The Cloud Pod

By Justin Brodley, Jonathan Baker, Ryan Lucas and Matthew Kohn

Drowning in a sea of cloud innovations, AI breakthroughs, and shifting tooling ecosystems? The Cloud Pod is your lifeline! Join cloud veterans Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matt as they decode the rapid... more

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FAQs about The Cloud Pod:

How many episodes does The Cloud Pod have?

The podcast currently has 409 episodes available.

The Cloud Pod episodes:

June 13, 2025307: The AI Assistant That Finally Understands Your Kubernetes Cluster (We are Doomed)
Welcome to episode 307 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Who else is at a conference? Justin is coming to us this week from sunny San Diego where he’s attending FinOps – so we have that news to look forward to for next week. Matt and Ryan are also on hand today to share the latest news from Kubernetes, Salesforce acquisitions, and the strange case of Azure making AWS more cost effective.
Titles we almost went with this week:
The Great Redis Escape: One Year Later, Valkey is Living Its Best Life
Cache Me If You Can: How Valkey Outran Redis’s License Policies
Tier Today, Gone Tomorrow: AWS’s New Storage Class That Moves Your Data So
You Don’t
Hey AI, Deploy My App: AWS Makes It Actually Work
AWS Finally Calculates What You’ll Actually Pay
The Price is Right: AWS Edition
From List Price to Real Price: AWS Gets Transparent
Red Hat and AWS Sitting in a Tree, R-H-E-L-I-N-G
Dockerfile? More Like Dockefile-It-For-Me with Amazon’s New MCP Server
Elementary, My Dear Watson: Amazon Q Becomes Sherlock Holmes for AWS
CUD You Believe It? Red Hat Gets the Discount Treatment
Committed Relationship Status: It’s Complicated (But 20% Cheaper)
RHEL Yeah! Google Drops Prices on Enterprise Linux
Disk Today, Gone Tomorrow: Azure’s Vanishing OS Storage
ATL1: Where GPUs Meet Sweet Tea and Southern Hospitality
AWS Launches Operation Cloud Sovereignty
The Great Firewall of Europe: AWS Edition
Amazon Builds a GDPR Fortress in Germany
General News
01:46 What Salesforce’s $8B acquisition of Informatica means for enterprise data and AI | VentureBeat
Salesforce just dropped $8 billion to acquire Informatica.
This purchase was really about building the data foundation needed for agentic AI to actually work in enterprise environments – we’re talking about combining Informatica’s 30 years of data management expertise with Salesforce’s cloud platform to create what they’re calling a “unified architecture for agentic AI.”
This acquisition fills a massive gap in Salesforce’s data management capabilities, bringing in critical pieces like data cataloging, integration, governance, quality controls, and master data management – all the unsexy but absolutely essential plumbing that makes AI agents trustworthy and scalable in real enterprise deployments.
The timing here is fascinating, because Informatica literally just announced their own agentic AI offerings last week at Informatica World, so Salesforce is essentially buying a company that’s already pivoted hard into the AI space – rather than trying to build these capabilities from scratch.
There’s going to be some interesting overlap with MuleSoft, which Salesforce bought for $6.5 billion back in 2018, but analysts are s
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1h 12min
June 05, 2025306: Batch Better Have MySQL: Azure’s Maintenance Makeover
Welcome to episode 306 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy!
This week, we have a bunch of announcements concerning the newest offering from Anthropic – Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4, plus container security, Azure MySQL Maintenance, Vertex AI, and Mistral AI. Plus, we’ve got a Cloud Journey installment AND an aftershow – so get comfy and get ready for a trip to the clouds!
Titles we almost went with this week:
ECS Failures Now Have 4x the Excuses
Nailing Down Your Container Security, One Patch at a Time
HashiCorp’s New Recipe: Terraform, AI, and a Pinch of MCP
Teaching an Old DNS New IPv6 Tricks
Dash-ing through the Klusters, in an AWS Console
Google’s Generative AI Playground Gets a Glow-Up
Vertex AI Studio: Now with 200% More Darkness! Like our souls
Claude Opus 4 Strikes a Chord on Google Cloud
Sovereign-teed to Please: Google Cloud’s Royal Treatment
Google’s Cloud Kingdom Expands its Borders
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s AI? Anthropic Drops Sonne(t) 4 Knowledge on Vertex
Mistral AI Chats Up a Storm on Google Cloud
Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Gets a Dose of Mistral Magic
