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.
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Welcome to episode 333 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are taking a quick break from re:Invent festivities. They bring you the latest and greatest in Cloud and AI news. This week, we discuss Norad and Anthropic teaming up to bring you Christmas cheer. Wait, is that right? Huh. We also have undersea cables, some Turkish region delight, and a LOT of Opus 4.5 news. Let’s get into it!
Titles we almost went with this week
Boring Error Pages Not Found
Claude Goes Native in Snowflake: Finally, AI That Stays Where Your Data Lives
Cross-Cloud Romance: AWS and Google Make It Official with Interconnect
Google Gemini Puts OpenAI in Code Red: The Tables Have Turned
Azure NAT Gateway V2: Now With More Zones Than a Parking Lot
From ChatGPT to Chat-Uh-Oh: OpenAI Sounds the Alarm as Gemini Steals 200 Million
Users **Anthropic
Scheduled Actions: Because Your VMs Need a Work-Life Balance Too
Finally, Your 500 Errors Can Look as Good as Your Homepage
Foundry Model Router: Because Choosing Between 47 AI Models is Nobody’s Idea of Fun
Google Takes the Scenic Route: New Cable Avoids the Sunda Strait Traffic Jam
Azure Application Gateway Gets Its TCP/IP Diploma
Google Cloud Gets Its Türkiye Dinner: 2 Billion Dollar Cloud Feast Coming Soon
Microsoft Foundry: Turning AI Chaos into Compliance Gold
The model supports up to 14 reference images for style consistency and generates 4K resolution outputs with multilingual text rendering capabilities.
The model includes Google Search grounding for factual accuracy in generated infographics and diagrams, plus built-in SynthID watermarking for transparency. Copyright indemnification will be available at general availability under Google’s shared responsibility framework.
Enterprise integrations are live with Adobe Firefly, Photoshop, Canva, and Figma, enabling production-grade creative workflows. Major retailers, including Klarna, Shopify, and Wayfair, report using the model for product visualization and marketing asset generation at scale.
Developers can access Nano Banana Pro through Vertex AI with Provisioned Throughput and Pay As You Go pricing options, plus advanced safety filters. Business users get access through Google Workspace apps, including Slides, Vids, and
Chapters
(00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: This Week's News
(00:03:02) - Google Launches Nano Banana Pro in Google Workspace
(00:05:59) - Cloud Opus 4.5 Availability and Performance
(00:10:41) - OpenAI Declares Code Red as Google's Gemini GPT G
(00:14:00) - AWS 10: Prediction vs. Keynotes
(00:14:49) - Google Cloud Region Coming to Turkey
(00:18:52) - Google to Build New Subsea Cable Link Between Australia and Thailand
(00:22:12) - Google Cloud Next
(00:25:57) - Google Cloud VPN Flow Logs now support Cross-Cloud Networks
(00:29:43) - Amazon Cloud Connects to Google Cloud
(00:32:10) - Azure Application Gateway: TLS and TCP Protocol Termination
(00:35:39) - Azure 2.8: Agent to Agent in Public Preview
(00:37:02) - Microsoft Cloud Open Sport 5
(00:39:10) - Azure DNS & Security: Threat Intelligence Feed Blocking
(00:41:22) - NAT Gateway: Standard V2 SKU and Public Preview
(00:45:23) - Azure app service: Custom Error Pages now in general availability
(00:47:22) - Microsoft Foundry
(00:51:02) - Microsoft's AI Orchestration Layer Gets Scheduled Tasks
(00:56:18) - Week in the Cloud: AWS Extravaganza
(00:57:06) - NORAD's AI-powered Holiday Tools
(01:00:34) - Elf Photo Day
(01:01:20) - Unifi: Printer v2 local
332: 2025 Re:Invent Predictions Draft – May The Odds Be Ever In Your Favor
Episode 332
Friday, November 28, 2025 • Duration 31:08
Welcome to episode 332 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s Thanksgiving week, which can only mean one thing: AWS Re:Invent predictions! In this special episode, Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matt engage in the annual tradition of drafting their best guesses for what AWS will announce at the biggest cloud conference of the year. Justin is the reigning champion (probably because he actually reads the show notes), but with a reverse snake draft order determined by dice roll, anything could happen. Will Werner announce his retirement? Is Cognito finally getting a much-needed overhaul? And just how many times will “AI” be uttered on stage? Grab your turkey and let’s get predicting!
