgiving turkey.  AWS customers running Windows con...

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team wishes for time-traveling data. Also, GCP announces Data Lakehouse, Azure hosts Ignite 2021, and Microsoft is out for the metaverse.  A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.  This week’s highlights GCP releases its data lakehouse, a new architecture that offers low-cost storage in an open format. The real question is, can we book it on Airbnb? Microsoft kicks off Azure Ignite 2021, announcing new capabilities for its hybrid, multicloud and edge computing platforms.  Microsoft also unveils plans for its own metaverse, including upgrades to Teams, Dynamic 365 Connected Spaces and more.  Top Quotes   “I’m a big fan of IDE for coding and that integrated environment to reduce context shifting, but when you’re talking about access to data, Jupyter is something that’s hosted, that you can protect and grant access to, versus an IDE like RStudio. It becomes a much trickier scenario to maintain any kind of data sovereignty, or protect that in any way, just because, by its true nature, you have to open it up.” “Between the Facebook Metaverse and Microsoft, who’s going to win the race? Everyone wants to build “Ready Player One.” And Facebook owns Oculus and they have all my data, then they can get my brain as well: They can just monetize the crap out of my profile. And then Microsoft  has their augmented reality things… . But I think the power of the Azure cloud actually gives them the advantage versus Facebook, in my opinion. “ General News: ‘Tis Earnings Season ​​ Microsoft was the first to announce its quarterly revenue, boasting a $45 billion increase. This jump of 22% beats Wall Street expectations, and includes Microsoft Azure, LinkedIn commercial revenue, Office 365, and Xbox.   Google also posted impressive results, rounding out the quarter at $18.9 billion, up a whopping 68% from one year ago. Much of this success came from