.NET Aspire on Azure: The App Service Strikes Back
Default Outbound Access Retires, Decides Florida Isn’t for Everyone
AI Is Going Great – or How ML Makes Money
01:52 Introducing Claude 4
Claude has launched the latest models in Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, setting new standards for coding, advancing reasoning and AI agents. Maybe they’ll actually follow instructions when told to shut down? (Looking at you, ChatGPT.)
Claude Opus 4 is “the world’s best coding model” with sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows.
Opus 4 has 350 billion parameters, making it one of the largest publicly available language models.
It demonstrates strong performance on academic benchmarks, including research.
Sonnet 4 is a smaller 10 billion parameter model optimized for dialogue, making it well-suited for conversational AI applications.
Alongside the models, they are also announcing:
Extended thinking with tool use (beta): Both models can use tools – like web search – during extended thinking, allowing Claude to alternate between reasoning and tool use to improve its responses.
New Model Capabilities: Both models can use tools in parallel, follow instructions more precisely, and when given access to local files by developers — demonstrate significantly improved memory capabilities, extracting and saving key facts maintain continuity and build tacit knowledge over time
Claude code is now generally available: After receiving extensive positive feedback during our research preview, they are expanding how developers can collaborate with Claude. Claude code now supports background tasks via gith
...more
1h 35min
May 28, 2025305: AWS Breaks Up with Unpopular Services – “It’s Not You, It’s Me”
Welcome to episode 305 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! How did you do on your Microsoft Build Predictions? As badly as us? Plus we’ve got news on AWS service changes, a lifecycle catch up page for all those services that bought the farm, tons of Gemini news (seriously, like a lot) and even some AI for .NET.
Welcome to the cloud pod- and thanks for joining us!
Titles we almost went with this week:
Google’s Jules: An AI Gem for Cloud Devs
Autonomous Agents of Code: Jules’ Excellent Adventure in the Google Cloud
Gemini 2.5 Shoots for the Stars with Cosmic-Sized AI Upgrades
Resistance is Futile: OpenAI Assimilates Your Codebase
AWS Transformers: Rise of the Agentic AI
Teaching an old .NET dog new Linux tricks
CodeBuild Puts Docker Builds in Hyperdrive
Inspector Gadget’s New Trick: Mapping Container Vulnerabilities
Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like Scanning Containers…
Google Cranks AI to 11 with New Ultra Plan
I, For One, Welcome Our New AI Ultra Overlords
The Inference Engine That Could: llm-d Chugs Ahead with Kubernetes-Native
Scaling
Scaling Inference to Infinity and Beyond with Google Cloud’s llm-d
Google Cloud and Spring AI: A Match Made in Java-n
The Fast and the Serverless: Cloud Run Drifts into AI Studio Territory
SQL Server 2025: A Vector Victor, Not a Scalar Failure
AI will solve my life problems of having money in my pocket
I used to scan all the containers but now I will just scan yours
AI Is Going Great – or How ML Makes Money
01:50 Jules: Google’s autonomous AI coding agent
Jules is an autonomous AI agent that can read code, understand intent, and make code changes on its own.
It goes beyond AI coding assistants to operate independently.
It clones code into a secure Google Cloud VM, allowing it to understand the full context of a project. This enables it to write tests, build features, fix bugs, and more.
Jules operates asynchronously in the background, presenting its plan and reasoning when complete. This allows developers to focus on other tasks while it works.
Integration with GitHub enables Jules to work directly in existing workflows without extra setup or context switching. Developers can steer and give feedback throughout the process.
For cloud developers, Jules demonstrates the rapid advancement of AI for coding moving from prototype to product. Its cloud-based parallel execution enables efficient handling of complex, multi-file changes.
While in public beta, Jules is free with some usage limits. This allows developers to experiment with this cutting-edge AI coding agent and understand its potential to accelerate development on Google Cloud.
02:56 Ryan – “More and more, as new tools get released, it’s just going to change the way anything gets written… it’s getting more and more capable.”
05:45 Introducing Flow: Google’s AI filmmaking tool designed for Veo
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1h 13min
