July 17, 2025

312: Azure Firewall Finally Learns to Spell (FQDN Edition)

1 hour 29 minutes

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.

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