The Cloud Pod cover art

The Cloud Pod

The Cloud Pod

By: Justin Brodley Jonathan Baker Ryan Lucas and Matt Kohn
Listen for free

About this listen

 The Cloud Pod is your one-stop-shop for all things Public, Hybrid, Multi-cloud, and private cloud. Cloud providers continue to accelerate with new features, capabilities, and changes to their APIs. Let Justin, Jonathan, Ryan and Peter help navigate you through this changing cloud landscape via our weekly podcast.© 2026 The Cloud Pod Economics
Episodes
  • 339: Just-in-Time Secrets: Because Your AI Agent Can't Keep Its Mouth Shut

    339: Just-in-Time Secrets: Because Your AI Agent Can't Keep Its Mouth Shut
    Jan 29 2026

    Welcome to episode 339 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Matt are in the studio today to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI announcements, including more personnel shifts (and it doesn’t seem like it was very friendly), a new way to get much needed copper, and Azure marketplace advertising 4,000 different models. What’s the real story? Let’s get into it and find out!

    Titles we almost went with this week
    • US-EAST-1: Still the Least Reliable Friend You Keep Inviting to Parties **OpenAI
    • 0⃣ From Zero to Inference: BigQuery Makes Open Models a Two-SQL Problem
    • AWS Goes Full Brandenburg Gate: Sovereign Cloud Opens for Business
    • Seven Ate Nine: AWS Skips G7 and Goes Straight to G7e Instances
    • From Crawling to Calling: Cloudflare Buys Human Native to Fix AI’s Data Problem
    • Finally, an AI That Actually Listens to Your War Room Panic
    • Tag, You’re Governed: AWS Automation Takes the Wheel
    • Cloudflare Reaches for the Stars: Astro Framework Acquisition Lands
    • Gemini Gets Personal: Google AI Finally Reads Your Email (With Permission)
    • AWS Strikes Ore: Amazon Cuts Out the Middleman in Copper Supply Chain
    • When Your Region Goes Down More Often Than Your Kubernetes Cluster
    • ChatGPT Go: OpenAI’s New Middle Child Gets $8 Allowance
    • Cloudflare’s Space-Age Acquisition: Astro Gets Jetsons-Level Upgrade
    • Rosie the Robot Fired: Cloudflare Brings Astro Framework Into the Family
    • It took 5 years, and now we have ads in our AI.
    • AI now with Ads
    • EU says hands off my data

    General News

    00:50 Heather’s data is not unreliable

    • Maybe it’s unreliable.
    • I blame Matt for having screwed up his outtro (as he did today), in which case I no longer recognize his participation.

    01:11 Astro is joining Cloudflare

    • Cloudflare acquires The Astro Technology Company, bringing the popular open-source web framework in-house while maintaining its MIT license and multi-cloud deployment capabilities.
    • Major platforms like Webflow Cloud, Wix Vibe, and Stainless already use Astro on Cloudflare infrastructure to power customer websites.
    • Astro 6 introduces a redesigned development server built on Vite Environments API that runs code locally using the same runtime as production deployment. When using the Cloudflare Vite plugin, developers can test against workerd runtime with access to Durable Objects, D1, KV, and other Cloudflare services during local development.
    • The framework focuses on content-driven websites through its Islands Architecture, which renders most pages as static HTML while allowing selective client-side interactivity using any UI framework.
    • This approach addresses the complexity that made building performant websites difficult before 2021, providing a simpler foundation for both human developers and AI coding agents.
    • Astro 6 adds stable Live Content Collections for real-time data...
    Show More Show Less
    56 mins
  • 338: T5Gemma Says "AI’ll be Back”