May 21, 2025304: It’s Chile Up Here in The Cloud!
Welcome to episode 304 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan and Matt are in the house tonight to bring you all the latest and greatest in Cloud and AI news, including AWS new Chilean region, the ongoing tug of war between Open AI and Microsoft, and even some K8 updates – plus an aftershow. Let’s get started!
Titles we almost went with this week:
Open AI gets a COO delivered
Things get Chile with new regions
Observability and AI, I Q-uestion the logic
Cloud Pod tries to Microsoft Build predictions
K8 resizes pods on the fly
Microsoft strongly reinforces the AI Foundry
The Cloud Pod renegotiates the hosts’ contracts … we now have to pay the Cloud Pod to be on it
Follow Up
01:53 DOJ’s extreme proposals will hurt consumers and America’s tech leadership
We previously talked about the DOJ and Google Antitrust lawsuit – and now the DOJ has wrapped up their remedies hearing, and Google has *not* been quiet about it.
One of the claims is that the remedies would hurt browser choice, putting browsers like Firefox out of business completely.
Google also claimed that data disclosure mandates would threaten user’s privacy – it would be MUCH safer if they could just sell it to you via their marketplace.
We do agree that divesting Chrome would make things more complicated for people living in the Google Cloud.
Really, what comes down to is that Google claims DOJ’s solutions are the wrong solutions – although to us, Google’s solutions aren’t much better.
AI – Or How ML Makes Money
09:20 OpenAI Expands Leadership with Fidji Simo
OpenAI Hires Instacart CEO Simo For Major Leadership Role
OpenAI is hiring Fidji Simo as the CEO of applications, representing a major restructuring of leadership at the company.
She was the CEO at
...more
1h 17min
May 18, 2025303: Someday You Will Find Me, Caught Beneath the AI Landslide, in a Champagne Premier Nova in The Sky
Welcome to episode 303 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan and exhausted dad Matt are here (and mostly awake) ready to bring the latest in cloud news! This week we’ve got more news from Nova, updates to Claude, earnings news, and a mini funeral for Skype – plus a new helping of Cloud Journey!
Titles we almost went with this week:
Claude researches so Ryan can nap
The best AI for Nova Corps, Amazon Nova Premiere JB
If you can’t beat them, change the licensing terms and make them fork, and then
reverse course… and profit
Q has invaded your IDE!!
Skype bites the dust
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
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
02:50 Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we’re doing about it
OpenAI wrote up a blog post about their sycophantic Chat GPT 4o upgrade last week, and they wanted to set the record straight.
They made adjustments at improving the models default personality to make it feel more intuitive and effective across a variety of tasks.
When shaping model behavior, they start with a baseline principle and instructions outlined in their model spec.
They also teach their models how to apply these principles by incorporating user signals like thumbs up and thumbs down feedback on responses.
In this update, though, they focused too much on short-term feedback and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve. This skewed the results towards responses that were overly supportive – but disingenuous.
Beyond rolling back the changes, they are taking steps to realign the model behavior, including refining core training techniques and system prompts to explicitly steer the model away from sycophancy.
They also plan to build more guardrails to increase honesty and transparency principles in the model spec.
Additionally, they plan to expand ways for users to test and give direct feedback before deployments.
Lastly, OpenAI continues to expand evaluations building on the model sync and our ongoing research.
04:43 Deep Research on Microsoft Hotpatching:
Yes, they’re grabbing money and screwing you. Basically.
07:06 Justin – “I’m not going to give them any credit on this one. I appreciate that they created hotpatching, but I don’t like what you want to charge me for it.”
General News
It’s Earnings time – cue the sound effects!
08:03 Alphabet’s Q1 earnings shattered analyst expectations, sending the stock
...more
1h 25min
May 08, 2025302: It’s So Hot, Even Windows is Hotpatching
Welcome to episode 302 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin and Ryan are on hand to bring you all the latest in Cloud (and AI news.) We’ve got hotpatching, Project Greenland, and a rollback of GPT-4.o, which sort of makes us sad – and our egos are definitely less stroked. Plus Saas, containers, and outposts – all of this and more. Thanks for joining us in the cloud!
