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The Cloud Pod | Weekly AI & Cloud News on AWS, Azure & GCP
By Justin Brodley, Jonathan Baker, Ryan Lucas and Matt Kohn | Cloud Computing & AI NewsBusinessTechnologyManagement
The Cloud Pod | Weekly AI & Cloud News on AWS, Azure & GCP episodes
- 324: Clippy’s Revenge: The AI Assistant That Actually Works – Sort OfWelcome to episode 324 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Jonathan are your hosts, bringing you all the latest news and announcements in Cloud and AI. This week we have some exec changes over at Oracle, a LOT of announcements about Sonnet 4.5, and even some marketplace updates over at Azure! Let’s get started.Titles we almost went with this week
- Oracle’s Executive Shuffle: Promoting from Within While Chasing from Behind
- Copilot Takes the Wheel on Your Legacy Code Highway
- Queue Up for GPUs: Google’s Take-a-Number Approach to AI Computing
- License to Bill: Google’s 400% Markup Grievance
- Autopilot Engages: GKE Goes Full Self-Driving Mode
- SQL Server Finally Gets a Lake House Instead of a Server Room
- Microsoft Gives Office Apps Their Own AI Interns
- Claude and Present Danger: The AI That Codes for 30 Hours Straight
- The Claude Father Part 4.5: An Offer Your Code Can’t Refuse
- CUD You Believe It? Google Makes Discounts Actually Flexible
- ECS Goes Full IPv6: No IPv4s Given
- Breaking News: AWS Finally Lets You Hit the Emergency Stop Button
- One Marketplace to Rule Them All
- BigQuery Gets a Crystal Ball and a Chatty Friend
- Azure’s September to Remember: When Certificates and Allocators Attack
- Shall I Compare Thee to a Sonnet? 4.5 Ways Anthropic Just Leveled Up
- AWS provides a big red button
Follow Up01:26 The global harms of restrictive cloud licensing, one year later | Google Cloud Blog
- Google Cloud filed a formal complaint with the European Commission one year ago about Microsoft’s anti-competitive cloud licensing practices, specifically the 400% price markup Microsoft imposes on customers who move Windows Server workloads to non-Azure clouds.
- The UK Competition and Markets Authority found that restrictive licensing costs UK cloud customers £500 million annually due to lack of competition, while US government agencies overspend by $750 million yearly because of Microsoft’s licensing tactics.
- Microsoft recently disclosed that forcing software customers to use Azure is one of three pillars driving its growth and is implementing new licensing changes preventing managed service providers from hosting certain workloads on Azure competitors.
- Multiple regulators globally including South Africa and the US FTC are now investigating Microsoft’s cloud licensing practices, with the CMA finding that Azure has gained customers at 2-3x the rate of competitors since implementing restrictive terms.
- A European Centre for Inter
1 hr 5 min - 322: Did OpenAI and Microsoft Break Up? It’s Complicated…Welcome to episode 322 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! We have BIG NEWS – Jonathan is back! He’s joined in the studio by Justin and Ryan to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including ongoing drama in the Microsoft/OpenAI drama, saying goodbye to data transfer fees (in the EU), M4 Power, and more. Let’s get started!Titles we almost went with this week
- EU Later, Egress Fees: Google’s Brexit from Data Transfer Charges
- The Keys to the Cosmos: Azure Unlocks Customer Control
- Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Google Splits LLM Inference for Better Performance
- OpenAI and Microsoft: From Exclusive to It’s Complicated
- Google’s New Model Has Trust Issues (And That’s a Good Thing)
- Mac to the Future: AWS Brings M4 Power to the Cloud
- Oracle’s Cloud Nine: Stock Soars on Half-Trillion Dollar Dreams
- ChatGPT: From Chat Bot to Hat Bot (Everyone’s Wearing Different Professional Hats)
- Five Billion Reasons to Love British AI
- NVMe Gonna Give You Up: AWS Delivers the Storage Metrics You’ve Been Missing
- Tea and AI: OpenAI Crosses the Pond
- The Norway Bug Strikes Back: A New YAML Hope
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 Money01:33 Microsoft and OpenAI make a deal: Reading between the lines of their secretive new agreement – GeekWire
- Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding that will restructure their partnership, with OpenAI’s nonprofit entity receiving an equity stake exceeding $100 billion in a new public benefit corporation where Microsoft will play a major role.