    338: T5Gemma Says "AI’ll be Back”
    Jan 22 2026
    Welcome to episode 338 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, Matt, and Jonathan are in the studio today to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including a bit of a buying spree (inlcuding whole power companies) Veo 3.1, Cowork, and more – today in the cloud! Titles we almost went with this week Snowflake’s Ironic Timing: Buying Downtime Prevention Tool While Experiencing Downtime Flexera Buys ProsperOps and Chaos Genius, Promises Less Chaos and More Prosperity Flexera Goes Shopping: Two FinOps Acquisitions to Prosper and Reduce Chaos Token of Appreciation: Gemini CLI Now Tracks Every Penny of Your AI Spend Snowflake Buys Observe to Stop Its Own Services from Melting Down Google’s Veo 3.1 Goes Vertical: Finally Understanding How People Actually Hold Their Phones Alphabet’s New Power Move: Buying the Company That Literally Powers Data Centers Dashboard Confessional: Gemini CLI Gets Transparent About Its Usage Microsoft’s New Agent Works 24/7 and Never Asks for a RaiseFrom Robot Vacuums That Climb Stairs to TVs You Can’t Feel: CES Gets Weird Agent Shopping: When Your AI Has Better Taste Than You Do The cloudpod hosts do not like any stories this week AWS took a nap on announcements this week Claude is my new co-worker Wake up, AWS, and give us some fun news The $200 Assistant: Is Cowork the End of Workplace Admins? Azure has more interesting announcements than AWS oh noooo If you can’t beat them in AI, just acquire everyone Notebook LM turns the Data Tables on you AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money 01:11 Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Code-like for general computing – Ars Technica Anthropic launches Cowork, a new feature in the macOS Claude desktop app that extends Claude Code‘s agentic capabilities to general office work tasks. Users can grant Claude access to specific folders and use plain language instructions to automate tasks like filling expense reports from receipt photos, writing reports from notes, or reorganizing files.Cowork lowers the technical barrier compared to Claude Code by making AI-assisted file operations accessible to non-developer knowledge workers, including marketers and office staff. The feature was developed after Anthropic observed users already applying Claude Code to general knowledge work despite its developer-focused positioning.The tool provides similar functionality to what was possible through Model Context Protocol integrations, but offers a more streamlined interface with Claude Code-style usability improvements. Users can submit new requests or modifications to ongoing tasks without waiting for the initial assignment to complete.Cowork represents a strategic expansion of Anthropic’s agentic AI approach beyond software development into broader productivity workflows. The feature demonstrates how AI agents with file system access can automate routine knowledge work tasks that previously required manual processing of documents and data. 02:15 Ryan – “This week is the first time I actually tried to use AI to generate a PowerPoint presentation. It did not go well. It did gener... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure Weekly(00:00:43) - Cloud Code Launches Cowork for iOS(00:06:53) - Google's Video Output (VO 3.1)(00:10:10) - Snowflake to Integrate Observe into its Data Platform(00:12:47) - Flexera Expands Cloud Commitment Management with Acquisitions(00:17:44) - AWS: Sleeping in Seattle(00:18:35) - GCP 10.2: Gemini CLI Monitoring with Google Cloud(00:20:58) - Alphabet to Acquire Data Center Company(00:23:14) - Google's Notebook LLM Adds Data Tables(00:27:53) - Google's T5 Gemma 2: Multodal Vision Models(00:31:30) - Google Launches Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) for AI Agents(00:37:36) - Microsoft's Dynamic Threat Detection Agent in Public Preview(00:40:20) - Azure Service Bus Premium: Cross-Regional Replication(00:44:41) - This Week in Cloud: Amazon Stories(00:45:32) - CES 2017: The Best Tech Gadgets(00:51:27) - How to Get Your Smoke Detector to Work(00:53:25) - Fooled by Apple's Fold Phone(00:55:42) - E Ink Poster and Raspberry PI(00:59:44) - Lawyers Use the Remarkable Notebook
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 2 mins
  • 337: AWS Discovers Prices Can Go Both Ways, Raises GPU Costs 15 Percent

    337: AWS Discovers Prices Can Go Both Ways, Raises GPU Costs 15 Percent
    Jan 16 2026
    Welcome to episode 337 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan have hit the recording studio to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, from acquisitions and price hikes to new tools that Ryan somehow loves but also hates? We don’t understand either… but let’s get started! Titles we almost went with this week Prompt Engineering Our Way Into TroubleThe Demo Worked Yesterday, We SwearIt Scales Horizontally, Trust UsResponsible AI But Terrible Copy (Marketing Edition) General News 00:58 Watch ‘The Thinking Game’ documentary for free on YouTube Google DeepMind is releasing the “The Thinking Game” documentary for free on YouTube starting November 25, marking the fifth anniversary of AlphaFold. The feature-length film provides behind-the-scenes access to the AI lab and documents the team’s work toward artificial general intelligence over five years.The documentary captures the moment when the AlphaFold team learned they had solved the 50-year protein folding problem in biology, a scientific achievement that recently earned Demis Hassabis and John Jumper the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This represents one of the most significant practical applications of deep learning to fundamental scientific research.The film was produced by the same award-winning team that created the AlphaGo documentary, which chronicled DeepMind’s earlier achievement in mastering the game of Go. For cloud and AI practitioners, this offers insight into how Google DeepMind approaches complex AI research problems and the development process behind their models.While this is primarily a documentary release rather than a technical product announcement, it provides context for understanding Google’s broader AI strategy and the research foundation underlying its cloud AI services. The AlphaFold model itself is available through Google Cloud for protein structure prediction workloads. 01:54 Justin – “If you’re not into technology, don’t care about any of that, and don’t care about AI and how they built all the AI models that are now powering the world of LLMs we have, you will not like this documentary.” 04:22 ServiceNow to buy Armis in $7.7 billion security deal • The Register ServiceNow is acquiring Armis for $7.75 billion to integrate real-time security intelligence with its Configuration Management Database, allowing customers to identify vulnerabilities across IT, OT, and medical devices and remediate them through automated workflows. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026 and aims to triple ServiceNow’s current $1 billion annual security revenue.The acquisition represents a strategic data play when combined with ServiceNow’s recent purchase of Data.World, giving the company both massive volumes of se... Chapters (00:00:00) - Azure: Raising GPU Prices 15%.(00:00:51) - Homework for the Week(00:01:05) - Google's The Thinking Game Documentary(00:04:22) - ServiceNow Acquires Armis for $7.5 Billion(00:06:39) - What is the Cognizant Threat Management Platform?(00:08:29) - Google's 2025: The Year of TUNE (In Depth)(00:11:36) - MetaAcquires AI Agent Firm Manus(00:15:27) - Migration from AWS Security Hub to OCSF(00:21:10) - EC2 Spot Capacity for Containerized Apps(00:23:13) - Amazon EKS now supports DNS-based and Admin Network Policies(00:26:58) - Amazon Raises EC2 Capacity Prices(00:31:19) - Lookinger: Upload CSV and Excel Files Directly into the BI(00:34:01) - AlloyDB's AI Natural Language API(00:36:23) - Google's Vertex AI Agent Builder(00:38:05) - Google Cloud SQL for MySQL Enterprise+ Edition: Optimized Writes(00:42:26) - Microsoft Acquires OSMOS for Unified Data Platform(00:44:19) - Microsoft Deploys Nvidia's Next-Gen Arubin Platform(00:46:25) - Will Oracle Use Non-Evaporative Cooling at Their New(00:51:01) - Week in the Box: Cloud: More News?
    Show More Show Less
    52 mins
No reviews yet