Titles we almost went with this week:
Roll For Initiative: The Re:Invent Prediction Draft
Justin’s Winning Streak: A Study in Actually Doing Your Homework
Serverless GPUs and Broken Dreams: Our Re:Invent Wishlist
Shooting in the Dark: AWS Predictions Edition
We’re Never Good at This, But Here We Go Again
Vegas Odds: What Happens at Re:Invent, Gets Predicted Wrong
AWS Re:Invent Predictions 2025
The annual prediction draft is here! Draft order was determined by dice roll: Jonathan first, followed by Ryan, Justin, and Matt in last position. As always, it’s a reverse order format, with points awarded for each correct prediction announced during the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday keynotes.
Jonathan’s Predictions
Serverless GPU Support – An extension to Lambda or a different service that provides on-demand serverless GPU/inference capability. Likely with requirements for pre-warmed provisioned instances.
Agentic Platform for Continuous AI Agents – A service that allows agents to run continuously with goals or instructions, performing actions periodically or on-demand in the real world. Think: running agents on a schedule that can check conditions and take automated actions.
Werner Vogels Retirement Announcement – Werner will announce that this is his last Re:Invent keynote and that he is retiring.
Ryan’s Predictions
Chapters
324: Clippy’s Revenge: The AI Assistant That Actually Works - Sort Of
Episode 324
Thursday, October 9, 2025 • Duration 01:04:28
Welcome 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
Google Cloudfiled 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.
Chapters
231: The CloudPod Takes the Highway to the Datazone
Episode 231
Thursday, October 19, 2023 • Duration 33:21
Welcome to The Cloud Pod episode 231! This week Justin and Matthew are discussing updates to Terraform testing for code validation, some new tools from Docker, look into the now generally available AWS DataZone, and dig into the evolution of passkeys over at Google. Slide into the passenger seat and let’s check out this week’s cloud news.
Titles we almost went with this week:
The Cloud Pod wants to validate your code
The Cloud Pod can now test in parallel
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.
General News this Week:
At Hashiconf this week, they announced Terraform 1.6 is now available for download.
The most exciting feature? We’re so glad you asked!
The new terraform test framework that deprecates and replaces the previous experimental features added in 0.15.
Terraform test allows authors to consistently validate the functionality of their configuration in a safe environment. Tests are written using familiar HCL syntax, so there is no need to learn a new language to get started.
Config-Driven import introduced in Terraform 1.5 gets improvements to support variable driven ID attributes. Making it easier than ever to import existing items.
Cli Improvements
Several changes are coming to the S3 Backend remote state in this release to better align with the SDK and the official terraform AWS provider.
It should still work but you may receive warnings about deprecated attributes. May the odds be ever in your favor.
230: If I Ever Own a Sailboat, I Will Name it Kafka… and Sail it on a Data Lake
Episode 230
Wednesday, October 11, 2023 • Duration 54:50
Welcome to The Cloud Pod episode 230, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re sailing our pod across the data lake and talking about updates to managed delivery from Kafka. We also take a gander at Bedrock, some new security tools from our friends over at Google. We’re also back with our Cloud Journey Series talking security theater.Stay Tuned!
Titles we almost went with this week:
Security and Delivery Within an Hour… Sacrilegious!
Unlock Global Innovation with Sovereign Cloud
Microsoft… What in the World Are You Doing?
⛵If I ever own a sailboat, I will name it Kafka.
And the Oscar for Security Theater goes to…
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.
General News this Week:
01:15 Microsoft fans… This isn’t going to be pretty. You were warned.
