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

Justin Brodley, Jonathan Baker, Ryan Lucas and Matt Kohn | Cloud Computing & AI News

The Cloud Pod delivers weekly cloud computing and AI news for engineers, architects, and technology leaders. Join Justin Brodley, Jonathan Baker, Ryan Lucas, and Matt Kohn as they break down the latest from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud — covering new services, platform updates, FinOps strategies, and the AI innovations reshaping the industry. Stay ahead of the cloud landscape with one of the longest-running cloud computing podcasts available.

  1. 4 days ago

    362: Mechanical Turk: The Fall of the Ottoman API

    Welcome to episode 362 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and Matt are in the studio, and this week we’ve got slightly less AI, but much more data news – a trend Jonathan is sure will continue. Join us as we explore Kubernetes updates, the end of Amazon Mechanical Turk, and the last of the physical media for game consoles, plus more. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Going Cold Turk-ey Kubernetes Rollbacks Let You Ctrl-Z Your Cluster Answer Engine Optimization Is the New SEO Game Turk-ing Point: Amazon Pulls the Plug Stop Chasing Ephemeral IPs in Your EKS Cluster Firewall Rules That Know Your Pods by Name CloudWatch Pipelines Finally Speaks Fluent OpenTelemetry Sony Discs You, Keeps Your Money Forever  EKS Upgrades Finally Get an Undo Button Azure Embraces Chaos, Calls It Studio Time Mechanical Turk Turns Off The Lights For Good There Was Never Anyone Inside the Box KV Cache Me If You Can on GKE AWS Security Hub Says Hello to Azure, Finally Amazon Cancels the Internet’s Oldest Side Hustle Amazon Prime’s Next Delivery: A Pink Slip for the Turk Business as Usual – Azure announces Chaos Studio? Hello sunshine, my old Azure A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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  01:36 Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to stop accepting new customers – and not  Even AI can save it Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk to new customers, effectively ending the crowdsourced human-labor platform that launched in 2005 and once served as a foundational tool for AI training data labeling. The service predates the current generative AI boom by nearly two decades, originally designed for tasks like image tagging, transcription, and data verification that computers couldn’t handle at the time. Ironically, the rise of AI and large language models has reduced demand for the type of human-in-the-loop micro-tasking Mechanical Turk provided, as automated systems now handle much of that labeling work. Existing customers can reportedly continue using the platform, but the halt on new signups signals that Amazon is deprioritizing the service rather than investing further in it. This closure reflects a broader shift in the AI data pipeline, where synthetic data generation and more sophisticated automated labeling tools are replacing older crowdsourced human-labor marketplaces. 02:14 Justin – “If you ever actually used the service, you’ll know that both the Turks interface that you actually did work, and the setting up the jobs was terrible anyway. It was always very difficult to use, and they never made it easier over the years. So I don’t know if they’ve ever really been investing in it heavily. But it’s definitely been around for a long time.” AI Is Going Great – or How ML Makes Money  04:11 New analytics and cost controls are available for Claude Enterprise

    362: Mechanical Turk: The Fall of the Ottoman API

  2. 9 Jul

    361: Beep Beep: AWS Ships an ACME Product That Actually Works

    Welcome to episode 361 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! It’s a full house tonight – Justin, Ryan, Jonathan (and eventually) Matt are all in the studio this week to bring you the latest in cloud and AI news, including a greenlight for Mythos, an ACME product that *doesn’t* involve an anvil, and a couple of new models from Anthropic and OpenAI. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get into it!  Titles we almost went with this week Azure EU Capacity Is Full. Please Try Another Continent OpenAI Names Models After Planets, Charges Like a Rocket Gemini Spark Now Watches Stocks While You Touch Grass Three Tiers Walk Into a Bar, Sol Picks Up the Tab Anthropic Drops Sonnet 5 and Bugs Fix Themselves Now Your Mac Has a New AI Overlord Named Spark CloudFormation Finally Stops Waiting Around Like Your CI Pipeline AI Agents Finally Get Their Own Office Space No Room at the Cloud Inn for EU Workloads A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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  02:02 U.S. government gives Anthropic green light for limited re-release of Mythos 5 The U.S. government invoked export control authorities to force Anthropic to take two of its most capable AI models offline, citing national security concerns, which marks a notable use of trade law as a mechanism for AI oversight. Mythos 5 is being restored to roughly 100 organizations for defensive cybersecurity purposes, including infrastructure providers and government agencies, reflecting a tiered access model where use case and organizational trust level determine availability. The export control angle is worth noting for cloud and enterprise customers because foreign nationals at partner organizations triggered the shutdown, which could make workforce composition a compliance consideration for companies accessing advanced AI systems. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are now operating under ad hoc government vetting processes before model releases, with no formal framework yet established, creating uncertainty for developers and enterprises planning around AI capability timelines. The situation highlights a tension between AI safety guardrails and commercial availability, as Fable 5 was pulled in part because officials were not confident that its consumer-facing restrictions could prevent misuse in the cyber and biology domains. 02:34 Anthropic test found vulnerabilities in classified US systems in hours  Anthropic’s Mythos model, tested through Project Glasswing in partnership with US intelligence agencies, identified vulnerabilities in classified government systems within hours, though the model did not necessarily exploit those vulnerabilities in that same time...

