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!

• 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

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 – just operationally – it’s very hard. So I think having a mature program where you’re rolling that out with intent and being very specific with your AI tasks I think will go a long way with a lot of companies.”

08...

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?

• ☁️This is the CLOUDPOD Episode 300
• ️Tonight we dine in the Cloud
• The Next Chapter
• Now in Preview: Episode 300

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....

• (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: Episode 300
• (00:00:38) - Ryan's Absence at CES 2017
• (00:01:53) - Episode 300
• (00:02:30) - Google Shuffles Up Their Gemini Team
• (00:05:08) - GKE: Multi Cluster Orchestrator for Kubernetes
• (00:09:37) - Google I/O 2019: The Conference Schedule
• (00:12:22) - The Wizard of Oz Event at Google's Sphere
• (00:15:01) - The Wizard of Oz Movie Made With AI
• (00:18:56) - The Wizard of Oz: The Sphere
• (00:20:24) - Day 1, keynote
• (00:20:49) - Google Cloud Next: The First Google TPU for Inference &
• (00:25:33) - Google Agent Spaces: Unified Enterprise Search and Intelligence
• (00:31:38) - Google's Video, Speech and Music, Generative AI
• (00:35:42) - Inferring with AWS' GKE
• (00:38:33) - Python's AI Agent Development Kit
• (00:43:13) - Agent to Agent
• (00:47:52) - Google Cloud Keynote
• (00:51:18) - A Day in the Life
• (00:51:38) - Gemini Cloud Conference 2018: Small Announcements
• (00:56:52) - Google Cloud Network: Cross-Cloud Interconnect
• (01:02:14) - Google Cloud Storage Pools: More Storage, More Intelligence
• (01:03:01) - Migration from SQL Server to PostgreSQL using DMS
• (01:06:42) - Google Next: Predicting The Winners
• (01:09:08) - Microsoft's Ignite Conference Recap & More
• (01:13:04) - AI Conference Prediction
• (01:16:06) - Google Next: A Year 2 in Vegas
• (01:18:14) - Black Mirror: The First Season Review

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!

• 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

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

• (00:00:00) - Cloud Pod: Week 298
• (00:00:56) - China's First Autonomous AI Agent Is Going Viral
• (00:04:12) - Cloudflare's 'Artificial Labyrinth' to Stop Bots
• (00:06:54) - OpenAI's ChatGPT 4.0 Image Generation
• (00:10:46) - Bay Bridge vs Golden Gate
• (00:11:26) - OpenAI's Speech Text and Text Speech Audio Transcription
• (00:12:28) - Redis vs Valky: The Cloud-Tools Fork
• (00:17:25) - Amazon AWS: More Geography on Regions and Availability Zones
• (00:22:05) - Amazon Q & Quicksight: New Scales capability
• (00:24:39) - Amazon OpenSearch OC2 and OM2 Instances Announce
• (00:26:11) - OpenJDK24
• (00:28:26) - AWS Mobile App: More Services, Less Adoption
• (00:33:17) - AWS Network Firewall: New Flow Management Features
• (00:34:43) - Google Next
• (00:36:43) - Google Cloud Backup: Data Protection Summary and AI Protection
• (00:38:59) - Google's AI Toolbox for Databases
• (00:41:17) - BigQuery Repos: Git Integration in BigQuery Studio
• (00:45:31) - Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro Takes the Top L on the
• (00:48:46) - Azure Functions: Public Preview
• (00:52:13) - Nvidia Serverless GPUs: What You Need to Know
• (00:53:59) - Nvidia's Nim Microservices for Azure AI
• (00:57:16) - Microsoft Launches 6 AI Agents in Security Copilot
• (01:02:02) - Oracle Introduces AI Agent Studio
• (01:03:40) - Week in the Cloud: Google Cloud Next

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.

• 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

01:05 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 informat...

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!

• 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.

01:02 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 inte...

Welcome to episode 295 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy!

Welp, it’s sayonara to Skype – and time to finally make the move to Teams. Hashi has officially moved to IBM, GPT 4.5 is out and people have…thoughts. Plus, Google has the career coach you need to make all your dreams come true.*

*Assuming those dreams are reasonable in a volatile economy.

• Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the cloud dreamers, and Me
• Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer
• ☁️You may say I’m a cloud dreamer, but I’m not the only one
• May the skype shut down
• Q can tell me that my python skills are bad
• How many free code assistance does Ryan need to be a good developer: ALL OF THEM
• Oops honey I spent 1M dollars on oracle
• Latest Cloud Pod Reviews: “It’s a Lemon”

01:04 On May 5, Microsoft’s Skype will shut down for good

• In what we swear is the 9th death for Skype, Microsoft has announced that after 21 years (with 13 of those years under MS Control,) Skype will be no more.
• For real this time. Really.
• May 5th is the official last day of Skype, and they’ve indicated you can continue your calls and chats in Teams.
• Starting now, you should be able to use your Skype login to get into Teams.
• For those of you who do this, you’ll see all your existing contacts and chats in Teams.
• Alternatively, you can export your Skype data, specifically contacts, call history and chats.
• Current subscribers to Skype Premium services will remain active until the end, but you will not be able to sign up for Skype at this time.
• Skype dial pad credits will remain active in the web interface and inside Teams after May 5th so you can finish using those credits.

03:37 Matthew – “I think there’s a lot of people and, you know, at least people I know in other countries to still use Skype, like pretty heavily for like cross country communications, things along those lines. So I think a lot of that is that there probably is still a good amount of people using it. And this is just, Hey, they’re trying to make it nicely...