November 18, 2025

331: Claude Gets a $30 Billion Azure Wardrobe and Two New Best Friends

1 hour 24 minutes

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

...more

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

4.9

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