  3. 1 Jul

    360: And you thought AWS was out of features for S3. Surprise!

    Welcome to episode 360 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Jonathan (for a bit, anyway) are in the studio this week bringing you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including a bunch of analytics, some upgrades courtesy of AI agents, and some news from Kafka. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week MSK Agent Skills Make Kafka Migration Less Kafkaesque One Token Pool to Rule All Claude Tools STRIDE Into Security Without Leaving Your IDE Your Code Must Be This Stable to Enter Production ChatGPT Gets a Budget So Karen Can’t Break the Bank One Platform to Train Them All and in Darkness Deploy Them Who Let the Agents Out? Snowflake Knows Kafka Whisperer Now Comes With an AI Upgrade Stop Reading Docs, Let MSK AI Do the Kafka Math Your AI Wrote That Pull Request, Own It Claude. Tag, you’re it!  See, there are more features that we can add to s3 A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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  03:45 Claude Design now stays on brand for daily work  Claude Design now integrates directly with Claude Code through two new slash commands: /design-sync pulls your design system into Claude Code, and /design lets you create and manage design projects without leaving the terminal, keeping both tools in sync throughout the workflow. The rebuilt design system import supports GitHub repos, design files, and raw uploads, with Claude automatically checking its output against your components before rendering results.  Enterprise admins can lock down a single approved system to enforce consistency across teams. Anthropic updated the usage model, so Claude Design now shares a token pool with chat, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code rather than having separate limits, which should give most users more headroom and reduce how often they hit caps. Export and integration options expanded substantially, with connectors now covering Adobe, Canva, Gamma, Lovable, Miro, Replit, Vercel, Wix, Base44, and standard PDF and PowerPoint formats, making it easier to move finished work into existing production pipelines. Claude Design is available in beta on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans at claude.ai/design, with Enterprise having it disabled by default pending admin activation and output restricted to internal sharing only. 05:07 Matt – “…when I’ve used it – just playing around with it, it produced really nice things. I just used half my session tokens real fast with iterations and things like that. So I would be careful using it, but it does great front-end design.” Data+AI Summit – Top Announcements  07:31 Introducing Lakehouse//RT: Real-Time Performance on a Unified Lakehouse

    360: And you thought AWS was out of features for S3. Surprise!

  4. 26 Jun

    359: Tokenomicon Sounds Metal, but it's Just Cloud Budgets

    Welcome to episode 359 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin and Ryan are in the studio this week to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including AI governance, FinOps’ final conference, and even an earnings story courtesy of Oracle. These and so much more – so let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week You Shall Not Pass Unless Your Network Policy Says So One CLI Wizard to Rule All AWS Agents AWS WAF Turns AI Crawlers Into Cash Cows No More Delete and Pray for AWS Cost Reports Stop Rolling Your Own Certificate Rotation AWS Did It Tux Gets a Security Checkup, Microsoft Antivirus Style Coal Plant to Cloud Plant Google’s Billion Dollar Glow Up FinOps Grows Up and Gets an AI Spending Problem Tokenomics Foundation Wants to Bill AI by the Word Sweet Home Alabama Now Runs on Google Cloud Infrastructure A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 02:53 Microsoft restricts Claude Fable for employees over data retention concerns  Microsoft has restricted Claude Fable 5 from its internal GitHub Copilot model picker, even though the model is available to external GitHub Copilot and Azure Foundry customers.  All other Claude models remain available internally because they operate under Zero Data Retention rules. The core issue is that Claude Fable 5 requires data retention to power Anthropic’s new safety classifiers, meaning prompts and outputs are stored for up to 30 days by default, and up to two years if flagged for policy violations.  This creates a meaningful conflict with enterprise data handling expectations. This situation highlights a broader tension cloud enterprises face when adopting frontier AI models that bundle safety mechanisms requiring data retention, since those requirements may conflict with internal legal and compliance policies around confidential information. The restriction is notable because Microsoft is both a distribution partner for Anthropic through Azure and a direct competitor via its own AI offerings, so internal adoption decisions carry weight beyond typical enterprise procurement concerns. For developers and businesses evaluating Claude Fable 5 through Azure Foundry or GitHub Copilot, this serves as a reminder to review the specific data retention terms for Mythos-class models before deploying them in workflows that handle sensitive or proprietary information. 04:23 Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 The US government issued an export control directive requiring Anthropic to immediately suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, forcing a full custom...

