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 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 Justice Department Reiterates Demand to Break Up Google

• New Administration means new head of the DOJ – and we’re sure Google was hoping for a break in the Antitrust area.
• Unfortunately for them, the Justice Department reiterated last week that many aspects of its proposed final judgement, including the prohibition of payments to Apple and other companie...