- The deal addresses the AGI clause that previously allowed OpenAI to unilaterally dissolve the partnership upon achieving artificial general intelligence, which had been a significant risk for Microsoft’s multi-billion-dollar investment.
- Both companies are diversifying their partnerships – Microsoft is now using Anthropic’s technology for some Office 365 AI features, while OpenAI has signed a $300 billion computing contract with Oracle over five years.
- Microsoft’s exclusivity on OpenAI cloud workloads has been replaced with a right of first refusal, enabling OpenAI to participate in the $500 billion Stargate AI project with Oracle and other partners.
- The restructuring allows OpenAI to raise capital for its mission while ensuring the nonprofit’s resources grow proportionally, with plans to use funds for community impact, includin
1 hr 24 min - 321: The Cloud Pod is in Tears Trying to Understand Azure TiersThe Cloud Pod is in Tears Trying to Understand Azure TiersWelcome to episode 321 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are all on hand to bring you the latest in cloud and AI news, including increased metrics data (because who doesn’t love more data), some issues over at Cloudflare, and even bigger issues at Builder.ai – plus so much more.Let’s get started!Titles we almost went with this week
- Lost in Translation: Google Helps IPv6 Find Its Way to IPv4
- BigQuery’s Soft Landing for Hard Problems
- CloudWatch Gets a Two-Week Memory Upgrade
- VM Glow-Up: From Gen1 Zero to Gen2 Hero
- Azure Gets Contextual: API Management Learns to Speak AI
- The Cloud Pod: Now Broadcasting from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
- LoRA LoRA on the Wall, Who’s the Finest Model of Them All
- Azure Says MFA or the Highway for Resource Management
- Two-Factor or Two-Furious: Azure’s Security Ultimatum
- Agent 007: License to Build
- CUD You Believe It? Google’s Discounts Get More Flexible
- WAF’s New Deal: Free Logs with Every Million Requests Served
- SOC It To Me: Google’s AI Security Workshop Tour
- MFA mandatory in Azure, now you too can hate/hate MS Authenticator
- AWS AMIs no longer the Tribbles of cloud computing
- ECS Exec; Justin’s prediction from 2018 finally comes true
General News00:56 FinOps Weekly Summit 2025
- Victor Garcia reached out and asked us to share the news about the FinOps Weekly Summit coming up on October 23rd, 2025.
- A lot of great speakers; if you’re in the FinOps space, we recommend it.
- Want to register? You can do that here.
01:53 Ignite Registration Opens
- San Francisco, Moscone Center
- November 18–21, 2025
- Need to convince your manager to pay for you to go? Find that letter here.
02:45 Addressing the unauthorized issuance of multiple TLS certificates for 1.1.1.1
- Some issues over at Cloudflare recently…
- Fina CA issued 12 unauthorized TLS certificates for Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver IP address between February 2024 and August 2025, violating domain control validation requirements and potentially allowing man-in-the-middle attacks on DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS connections.