Titles we almost went with this week:
The Cloud Pod was never accused of being sycophantic
2nd Gen outposts!?! I didn’t even know anyone was using Gen 1
AWS Outposts 2nd Gen… not with AI (GASP)
If you’re doing SaaS wrong, Google & AWS have your back this week with new Features
Patching, so hot right now
Larger container sizes for Azure…. You don’t say
AWS Green reporting detects hotspots… surprisingly close to Maryland…..
Visual pipeline for Opensearch… I want to like this… but I just can’t
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
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
01:37 Sharing new DORA research for gen AI in software development
The DORA team at Google has released a new report, “Impact of Generative AI In Software Development.” The report is based on data and developer interviews, and the report aims to move beyond hype to offer a proper perspective on AI’s impact on individuals, teams and organizations.
Click on the link in our show notes to access the full report. However, Google has highlighted a few key points in the blog post.
AI is Real – A staggering 89% of organizations are prioritizing the integration of AI into their applications, and 76% of technologists are already using AI in some part of their daily work.
Productivity gains confirmed: Developers using Gen AI report significant increases in flow, productivity, and job satisfaction. For instance, a 25% increase in AI adoption is associated with a 2.1% increase in individual productivity.
Organization benefits are tangible: Beyond individual gains, Dora found strong correlations between AI adoption and improvements in crucial organizational metrics. A 25% increase in AI adoption is associated with increases in document quality, code quality, code review speeds and approval speeds.
If you are looking to utilize AI in your development organization, they provide five practical approaches for both leaders and practitioners.
Have transparent communications
Empower developers with learning and experimentation
Establish clear policies
Rethink performance metrics
Embrace fast feedback loops
045:06 Ryan – “Those are really good approaches, but really difficult to implement in practice. You know, in my day job, watching the company struggle to get a handle on AI from all the different angles you need to, from data protection, legal liability
...more
1h 33min
April 29, 2025 301: The Cloud Pod PartyRocks in the House Tonight
...more
1h 20min
April 17, 2025300: The Next Chapter: How Google’s Next-Level Next Event Nexted All Our Next Expectations – and What’s Next Now That Next Is Past
Welcome to episode 300 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! According to the title, this week’s show is taking place inside of a Dr. Suess book, but don’t despair – we’re not going to make you eat green eggs and ham, but we WILL give you the low down on all things Vegas. Well, Google’s Next event which recently took place in Vegas anyway. Did you make any Next predictions?
Titles we almost went with this week:
This is the CLOUDPOD Episode 300
Tonight we dine in the Cloud
The Next Chapter
Now in Preview: Episode 300
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
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.
GCP
Pre-Next
02:35 Google shakes up Gemini leadership, Google Labs head taking the reins
There was a lot of Gemini news at Next – but we’ll get to all that.
In this particular case, there’s an employee shakeup. Sissie Hsiao is stepping down from leading the Google team, and is being replaced by Josh Woodward, who is currently leading the Google Labs.
04:35 Filestore instance replication now available
GCP says customers have been asking for help in meeting business and regulatory goals, and so they are releasing Filestore instance replication.
This new feature offers an efficient replication point objective (RPO) that can reach 30 minutes for data change rates of 100 MB/sec.
05:16 Multi-Cluster Orchestrator for cross-region Kubernetes workloads
The public preview of Multi-Cluster Orchestrator was recently announced.
This lets platform and application teams optimize resource utilization, enhance application resilience, and accelerate innovation in complex, multi-cluster environments.
The need for effective multi-cluster management has become essential as organizations increasingly use Kubernetes to deploy and manage their applications; Challenges such as resource scarcity, ensuring high availability, and managing deployments across diverse environments create significant operational overhead.
