Yells at Cloud

Gunnar Grosch

Yells at Cloud is a podcast where a rotating panel of AWS Heroes makes sense of cloud news: the launches, the outages, the pricing pages that look like ransom notes. We're opinionated because we've earned it: these takes are backed by years of building, breaking, and getting paged for it. Each episode covers whatever's happening in the cloud world, from genuine breakthroughs to baffling pricing decisions, and occasionally devolves into argument. If you work in the cloud and have opinions you're not saying out loud, this show is for you.

Episodes

  1. 1d ago

    The Vulnpocalypse

    PHP is 31, runs most of the web, and finally made the front page of the Wall Street Journal, thanks to an unauthenticated remote code execution bug. Danielle opens with a goodbye: AWS is ending support for Infrastructure Composer, which grew out of Stackery, the startup she worked at. Is AWS good at developer experience, and what happens to the startups that build it? Chris walks through the Vulnpocalypse: an eMudhra CA private key that was literally the number 4, PHP2Shell and the Chainguard embargo fight, a Node.js RCE, the Railway and TiDB breaches, and why long-lived access keys keep showing up in every incident. Gunnar brings the one piece of good news: Lambda Web Functions. Bring your own HTTP server, pay for active CPU, and every existing Lambda function is now an Event Function. It's the fourth Lambda compute model in under a year, so is serverless still meant for humans to understand, or only for agents? Ken looks at Claude Code agent teams and mods, the part of the docs that says mods aren't sandboxed, and Amazon blocking Meta's Muse agent from shopping. Burst Mode: Danielle on Eric Mann's Longhorn PHP keynote, The Commit You Can't Take Back, and the day a PM added "destroy" to the dropdown. Chris on the crappy state of MCPs: one Google account per user, a Google Form to get access, and Copilot credits to read your own email. Ken on recursive self-improvement and why you should stop writing prompts and start writing evals. Gunnar on Mistral, which answered last episode's "are they still around?" with a trillion-parameter model named after a cat meme: Le Chonk. Timestamps 0:00 - Intro, brought to you by PHP 0:35 - Check-ins: retro gaming, an MCP gateway, ProductFest 3:49 - Infrastructure Composer end of support (Danielle Heberling) 12:28 - The Vulnpocalypse: eMudhra, PHP2Shell, Node.js and more (Chris Farris) 29:57 - Lambda Web Functions: is serverless still for humans? (Gunnar Grosch) 42:24 - Claude is teamin' and modin' (Ken Collins) Burst Mode 52:06 - Burst Mode 52:32 - The Commit You Can't Take Back (Danielle Heberling) 54:53 - The crappy state of MCPs (Chris Farris) 57:03 - Recursive self-improvement (Ken Collins) 1:00:48 - Mistral is still around: Le Chonk (Gunnar Grosch) 1:05:25 - What we're looking forward to 1:08:32 - Wrap Links Infrastructure Composer end of support PHP Foundation on the PHP2Shell release Socket: the PHP embargo dispute Google on eMudhra Announcing Lambda Web Functions Aidan Steele on Lambda Web Functions Claude Code agent teams Claude Code mods The Commit You Can't Take Back (Eric Mann, Longhorn PHP) agentgateway Anthropic: When AI builds itself Mistral Large 4 (TechCrunch) Node.js October security releases AWS: PHP2Shell seen in MadPot before disclosure Aidan Steele: Web Functions as queue consumers Bref: serverless PHP Amazon blocks Meta's Muse (GeekWire) Full show notes, all sources and the transcript: yellsatcloudpod.com Hosts Gunnar Grosch Danielle Heberling Chris Farris Ken Collins Watch on YouTube | Bluesky | Twitter / X