- The incident highlights vulnerabilities in the Certificate Authority trust model where any trusted CA can issue certificates for any domain or IP without proper validation, though exploitation would require the attacker to have the private key, interce
55 min - 320: Azure gives your Finops person a heart attackWelcome to episode 320 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan are coming to you from Justin’s echo chamber and bringing all the latest in AI and Cloud news, including updates to Google’s Anti-trust case, AWS Cost MCP, new regions, updates to EKS, Veo, and Claude, and more! Let’s get into it.Titles we almost went with this week:
- Breaking Bad Bottlenecks: AWS Cooks Up Faster Container Pulls
- The Bucket List: Finding Your Lost Storage Dollars
- State of Denial: Terraform Finally Stops Saving Your Passwords
- Three Stages of Azure Grief: Development, Preview, and Launch
- Ground Control to Major Cloud: Microsoft Launches Planetary Computer Pro
- Veo Vidi Vici: Google Conquers Video Editing
- Red Alert: AWS Makes Production Accounts Actually Look Dangerous
- Amazon EKS Discovers the F5 Key
- Chaos Theory Meets ChatGPT: When Your Reliability Data Gets an AI Therapist
- Breaking Bad (Services): How AI Helps You Find What’s Already Broken
- Breaking Up is Hard to Cloud: Gemini Moves Back In
- Intel Inside Your Secrets: TDX Takes Over Google Cloud
- Lord of the Regions: The Return of the Kiwi
- All Blacks and All Stacks: AWS Goes Full Kiwi
- Azure Forecast: 100% Chance of Budget Alert Storms
- Google Keeps Its Cloud Together: A $2.5T Near Miss
- Shell We Dance? AWS Makes CLI Scripting Less Painful
- AWS Finally Admits Nobody Remembers All Those CLI Commands
- Cache Me If You Claude
- Your AWS Console gets its Colors, just don’t choose red shirts
- Amazon Q walks into a bar, Tells MCP to order it a beer.. The Bartender sighs and mutters “at least chatgpt just hallucinates its beer”
- Ryan’s shitty scripts now as a AWS CLI Library
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 News00:57 Google Dodges A 2.5t Breakup
- We have breaking news – and it’s good news for Google.
- Google successfully avoided a potential $2.5 trillion breakup following antitrust proceedings, maintaining its current corporate structure despite regulatory pressure.
- The decision represents a significant outcome for Big Tech antitrust cases, potentially setting a precedent for how regulators approach market dominance issues in the cloud and technology sectors.
- Cloud customers and partners can expect business continuity with Google Cloud Platform services, avoiding potential disruptions that could have resulted from a corporate restructuring.
- The ruling may influence how other major cloud providers structure their businesses and approach regulatory compliance, particularly around bundling services and market competition.
- Enterprise customers relying on Google’s integrated ecosystem of cloud, advertising, and productivity tools can continue their current architectures without concerns about service separation.
- You just KNOW Microsoft is super mad about this.
AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money02:16
56 min - 319: AWS Cost MCP: Your Billing Data Now Speaks HumanWelcome to episode 319 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan are in the studio to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news. AWS Cost MCP makes exploring your finops data as simple as english text. We’ve got a sunnier view for junior devs, a Microsoft open source development, tokens, and it’s even Kubernetes’ birthday – let’s get into it!Titles we almost went with this week:
- From Linux Hater to Open Source Darling: A Microsoft Love Story
- 20,000 Lines of Code and a Dream: Microsoft’s Open Source Glow-Up
- Ctrl+Alt+Delete Your Assumptions: Microsoft Goes Full Penguin
- Token and Esteem: Amazon Bedrock Gets a Counter
- CSI: Cloud Scene Investigation
- The Great SQL Migration: How AI Became the Universal Translator
- Token and Ye Shall Receive: Bedrock’s New Counting Feature
- The Count of Monte Token: A Bedrock Tale – mk
- Ctrl+Z for Your Database: Now with Built-in Lag Time
- IP Freely: GKE Takes the Pain Out of Address Management
- AWS CEO: AI Can’t Replace Junior Devs Because Someone Has to Fix the AI’s Code
- Better Late Than Never: RDS PostgreSQL Gets Time Travel
- The SQL Whisperer: Teaching AI to Speak Database
- DigitalOcean Goes Full Chatbot: Your Infrastructure Now Speaks Human
- Musk vs Cook: The App Store Wars Episode AI
- Firestore Goes Mongo: A Database Love Story
- GKE Turns 10: Now With More Candles and Less Complexity
- Prime Day Infrastructure: Now With 87,000 AI Chips and a Robot Army
- AWS Scales to Quadrillion Requests: Your Black Friday Traffic Looks Cute
- AWS billing now speaks human, thanks to MCPs
- The Bastion Holds: Azure’s New Gateway to Kubernetes Kingdoms
- The Surge Before the Merge: Azure’s New Upgrade Strategy
- CNI Overlay: Because Your Pods Deserve Their Own ZIP Code
AI Is Going Great – or How ML Makes Money00:46 Musk’s xAI sues Apple, OpenAI alleging scheme that harmed X, Grok
- xAI filed a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI, alleging anticompetitive practices in AI chatbot distribution, claiming Apple deprioritizes competing AI apps like Grok in the App Store while favoring ChatGPT through direct integration into iOS devices.
