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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
- 305: 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 Money01:50 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
1 hr 13 min - 304: 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 Up01:53 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 Money09:20 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
1 hr 17 min - 303: 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 Up02:50 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 NewsIt’s Earnings time – cue the sound effects!
08:03 Alphabet’s Q1 earnings shattered analyst expectations, sending the stock soaring. GoogleR
1 hr 25 min - 302: 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 News01:37 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
1 hr 33 min - 1 hr 20 min
- 300: 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.GCPPre-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 How we built th
1 hr 21 min - 299: 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 Money02:27 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 open standard (think “USB-C for AI integrations”) th
1 hr 21 min - 298: 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 Money00:46 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
1 hr 6 min - 297: Save the Date So You Can Get Some Skills – In AI!
Welcome to episode 297 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matthew have beaten the black lung and are in the studio – ready to bring you all the latest and greatest in cloud and AI news! We’ve got Wiz buyouts (that security, it’s so hot right now!) Gemma 3, Glue 5 (but not 3 or 4) and Gemini Robots – plus looking forward to AI Skills Fest and Google Next, all this week on The Cloud Pod.
Titles we almost went with this week:- Google! Yer a WIZ—Ard
- Google Announces Network Security Integration… and that must include WIZ
- Gemini Robots…. What could go wrong
- AI Data Studios … So Hot Right Now
- I want 32 Billion dollars
- Azure Follow AWS in bad life choices – mk
- Wait Glue is more than v2
- What happened to Glue 3 and 4?
- 5th Try and AWS Glue still sucks
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 Up01:05 Microsoft quantum computing claim still lacks evidence: physicists are dubious
- A MS researcher presented results behind the company’s controversial claim to have created the first topological qubits – a long-sought goal of quantum computing.
- Theorists said it’s a hard problem, and that it was a beautiful talk but the claims come without evidence, and people think they have gone overboard.
- The Head of Quantum at Amazon was also highly skeptical:
- https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-exec-casts-doubt-microsoft-quantum-claims-2025-3
02:09 Justin – “No one’s really buying Microsoft actually created a new topological qubit. There’s some doubt… basically they said that what they showed, which is a microscopic H-shaped aluminum wire on top of indium arsenide – a superconductor at ultra-cold temperatures, and the devices are designed to harness majoranas, previously undiscovered quasi-particles that are essential for topological qubits to work, and the goals for majoranas to appear at the four tips of the H-shaped wire emerging from reflective-behavior electrons, and these majorans in theory could be used to perform quantum computing that are resistant to information loss, but no proof, no evidence, and they think Microsoft’s full of it.”
General News04:12 Google + Wiz: Strengthening Multicloud Security
- Google has announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Wiz. This will allow them to better provide business and governments with more choice in how they protect themselves.
- Google answers why now… and that they have seen their Mandiant consultants witness the accelerati
1 hr 8 min - 296: Google Forces AI Protection
Welcome to episode 296 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Today is a twofer – Justin and Ryan are in the house to make sure you don’t miss out on any of today’s important cloud and AI news. From AI Protection, to Google Next, to Amazon Q Developer, we’ve got it all, this week on TCP!
Titles we almost went with this week:- Amazon Step Functions, walks step by step into my IDE
- Deepseek seeks the truth of “is it serverless or servers”?
- Well Architected Reviews by AI… What will my solutions architects do now?
- The cloud pod hosts steps over the Azure EU Data Boundary
- BYOIP to ALBs… only years too late for everyone.
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 HashiCorp and Red Hat, better together
- Hashicorp has more details on its future, with the recent IBM acquisition in this blog post.
- They talk about the wide range of Day 2 operations, including things like drift detection, image management and patching, rightsizing, and configuration management.
- As Red Hat Ansible is a purpose built operational management platform, it makes it easier to properly configure resources after the initial creation, but also to evolve the configuration after setup, and then execute ad-hoc playbooks to keep things running reliably and more securely at scale.
- Some additional things they’re exploring, now that the acquisition has closed:
- Red Hat Ansible Inventory generated dynamically by Terraform.
- Official Terraform modules for Redhat Ansible, making it easier to trigger terraform from Ansible Playbooks.
- Redhat and Hashicorp officially support the Red Hat Ansible Provider for Terraform, making it easier to trigger Ansible from Terraform.
- Evolving Terraform provisioners to support a more comprehensive set of lifecycle integrations.
- Improved mechanisms to invoke Ansible Playbooks outside of the resource provisioning lifecycle
- Customers – not surprisingly – regularly integrate Vault and Openshift, and they have identified dozens of connection points that can add value, including:
- Vault Secrets Operator for OpenShift
- Etcd data encryption
- Argo CI/CD
- Istio Certificate issuance
01:48 Justin – “That’s a lot of promise for Ansible there, that I’m not sure it completely lives up to…”
07:09
1 hr
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.