    The Vulnpocalypse
  2. Sep 28

    Super Intelligence, Artificial Slowdown

    Dario Amodei wants to pace the frontier. Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed, and about ten days later the labs shipped new models and cut prices. Gunnar goes around the table: is slowing down a safety commitment, marketing, or a way to write the rules before regulators do? Chris explains the EU Cyber Resilience Act, which started a 24-hour clock for reporting actively exploited vulnerabilities on September 11, and what the December 2027 requirements mean for anyone shipping software into the EU. Danielle looks at Pizza Bot, AWS' open-source inbox for background agents, and asks why everything that was an agent last month is a harness now. Newcomer Ken Collins talks about building AI-native teams: role compression, budgeting for people and AI together, and the burden inversion that artificial confidence and slop grenades put on the people who actually know how things work. Burst Mode: Danielle on Aurora DSQL finally supporting foreign key constraints, more than a year after GA. Ken on Jev, TypeSafe's decision model that returns answers instead of text, and Laya, the open-weight alternative whose creator says he published the idea a year earlier. Chris asks whether AI can decide which forgotten cloud resources are safe to turn off, including an S3 bucket created on Obama's inauguration day, and Gunnar brings up AWS's new account spend limits. Gunnar closes with AWS confirming that some customer data in Bahrain and the UAE is permanently gone. Timestamps0:00 - Cold open: super intelligence and personal check-ins3:57 - Pacing the frontier: is "slow down" just marketing? (Gunnar Grosch)15:00 - The EU Cyber Resilience Act starts the clock (Chris Farris)22:53 - Pizza Bot and the harness explosion (Danielle Heberling)28:31 - Building AI-native teams (Ken Collins) Burst Mode38:58 - Burst Mode39:06 - Aurora DSQL foreign key constraints (Danielle Heberling)45:07 - Jev, Laya, and decision models (Ken Collins)51:13 - Can AI clean up forgotten cloud resources? (Chris Farris)55:58 - AWS permanently loses customer data in the Middle East (Gunnar Grosch) LinksPacing the frontier (CNBC)David Sacks on slowing downLabs sued over pacing AI developmentEU Cyber Resilience Act reporting clockEU Commission CRA reportingOpenSSF CRA ebookPizza BotPizza Bot on GitHubAnthropic labor market researchMicrosoft ports Copilot runtime to RustAurora DSQL foreign key constraintsJevLayaLaya on Hacker NewsAWS spend limitsAWS Middle East data loss (CNBC)AWS Middle East data loss (Reuters)Wildberries Architected Frameworkfwd:cloudsec

    Super Intelligence, Artificial Slowdown
  3. Aug 24

    The Slow Collapse of Civilization

    The cloud is available, until it isn't. Chris explains how AI agents escaped their sandboxes, exploited Artifactory, communicated with one another, and attacked real companies. Gunnar asks whether the labs are reporting dangerous behavior or marketing their models. Danielle covers Grok Bot, the latest attempt to turn autonomous agents into virtual coworkers, and why giving an AI the keys to your digital life still sounds like a terrible idea. Gunnar examines Amazon's Region Flex project, where Amazon's own retail division is moving workloads out of flagship regions because power and data center capacity are running short. Chris follows that thread to Amazon's planned 7.65-gigawatt gas-powered AI data center in Texas and asks what happened to The Climate Pledge. Burst Mode: Danielle on NVIDIA's Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and the case for specialized open-weight models. Chris on Amazon destroying books to create AI training data and whether we are building a new Library of Alexandria. Gunnar on Twitch scraping streamer content for AI training, with an executive openly admitting that nobody would opt in. Matthew returns with a new take on CloudFormation Express Mode: it may be useful in production, but not in development or testing. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 - Cold open 2:38 - AI agents escape containment (Chris) 14:34 - Grok Bot and autonomous virtual coworkers (Danielle) 22:37 - Project Region Flex and AWS capacity limits (Gunnar) 30:21 - Amazon's polluting Texas data center (Chris) 36:37 - Burst Mode 36:37 - NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (Danielle) 42:46 - Amazon book destruction (Chris) 45:50 - Twitch's honest extraction scheme (Gunnar) 51:09 - CloudFormation Express Mode (Matthew) LINKS Grok Bot: https://x.ai/news/introducing-grok-bot Project Region Flex: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ecommerce-cloud-aws-power-crunch-ai-2026-8 Amazon's Texas data center: https://newrepublic.com/post/214111/amazon-data-center-biggest-pollution-source-entire-country Distilled on Amazon's gas plant: https://www.distilled.earth/p/scoop-amazon-is-behind-one-of-the US power grid concerns: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/us-power-grid-risk-18-115217618.html NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-nemotron-3-5-lightning-delivers-fast-accurate-specialized-task-execution-for-long-running-agents/ Amazon book destruction: https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility Twitch AI training data: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp30pz8d09jo HOSTS Gunnar Grosch: https://gunnargrosch.com Danielle Heberling: https://danielleheberling.xyz Matthew Bonig: https://matthewbonig.com Chris Farris: https://chrisfarris.com Subscribe: https://yellsatcloudpod.com