- The lawsuit highlights tensions in AI platform distribution models, where cloud-based AI services depend on mobile app stores for user access, potentially creating gatekeeping concerns for competing generative AI providers.
- Apple’s partnership with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iPhone, iPad, and Mac products represents a shift toward native AI integration rather than app-based access, which could impact how cloud AI services reach end users.
- The dispute underscores growing competition in the generative AI market, where multiple players, including xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Perplexity, are vying for market position through both cloud APIs and mobile distribution channels.
- For cloud developer
1 hr 37 min - 318: One Extension to Rule Them All (And in the VS Code Bind Them)Welcome to episode 318 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! We’re going on an adventure! Justin and Ryan have formed a fellowship of the cloud, and they’re bringing you all the latest and greatest news from Valinor to Helm’s Deep, and Azure to AWS to GCP. We’ve water issues, some Magic Quadrants, and Aurora updates…but sadly no potatoes. Let’s get into it!Titles we almost went with this week:
- You’ve Got No Mail: AOL Finally Hangs Up on Dial-Up
- Ctrl+Alt+Delete Climate Change
- H2-Oh No: Your Gmail is Thirsty
- The Price is Vibe: Kiro’s New Request-Based Model
- Spec-tacular Pricing: Kiro Leaves the Waitlist Behind
- SHA-zam! GitHub Actions Gets Its Security Cape
- Breaking Bad Actions: GitHub’s Supply Chain Intervention
- Graph Your Way to Infrastructure Happiness
- The Tables Have Turned: S3 Gets Its Iceberg Moment
- Subnet Where It Hurts: GKE Finally Gets IP Address Relief
- All Your Database Are Belong to Database Center
- From Droplets to Dollars: DigitalOcean’s AI Pivot Pays Off
- DigitalOcean Rides the AI Wave to Record Earnings
- Agent Smith Would Be Proud: Microsoft’s Multi-Agent Matrix
- Aurora Borealis: A Decade of Database Enlightenment
- Fifteen Shades of Cloud: AWS’s Unbroken Streak
- The Fast and the Failover-ious: Aurora Edition
- Gone in Single-Digit Seconds: AWS’s Speedy Database Recovery
- Agent 007: License to Secure Your AI
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 News01:02 AOL is finally shutting down its dial-up internet service | AP News
- AOL is discontinuing its dial-up internet service on September 30, 2024, marking the end of a technology that introduced millions to the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s.
- Census data shows 163,401 US households still used dial-up in 2023, representing 0.13% of homes with internet subscriptions, highlighting the persistence of legacy infrastructure in underserved areas – which is honestly crazy.
- Here’s hoping that these folks are able to switch to alternatives, like Starlink.
- This shutdown reflects broader technology lifecycle patterns as companies retire legacy services like Skype, Internet Explorer, and AOL Instant Messenger to focus resources on modern platforms.
- The transition away from dial-up demonstrates the evolution from telephone-based connectivity to broadband and wireless technologies that now dominate internet access.