    359: Tokenomicon Sounds Metal, but it's Just Cloud Budgets

  5. 19 Jun

    358: AI Spend Limits Because Frontier Models Aren't Free Therapy

    Welcome to episode 358 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy!  Justin, Matt, and Ryan (who, rumour has it, was working on an Eagles music podcast) are in the studio this week to bring you all the latest in AI and cloud news (and begging for a AI spend limit increase), including anthropic wanting everyone – except themselves – to slow down AI development, GitHub’s insane number of commits, and even an announcement from CoreWeave, plus so much more. Let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Stop Configuring Domains One by One Like a Peasant SSH Into Your AI Agent Like It’s 1999 Your AWS Bill Finally Has an AI Babysitter Stop Blaming Engineering, the AI Will Do It Now GPU Queue Anxiety Meet Your Serverless Spark Therapist One Wildcard Certificate to Rule All Subdomains One PTU Reservation to Rule All Regions Twelve Billion Parameters Walk Into a Laptop Squeezing Gemma 4 Until the Bits Cry Azure Cobalt 200 VMs Are Really Arm-ed and Dangerous AI has gone all Fables and Myth Arm-ed she blows: but probably not to a region near you Dash to change your password as Dashlane gets owned Siri AI shows just how slow Gemini is AI Announces going public, and then spreads Myths about AI development A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: There are many cloud cost management tools out there, but only Archera provides insured commitments. 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 do not use all the cloud resources you have committed to, Archera will literally cover the difference. Other cost management tools may say they offer “insured commitments”, but remember to ask: Will you actually give me my rebate? Because Archera will.  Check out thecloudpod.net/archera to schedule a demo today.  General News 01:27 How GitHub plans to win developers back GitHub’s scale challenge has grown substantially beyond earlier projections.  The platform processed 1 billion commits in all of 2025, but now handles 1.4 billion commits per month, with AI agents alone generating over 17 million pull requests monthly. The technical remediation work has shifted from surface-level scaling to architectural rebuilding. GitHub has addressed MySQL contention, moved webhooks off MySQL entirely, rewritten the GitHub Actions job dispatch system, and is migrating performance-sensitive code from its Ruby monolith to Go. GitHub’s migration to Microsoft Azure, previously reported as a capacity move, is now described as a deeper infrastructure overhaul.  The goal is service isolation so that a degraded subsystem like Actions does not cascade failures to Git or other core services. Microsoft is providing engineering support from teams with experience scaling systems at comparable load levels, which represents a more direct operational involvement than what was previously discussed. New feature releases like the Copilot CLI app are being developed outside the core GitHub.com infrastructure, which GitHub says allows continued product work without adding risk to the systems currently under remediation. 03:0 Ryan – “I’d actually lik...