    The Slow Collapse of Civilization
  4. Jul 11

    Generally Available

    AWS shipped Lambda MicroVMs, Firecracker-based sandboxes that snap back to life in milliseconds, and AJ cannot figure out who they're actually for. The pricing charges you two to three times more than it charges AWS' own services built on top of it, which is a choice. Matthew explained why CloudFormation Express Mode breaks a fundamental contract CFN has held since day one: it reports a stack as done before the resources are actually available, and disables rollback by default. Danielle brought actual good news: Cloudflare's temporary accounts let agents deploy and test without ever touching your credentials, which Matthew promptly called growth hacking. Chris covered AWS WAF's new AI traffic monetization. Publishers can now charge crawlers per request instead of just blocking them. AJ called it too little too late. And Gunnar made the case that Microsoft and AWS launching billion-dollar forward-deployed engineering programs is basically an admission that enterprise AI adoption is stuck and the tools don't work without hand-holding. Burst Mode: Claude Sonnet 5 is "available" on Bedrock in the sense that Danielle got an AccessDeniedException and was told to call sales. Matthew on IAM Identity Center finally getting programmatic access: what took so long? AJ on Anthropic renegotiating with Amazon to token-based pricing and what that means as open-weight models close the gap. Chris was at the AWS DC Summit when the Secretary of Energy got roundly booed for claiming AI data centers won't materially impact energy consumption. And Gunnar on a paper showing that multi-agent teams consistently underperform their smartest member. Not because of disagreement. Because of dilution. TIMESTAMPS Main topics0:00 - Cold open 0:52 - Lambda MicroVMs (AJ) 14:05 - CloudFormation / CDK Express Mode (Matthew) 25:01 - Cloudflare Temporary Accounts (Danielle) 31:37 - AWS WAF AI Traffic Monetization (Chris) 39:06 - Microsoft Frontier Co. & AWS Forward Deployed Engineering (Gunnar)Burst Mode49:07 - Burst Mode 49:30 - Claude Sonnet 5 on Bedrock: "available" (Danielle) 51:13 - IAM Identity Center programmatic access (Matthew) 52:21 - Anthropic / Amazon token pricing renegotiation (AJ) 55:10 - AWS DC Summit: Secretary of Energy gets booed (Chris) 58:17 - Multi-agent systems underperform their best member (Gunnar) LINKS Lambda MicroVMs: https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/lambda-microvms/ CloudFormation / CDK Express Mode: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/06/aws-cloudformation-cdk/ Cloudflare Temporary Accounts: https://blog.cloudflare.com/temporary-accounts/ AWS WAF AI Traffic Monetization: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-waf-adds-ai-traffic-monetization-capability-to-help-content-owners-charge-ai-bots-for-content-access/ Microsoft Frontier Co.: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/07/02/microsoft-frontier-company-ai-engineering-that-amplifies-and-protects-your-intelligence/ AWS Forward Deployed Engineering: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/introducing-forward-deployed-engineering-for-partners-winning-the-future-of-enterprise-ai/ The Register on AI bubble concerns: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/06/even-banks-and-hyperscalers-are-now-sounding-the-alarm-about-the-ai-bubble/5266123 Claude Sonnet 5 on Bedrock: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/introducing-claude-sonnet-5-on-aws-anthropics-most-capable-sonnet-model/ IAM Identity Center programmatic access: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/06/aws-iam-identity-center-account-access-customer-managed-apps/ Anthropic / Amazon token pricing: https://thenextweb.com/news/amazon-anthropic-token-pricing-openai-alternative Multi-agent systems paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01011 HOSTS Gunnar Grosch: https://gunnargrosch.com Danielle Heberling: https://danielleheberling.xyz AJ Stuyvenberg: https://aaronstuyvenberg.com Matthew Bonig: https://matthewbonig.com Chris Williams: https://mistwire.com Follow the show: https://yellsatcloudpod.com

    Generally Available

About

Yells at Cloud is a podcast where a rotating panel of AWS Heroes makes sense of cloud news: the launches, the outages, the pricing pages that look like ransom notes. We're opinionated because we've earned it: these takes are backed by years of building, breaking, and getting paged for it. Each episode covers whatever's happening in the cloud world, from genuine breakthroughs to baffling pricing decisions, and occasionally devolves into argument. If you work in the cloud and have opinions you're not saying out loud, this show is for you.