- AOL’s journey from a $164 billion valuation in 2000 to being sold by Verizon in 2021 illustrates the rapid shifts in technology markets and the challenges of ada
1 hr 6 min - 317: I Got 99 Problems, But a Hallucination Ain’t OneWelcome to episode 317 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and an out-of-breath (from outrunning bears) Ryan are back in the studio to bring you another episode of everyone’s favorite cloud and AI news wrap-up. This week we’ve got GTP-5, Oracle’s newly minted AI conference, hallucinations (not the good kind), and even a Cloud Journey follow-up. Let’s get into it!Titles we almost went with this week:
- Oracle Intelligence: Mission Las Vegas
- AI World: Oracle’s Excellent Adventure
- AI Gets a Reality Check: Amazon’s New Math Teacher for Hallucinating Models
- Jules Verne’s 20,000 Lines Under the C
- GPT-5: The Empire Strikes Back at Computing Costs
- 5⃣Five Alive: OpenAI’s Latest Language Model Drops
- GPT-5 is Alive! (And Ready for Your API Calls)
- From Kanban to Kan’t-Ban: Alienate Your User Base in One Update
- No More Console Hopping: ECS Logs Stay Put
- Following the Paper Trail: ECS Logs Go Live
- The Pull Request Whisperer
- Five’s Company: DigitalOcean Joins the GPT Party
- WireGuard Your Kubernetes: The Mesh-iah Has Arrived
- EKS-tending Your Reach: When Your Nodes Need a VPN Alternative
- Buttercup Blooms: DARPA’s Prize-Winning AI Security Tool Goes Public
- From DARPA to Docker: How Buttercup Brings AI Bug-Hunting to Your Laptop
- Agent 007: License to Query
- Compliance Manager: Because Nobody Dreams of Filling Out Federal Paperwork
- Do Compliance Managers dream of Public Sector sheep?
- Blob’s Your Uncle: Finding Lost Data in the Cloud
- Wassette: Teaching Your AI Assistant to Go Shopping for Tools
- Monitor, Monitor on the Wall, Who’s the Most Secure of All?
- Better Late Than IPv-Never
- VPC Logs: Now with 100% Less Manual Labor
- CloudWatch Catches All the Flows in Your Organization
- The Organization-Wide Net: No VPC Left Behind
- SQS Goes Super Size: Would You Like to Quadruple That?
- One MiB to Rule Them All: SQS’s Payload Growth Spurt
- Microsoft Finally Merges with Its $7.5 Billion Side Piece
- From Hub to Spoke: GitHub Loses Its Independence
- Cloud Run Forest Run: Google’s AI Workshop Marathon
- From Zero to AI Hero: Google’s Production Pipeline Workshop
- The Fast and the Serverless: Cloud Run Drift
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 News01:17 GitHub will be folded into Microsoft proper as CEO steps down – Ars Technica
- GitHub will lose its operational independence and be integrated into Microsoft’s CoreAI organization in 2025, ending its separate CEO structure that has existed since Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition in 2018.
- The reorganization eliminates the CEO position, with GitHub’s leadership team reporting to multiple executives within CoreAI rather than a single leader, potentially impacting decision-making speed and product direction.