In what has turned out to be a not so great week for Microsoft (and their customers) the software giant has released an urgent warning for SQL server instances running on Azure. **Insert meme of dog saying it’s fine surrounded by fire here**
229: The CloudPod Guide to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Container Chaos
Episode 229
Monday, October 9, 2023 • Duration 40:41
Welcome episode 228 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are taking a look at Magic Quadrant, Gemini AI, and GraalOS – along with all the latest news from OCI, Google, AWS, and Azure.
Titles we almost went with this week:
The CloudPod wonders if Anthropic’s Santa Clause will bring us everything we want in an AI Bot.
The Cloud Pod recommends protection to achieve Safer
Google rides the gemini rocket to AI JPB
The only Copilot I need Azure, is Booze
GraalOS, or what we now call ‘the noise our CFO makes when he receives the Oracle audit bills’
The hosts of the Cloud pod would like to understand how to properly pronounce GraalOS
Is Oracle even on the magic quadrant for cloud?
RedHat Puts lipstick on the pig and calls it OpenStack
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.
Red Hat is rebranding the Red Hat OpenStack Platform, which will now be known as Red Hat OpenStack services on OpenShift. You know, because let’s add containers. What could go wrong?
We didn’t know anyone was still trying to openstack at this point – did you?
228: Microsoft and Oracle Unite Their Legal Departments to Bring You…
Episode 228
Wednesday, September 27, 2023 • Duration 01:15:02
Welcome episode 228 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts are Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan –
Titles we almost went with this week:
The Cloud Pod gets scanned for a malware infection
The Cloud Pod gives up on security
The Cloud Pod burns cash on a new Mac instance
⚔️Copilot’s Copyright Crusade – Microsoft’s Got Your Back in Copyright Battles
☁️The Cloud Pod loves it when the clouds come together
The Cloud Pod doubts 90 day account expirations are a good idea
Matt brings a bit of class to the Cloud Pod
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.
General News this Week:
AWS
Amazon has a couple of new instances for us this week, including Amazon R7a, which is powered by the 4th generation AMD EPYC (Genoa) processors with a maximum frequency of 3.7ghz – this has 50 percent higher performance compared to the previous generation instances.
227: The Cloud Pod Peeps at Azure’s Explicit Proxy
Episode 227
Wednesday, September 13, 2023 • Duration 51:58
Welcome episode 227 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts are Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan – and they’re REALLY excited to tell you all about the 161 one things announced at Google Next. Literally, all the things. We’re also saying farewell to EC2 Classic, Amazon SES, and Azure’s Explicit Proxy – which probably isn’t what you think it is.
Titles we almost went with this week:
Azure announced a what proxy?
The Cloud Pod would like you to engage with our email.
Oracle Rover to Base… Come In Rover
️A snarky look at 160 Google Next Announcements
Google Next’s got 161 Announcements and AI ain’t one
How high can you count, Google can count to 161
⚖️The cloud pod would like to get consensus on the definition of light weight
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.
General News this Week:
AWS
Werner has a blog post talking about the end of Ec2-classic, with the final EC2-Classic instance being turned off on August 15th, 2 years after the announcement.
He points out that the reason it was “classic” is because of the network architecture. All instances launched on a giant 10.0.0.0/8 flat network shared between all customers.
The process for end users was simple, but it was highly complex for AWS at the time.
The m1.small that launched was equivalent of 1 virtual CPU powered by a 1.7ghz Xeon processor with 1.75gb of ram, and 160gb of local disk, and 250mb/s of network bandwidth. For the low price of $0.10 per clocked hour.
226: Duet, Co-Pilot, and a Code Whisperer Walk into a bar in San Francisco
Episode 226
Friday, September 8, 2023 • Duration 01:05:42
Welcome episode 226 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Matt and Ryan chat about all the news and announcements from Google Next, including – surprise surprise – the hot topic of AI, GKE Enterprise, Duet, Co-Pilot, Code Whisperer and more! There’s even some non-Next news thrown into the episode. So whether you’re interested in BART or Bard, we’ve got the news from SF just for you.
