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. 344: Amazon’s Coding Bot Bites the Hand That Runs It

    5D AGO

    344: Amazon’s Coding Bot Bites the Hand That Runs It

    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

    1h 2m
  2. 343: AWS CloudWatch Finally Hits Snooze

    FEB 25

    343: AWS CloudWatch Finally Hits Snooze

    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

    1h 12m
  3. 342: Eight Minutes to Midnight: When AI Helps Hackers Speed Run Your AWS Account

    FEB 18

    342: Eight Minutes to Midnight: When AI Helps Hackers Speed Run Your AWS Account

    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

    1h 26m
  4. 341: AWS Layoffs: Scaling Down Instead of Scaling Out

    FEB 13

    341: AWS Layoffs: Scaling Down Instead of Scaling Out

    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

    1h 13m
  5. 340: Azure releases a new SQL AI Assistant… Jimmy Droptables

    FEB 7

    340: Azure releases a new SQL AI Assistant… Jimmy Droptables

    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

    1h 13m
  6. 339: Just-in-Time Secrets: Because Your AI Agent Can't Keep Its Mouth Shut

    JAN 29

    339: Just-in-Time Secrets: Because Your AI Agent Can't Keep Its Mouth Shut

    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?

    56 min

  7. JAN 22

    338: T5Gemma Says "AI’ll be Back”

    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

    1h 2m
  8. 337: AWS Discovers Prices Can Go Both Ways, Raises GPU Costs 15 Percent

    JAN 16

    337: AWS Discovers Prices Can Go Both Ways, Raises GPU Costs 15 Percent

    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?

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34 Ratings

About

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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