1 hr 29 min - 316: Microsoft’s New AI Agent Has Trust Issues (With Software)Welcome to episode 316 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’ve got earnings (with sound effects, obviously) as well as news from DeepSeek, DocumentDB, DigitalOcean, and a bunch of GPU news. Justin and Matt are here to lead you through all of it, so let’s get started!Titles we almost went with this week:
- Lake Sentinel: The Security Data Monster Nobody Asked For
- Certificate Authority Issues: When Your Free Lunch Gets a Security Audit
- Slash and Learn: Gemini Gets Command-ing
- DigitalOcean Drops Anchor in AI Waters with Gradient Platform
- The Three Stages of Azure Grief: Development, Preview, and Launch
- E for Enormous: Azure’s New VM Sizes Are Anything But Virtual
- SRE You Later: Azure’s AI Agent Takes Over Your On-Call Duties
- Site Reliability Engineer? More Like AI Reliability Engineer
- Azure Disks Get Elastic Waistbands
- Agent Smith Would Be Proud: Google’s Multi-Agent Matrix Gets Real
- C4 Yourself: Google Explodes Into GA with Intel’s Latest Silicon
- The Cost is Right: GCP Edition
- Penny for Your Cloud Thoughts: Google’s Budget-Friendly Update
- DocumentDB Goes on a Diet: Now Available in Serverless Size
- MongoDB Compatibility Gets the AWS Serverless Treatment
- No Server? No Problem: DocumentDB Joins the Serverless Party
- Stream Big or Go Home: Lambda’s 10x Payload Boost
- Lambda Response Streaming: Because Size Matters
- GPT Goes Open Source Shopping
- GPT’s Open Source Awakening
- When Your Antivirus Needs an Antivirus: Enter Project Ire
- The Opus Among Us: Anthropic’s Coding Assistant Gets an Upgrade
- Serverless is becoming serverful in streaming responses
General News02:08 It’s Earnings Time! (INSERT AWESOME SOUND EFFECTS HERE)
02:16 Alphabet beats earnings expectations, raises spending forecast
- Google Cloud revenue hit $13.62 billion, up 32% year-over-year, with OpenAI now using Google’s infrastructure for ChatGPT, signaling growing enterprise confidence in Google’s AI infrastructure capabilities.
- Alphabet is raising its 2025 capital expenditure forecast from $75 billion to $85 billion, driven by cloud and AI demand, with plans to increase spending further in 2026 as it competes for AI workloads.
- AI Overviews now serves 2 billion monthly users across 200+ countries, while the Gemini app reached 450 million monthly active users, demonstrating Google’s scale in deploying AI services globally.
- The $10 billion increase in planned capital spending reflects the infrastructure arms race among cloud providers to capture AI workloads, which require significant compute and specialized hardware investments.
- Google’s cloud growth rate of 32% outpaces its overall revenue growth of 14%, indicating the strategic importance of cloud services as traditional search and advertising face increased AI competition.
03:55 Justin – “I don’t know what it takes to actually run one of these large models at like ultimate scale that like a ChatGPT needs or Anthropic, but I have to imagine it’s just thousands and thousands of GPUs just working nonstop.”
04:31
1 hr 6 min - 315: EC2’s New Shutdown Shortcut: Because Sometimes You Just Need to Pull the PlugWelcome to episode 315 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Your hosts, Justin and Matt, are here to bring you the latest in cloud and AI news, including news about AI from the White House, the newest hacker exploits, and news from CloudWatch, CrowdStrike, and GKE – plus so much more. Let’s get into it!Titles we almost went with this week:
- SharePoint and Tell: Government Secrets at Risk
- Zero-Day Hero: How Hackers Found SharePoint’s Achilles’ Heel
- Amazon Q Gets an F in Security Class
- Spark Joy: GitHub’s Marie Kondo Approach to App Development
- No Code? No Problem! GitHub Lights a Spark Under App Creation
- GKE Turns 10: Still Not Old Enough to Deploy Itself
- A Decade of Containers: Pokémon GO Caught Them All
- Kubernetes Engine Hits Double Digits, Still Can’t Count Past 9 Pods
- Account Names: The Missing Link in AWS Cost Optimization
- Flash Gordon Saves Your VMs from the Azure-verse
- The Flash: Fastest VM Monitor in the Multiverse
- Ctrl+AI+Delete: Rebooting America’s Artificial Intelligence Strategy
- The AImerican Dream: White House Plots Path to Silicon Supremacy
- CrowdStrike’s Year of Living Resiliently
- Kernel Panic at the Disco: A Recovery Story
- The Search is Over (But Your Copilot License Isn’t)
- Ground Control to Major Tom: You’re Fired
- GPU Booking.com: Reserve Your Neural Network’s Next Vacation
- Calendar Man Strikes Again: This Time He’s Scheduling Your TPUs
- AirBnB for AI: Short-Term Rentals for Your Machine Learning Models
- Claude’s World Tour: Now Playing in Every Region
- Going Global: Claude Gets Its Passport Stamped on Vertex AI
- SQS Finally Learns to Share: No More Queue Hogging
- The Noisy Neighbor Gets Shushed: Amazon’s Fair Play for Queues
- CloudWatch Gets Its AI Degree in Observability
- Teaching Old Logs New Tricks: CloudWatch Goes GenAI
- The Agent Whisperer: CloudWatch’s New AI Monitoring Powers
- NotebookLM Gets Its PowerPoint License
- Slides, Camera, AI-ction: NotebookLM Goes Visual
- The SSL-ippery Slope: Azure’s Managed Certs Go Public or Go Home
- Breaking Bad Certificates: DigiCert’s New Rules Leave Some Apps High and Dry
- Firewall Rules: Now with a Rough Draft Feature
- Azure’s New Policy: Think Before You Deploy
General News00:50 Hackers exploiting a SharePoint zero-day are seen targeting government agencies | TechCrunch
- Microsoft SharePoint servers are being actively exploited through a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-53770), with initial attacks primarily targeting government agencies, universities, and energy companies, according to security researchers.