Titles we almost went with this week:
️The cloud pod sings a duet, guess who was singing
You get AI, you get AI, Everyone Gets AI
Does a Mandiant Hunt, Or does a Hunter mandiant?
️The Cloud Pod goes into ROM Mode
Does a mandalorian Hunt, Or does a Hunter a mandalorian?
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.
General News this Week:
So you know Github Copilot, Duet AI, and Codewhisperer…. But do you know Code LLama? (Meta you better get good stickers on this)
Meta has released the source code for the Llama 2 based Code Specialized LLM in three sizes 7B, 13B, and 35B parameters.
Each model is trained with 500b tokens of code and code-related data.
The 7B and 13b base and instructor models have also been trained with fill-in-the-middle capability allowing them to insert code into existing code.
The 7B model can run on a single GPU, the 34B model however returns the best results and for the best for coding assistance… while the 7b and 13b are great for real-time code completions.
Training recipes for Code Llama are available on the .
225: The Cloud Pod Proclaims: Merry Google Next Eve!
Episode 225
Monday, August 28, 2023 • Duration 33:54
Google Next Eve!
Welcome episode 225 of The CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan are your hosts this week as we discuss all things Google Next! We talk schedule offerings, make our predictions about announcements, and prepare to be generally wrong about everything. Also – do you like stickers? Everyone likes stickers! Be on the lookout for us, and maybe you can have one.
Titles we almost went with this week:
None! Google Next is the next big thing, so of course it’s the title.
A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:
Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.
Pre-Show
Hashicorp has responded in their FAQ to some of the concerns we brought up when we talked about them moving to the BSL license in our last show.
Question: Can I host the HashiCorp products as a service internal to my organization?
Answer: Yes. The terms of the BSL allow for all non-production and production usage, except for providing competitive offerings to third parties that embed or host our software. Hosting the products for your internal use of your organization is permitted. HashiCorp considers an organization as including all of its affiliates. This means one division can host a HashiCorp product for use by another internal division.
Q: What is a “competitive offering” under the HashiCorp BSL license?
A: A “competitive offering” is a product that is sold to third parties, including through paid support arrangements, that significantly overlaps the capabilities of a HashiCorp commercial product. For example, this definition would include hosting or embedding Terraform as part of a solution that is sold competitively against our commercial versions of Terraform. By contrast, products that are not sold or supported on a paid basis are always allowed under the HashiCorp BSL license because they are not considered competitive.
New Trainium 3 Chips, Inferentia, and Graviton Chips – New generation of AWS custom silicon across training, inference, and general compute.
Expanded Model Availability in Bedrock – AWS will significantly expand the number of models available in Bedrock, potentially via partnerships or integrations with additional providers.
Major Refresh to AWS Organizations – UI-based or functionality refresh providing better visibility into SCPs, OU mappings, and stack sets across organizations.
(00:00:02) - Episode 332: Reinvent Predictions For
(00:01:26) - Reinvent: The Contest
(00:03:35) - How to Predict the AI Announcement
(00:04:23) - Serverless GPUs: First Step
(00:05:58) - SageMaker vs. Amazon: The Fight
(00:09:56) - What is the Future of AI Agents?
(00:11:03) - Facebook is an Agent Platform, but...
(00:15:09) - Top Tech Speakers: ML, AI and the Warner Key
(00:16:15) - Third and Final Prediction
(00:17:15) - WSJDLive: Future of AWS IT refresh
(00:18:18) - 3 of the Best Security Hub Features
(00:19:22) - AWS: Cognito 2.0 or Agentic Identities?
(00:21:27) - Tiebreaker: How Many Times Will AI Be Said?