Multi-Cluster Orchestrator addresses these challenges by providing a centralized orchestration layer that abstracts away the complexities of underlying Kubernetes infrastructure matching workloads with capacity across regions.
06:26 GKE at 65,000 nodes: Evaluating performance for simulated mixed AI workloads
Recently GKE announced it can now support up to 65,000 nodes (up from 15,000.)
Saint Carrie be with your CFO.
09:15
...more
1h 21min
April 06, 2025299: We Predict Next, for Next Week’s, Next-Level Google Next Event. What’s Next?
Welcome to episode 299 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Google Next is quickly approaching, and you know what that means – it’s time for predictions! Who will win this year’s Crystal Ball award? Only time and the main stage will tell. Join Matthew, Justin, and Ryan as they break down their thoughts on what groundbreaking (and less groundbreaking) announcements are in store for us.
Titles we almost went with this week:
OpenAI and Anthropic join forces?
Its 2025, and AWS is still trying to make Jumbo packets happen
Beanstalk and Ruby’s Updates!! They’re Alive!!!
Google Colossus or how to expect a colossal cloud outage someday.
The Cloud Pod gives an ode to Peter
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
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 All Its Money
02:27 OpenAI adopts rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to data
OpenAI is embracing Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where the data resides.
By adapting Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol or MCP across its products, including the desktop app for ChatGPT.
MCP is an open source standard that helps AI models produce better, more relevant responses to certain queries.
Sam Altman says that people love MCP and they are excited to add support across their products and that it is available today in the Agents SDK and support for the ChatGPT desktop and Response API is coming soon.
MCP lets models draw data from sources like business tools and software to complete tasks, as well as from content repositories and app development environments.
We found two helpful articles that may help demystify this whole concept.
MCP: What It Is and Why It Matters – by Addy Osmani
Meet MCP: Your LLM’s Super-Helpful Assistant!
Justin particularly loves Addy Osmani’s blog, as they start out with a simple ELI5 on understanding MCP. We’re going to quote verbatim:
“Imagine you have a single universal plug that fits all your devices – that’s essentially what the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is for AI. MCP is an
...more
1h 21min
April 02, 2025298: BigQuery Gits it With Devops
Welcome to episode 298 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matthew and Ryan are in the house (and still very much missing Jonathan) to bring you a jam packed show this week, with news from Beijing to Virginia! Did you know Virginia was in the US? Amazon definitely wants you to know that.
We’ve got updates from BigQuery Git Support and their new collab tools, plus all the AI updates you were hoping you’d miss. Tune in now!
Titles we almost went with this week:
The Cloud Pod now Recorded from Planet Earth
Wait Java still exists?
When will java just be coffee and not software
Cloudflare Makes AI beat Mazes
Replacing native mobile things with mobile web apps won’t fix your problems AWS
Turn your security over to the bots
The Cloud Pod is lost in the AI labyrinth
AI security agents to secure the AI… wait recursion
Durable + Stateless.. I don’t know if you know what those words means
Click ops expands to our phones yay!
The Cloud Pod is now a data analyst
Gitops come to bigquery
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
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 All Its Money
00:46 Manus, a New AI Agent From China is Going Viral—And Raising Big Questions
Manus is being described as “the first true autonomous AI agent” from China, capable of completing weeks of professional work in hours.
Developed by a team called Butterfly Effect with offices in Beijing and Wuhan, Manus functions as a truly autonomous agent that independently analyzes, plans, and executes complex tasks.
The system uses a multi-agent architecture powered by several distinct AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and fine-tuned versions of
...more
1h 6min

FAQs about The Cloud Pod:

How many episodes does The Cloud Pod have?

The podcast currently has 409 episodes available.

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