- The vulnerability affects on-premises SharePoint installations only, not cloud versions, with researchers identifying 9,000-10,000 vulnerable instances accessible from the internet that require immediate patching or disconnection.
- Initial exploitation appears t
1 hr 21 min - TCP-Talks: Focus on Value: How FinOps Transformed from Cost Cops to Business Enablers
For this special edition of TCP Talks, Justin Brodley is joined by four distinguished guests from the FinOps Foundation following the recent FinOps X conference in San Diego. Rob Martin, Mike Fuller, Graham Murphy, and the TCP team dive deep into the evolution of FinOps from pure cloud cost management to the broader “Cloud Plus” world, the rapid adoption of Focus 1.2, and how AI is transforming both what we manage and how we manage it.
About Our GuestsRob Martin has been with the FinOps Foundation for four years, currently focusing on the AI working group, ITAM initiatives, and the rapidly growing public sector adoption. His experience spans training development and strategic initiatives that have helped shape the foundation’s direction during a period of explosive growth.
Mike Fuller is one of the founding members of the FinOps Foundation and co-author of the Cloud FinOps book. As a member of the Focus project steering committee, he’s been instrumental in developing the specification that’s standardizing cloud billing data across the industry.
Graham Murphy serves as Director of SaaS P&L for Technology One in Brisbane. With 8-9 years in FinOps and recently nominated as both a FinOps Ambassador and Focus Ambassador, Graham brings a practitioner’s perspective from the APAC region and insights on implementing Focus in a SaaS environment.
Conference Growth and EvolutionThe 2025 FinOps X conference in San Diego marked a significant milestone with approximately 2,000 attendees—a substantial increase from the previous year. Despite the larger venue, the conference maintained its intimate feel, allowing for meaningful connections and knowledge sharing.
2:49 Graham: “AI definitely grew a lot this year. A lot more talk about how you go about managing AI, how FinOps is going to drive better value out of your AI investments. And also just a lot of people trying to understand where to start.”
The conference format evolved with more senior leadership participation, including executives from PepsiCo, Ticketmaster, and Nubank sharing their FinOps journeys. The quality of presentations notably improved, with practitioners willing to share deeper insights into their mature FinOps programs.
The Cloud Plus RevolutionA dominant theme throughout the conference was the expansion beyond traditional cloud cost management into what the foundation calls “Cloud Plus”—encompassing SaaS, data center, licensing, and AI costs.
4:31 Mike: “We saw that sort of echoed quite well across many of the breakout sessions by practitioners exactly how they’re sort of incorporating other costs into the conversation of their practices.”
6:56 Rob: “Ticketmaster said something that I loved, which was that they were ‘happily hybrid’… we understand that we’ve got all these different modalities that we’re going to use to deliver value—SaaS models and data center models and cloud models.”
This shift represents a fundamental change in how organizations view FinOps, moving from a cloud-specific practice to a comprehensive IT financial management approach.
48 min
About The Cloud Pod | Weekly AI & Cloud News on AWS, Azure & GCP
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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.