    358: AI Spend Limits Because Frontier Models Aren't Free Therapy

  6. 10 Jun

    357: Cache Me If You Can - Now With Durability

    Welcome to episode 357 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin and Matt are in the studio this week to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news! Is AI costing more than the people it replaced? Are CEO’s suffering from AI psychosis? Is Opus 4.8 better than 4.7? We answer all of these questions and more this week – so let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Valkey Stops Forgetting Your Data Like Your Ex  AI Coding Tools Cost More Than the Coders They Replace Microsoft Discovers AI Budgets Burn Faster Than Enthusiasm Executives Caught Hallucinating About AI Productivity Gains ABBA Said ” Dancing Queen”, but Google Said Data Center AI Now Tells Your AWS Apps How Fragile They Really Are Stop Playing VM Whack-a-Mole With Maintenance Windows Chaos Engineering for Apps Too Scared to Change AWS Rewires the Data Center With One Weird Optical Trick IAM the One Spending All Your Bedrock Money SQL Server Licenses Finally Pack Their Own Bags When AI Hype Meets Productivity Research, It Hurts CEOs Gone Wild: Demos Versus Deployment Reality Serverless Search Finally Learned to Nap Between Requests ElastiCache Finally Remembers Things After a Reboot Valkey Gets Durable So Your Data Stops Ghosting You Zero Data Loss Without Losing Your Microseconds Too Microsoft Build 2026 Scout AI and Quantum Dreams A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: There are many cloud cost management tools out there, but only Archera provides insured commitments. 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 do not use all the cloud resources you have committed to, Archera will literally cover the difference. Other cost management tools may say they offer “insured commitments”, but remember to ask: Will you actually give me my rebate? Because Archera will.  Check out thecloudpod.net/archera to schedule a demo today.  General News  01:45 Microsoft data suggests using AI is more expensive than hiring people: Microsoft canceled most internal Claude Code licenses just months after encouraging widespread adoption, redirecting employees to GitHub Copilot CLI instead.  This does not affect the broader Foundry partnership with Anthropic, but it signals that token costs at scale have become difficult to justify internally. Uber’s situation adds context here: the company reportedly burned through its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget in four months after internal teams were incentivized to compete on usage. This illustrates how adoption incentives can create runaway costs that outpace projected savings. The core economic tension worth discussing is whether AI tooling costs at scale can undercut the labor-savings argument.  When compute bills approach or exceed payroll savings, the ROI case for broad AI deployment gets more complicated for finance and engineering leaders to defend.

    357: Cache Me If You Can - Now With Durability

  7. 3 Jun

    356: Holy Labor Displacement, Batman! The Vatican Weighs In

    Welcome to episode 356 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin and Ryan are in the studio this week and ready to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including the Pope coming out against AI,  AWS introducing a new local zone, and GitHub having yet another crappy week. There’s a lot of news, so let’s get started!  Titles we almost went with this week Istanbul Not Constantinople, But Definitely an AWS Local Zone 218 Billion Parameters Walk Into a Single GPU Postgres Walks Into a DynamoDB Bar NSA Slides Into Anthropic’s DMs With 9 Billion Reasons Spy Agencies Want Claude But Can They Afford the Terms Pre-Shared Keys Were So Last Decade Azure When the Church and Anthropic Agree on AI Ethics Microsoft Finally Joins the Linux Party. It Crashed Iran Wants Cable Fees, and That’s No Phishing When the Church, the Spies, and Iran All Come for Big Tech I was gonna record a podcast until I got a migraine A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: There are many cloud cost management tools out there, but only Archera provides insured commitments. 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 do not use all the cloud resources you have committed to, Archera will literally cover the difference. Other cost management tools may say they offer “insured commitments”, but remember to ask: Will you actually give me my rebate? Because Archera will.  Check out thecloudpod.net/archera to schedule a demo today.  General News  03:31 Pope Leo, Anthropic Co-Founder Warn of AI Power Concentration, Labor Displacement Pope Leo XIV published a 42,000-word treatise called Magnifica Humanitas, outlining the Catholic Church’s position on AI governance, with a focus on labor displacement, power concentration among private tech companies, and autonomous weapons systems. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to participate in the Vatican’s AI encyclical event, and publicly acknowledged that large-scale human labor displacement from AI is a real possibility, framing support for displaced workers as a moral obligation. The document raises a structural concern relevant to cloud and AI businesses; that private transnational companies now hold more resources and influence over AI development than many governments, complicating regulatory oversight. The treatise specifically calls out the working conditions of data labelers, content moderators, and rare earth mineral extractors as forms of exploitation embedded in the AI supply chain, which touches directly on how cloud AI services are built and maintained. For cloud and AI businesses, this document signals growing institutional pressure from non-governmental bodies to factor employment protection and human dignity into product and infrastructure decisions, not just regulatory compliance. 04:41 Justin – “It’s not very often the pope weighs in on what you do for a day job.” 06:20 Iran demands Big Tech pay fees fo...

    356: Holy Labor Displacement, Batman! The Vatican Weighs In

  8. 27 May

    355: The Cloud Pod's AI Pleads Not Guilty, Blames Philip K. Dick

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

    355: The Cloud Pod's AI Pleads Not Guilty, Blames Philip K. Dick
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The Cloud Pod delivers weekly cloud computing and AI news for engineers, architects, and technology leaders. Join Justin Brodley, Jonathan Baker, Ryan Lucas, and Matt Kohn as they break down the latest from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud — covering new services, platform updates, FinOps strategies, and the AI innovations reshaping the industry. Stay ahead of the cloud landscape with one of the longest-running cloud computing podcasts available.

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