(00:23:28) - What to Do to Reinvent Yourself at Reinvent 2012
(00:24:00) - Amazon's AI Wish List
(00:29:50) - A Taste of Re Invent 2018
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 International Political Economy study suggests ending restrictive licensing could unlock €1.2 trillion in additional EU GDP by 2030 and generate €450 billion annually in fiscal savings and productivity gains.
03:32 Jonathan – “I’d feel happier about these complaints Google were making if they actually reciprocated the deals they make for their customers in the...
(00:36:45) - Google's Flex Start VMS for AI & GKE Autop
(00:41:48) - Google Launches Cloud SQL, BigQuery Extensions
(00:45:11) - BigQuery and Google Analytics: AI Data Analysis & Forecast
(00:47:02) - Microsoft Azure Migrate and Modernize: Cloud Code vs. Microsoft
(00:53:22) - Microsoft's Azure Marketplace Unifying with AppSource
(00:56:06) - Azure Compute Gallery: Soft Delete
(00:57:49) - Microsoft Azure Outages: Lessons Learned
(01:03:32) - Week in Cloud: A Week of Consistency
You can check out the Testing Terraform overview page here, or the Write Terraform tests tutorial here.
03:22 Justin – “ One of the interesting things that, you know, that wasn’t part of this particular announcement is that they’re also adding an ability to use AI to help you with yo...
Microsoft has detailed a new campaign in which attackers unsuccessfully attempted to move laterally to a cloud environment through a SQL server instance.
The attacker initially exploited a SQL injection vulnerability in an app, and then was able to gain access and elevated permission on MS SQL instance deployed in Azure VM.
The threat actor than attempted to move horizontally by abusing the server’s cloud identity, which could possess elevated permissions (least privilege folks)
MS says it found no evidence that the attacker successfully moved.
Considering the recent criticism by Tenable CEO who threw them under the bus for not fixing a major vulnerability for over 90 days, this warning and confirmation se...
“By integrating Kubernetes with OpenStack, organizations see improved resource management and scalability, greater flexibility across the hybrid cloud, simplified development and DevOps practices and more,” said Sean Cohen, director of product management in Red Hat’s Hybrid Platforms organizations.
Per Holger, Mueller openstack has gotten a lot of popularity in the Telecommunications industry where they use it to build private clouds to run their networks… *adds to the list of don’t work there… telecommunications companies*
02:32 Justin – “I mean, OpenShift is just like Convox. It’s a plat...
It also supports Double Data rate 5 (DDR5) memory.
From 1 vcpu and 8gb of ramp to 192 vcpu 1.5tb of memory
Not excited for AMD? Would you rather pay more money for an Intel version? Well fear not! Also available is the new R7iz instances – which are the fastest 4th generation scalable-based (sapphire rapids) instances with 3....
Werners blog even ran on the m1 small for 5+ years before he moved it to the Amazon S3 website feature.
VPC’s introduced in 2013, allows AWS customers to have their own slice of the cloud.. But classic still lived for another decade.
The EC2 team kept classic running until every instance was retired or migrated, providing the necessary documentation, tools and support from engineering and account management through the process.
Werner shows that this is one of the best examples of delivering cloud for today’s workloads as well as tomorrow, and how AWS won’t pull the rug out from under you.
<...
04:08 Matthew – “It’s interesting; if you go deep into the article there, they start to digress into like ‘Hey, this 7 and the 13 billion are better for near real time response back’ and the 34 billion… is better for fine tuning for yourself. So they really go into a little bit more detail of how to do it. And, you know, I think they also put out some code snippets if you kind of dive into it a little bit more, which I thought was very nice.”
Q: What does the term “embedded” mean under the HashiCorp BSL license?
A: Under the HashiCorp BSL license, the term “embedded” means including the source code or object code, including executable binaries, from a HashiCorp product in a competitive product. “Embedded” also means packaging the competitive product in such a way that the HashiCorp product must be accessed or downloaded for the competitive product to operate.
Q: What if HashiCorp releases a new product or feature in the future that makes my project competitive?
A: If HashiCorp creates an offering in the future that is competitive with a product you...
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