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.

• 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

02:27 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”) that allows AI models to connect to many different apps and data sources in a consistent way. In simple terms, MCP lets an AI assistant talk to various software tools using a common language, instead of each tool requiring a different adapter or custom code.”

• • So, what does this mean in practice? If you’r...

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 Claude 3.5 Sonnet and fine-tuned versions of Alibaba’s

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 information loss, but no proof, no evidence, and they think Microsoft’s full of it.”

04:12 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 accelerating number and severity of breaches.
• Most organizations are going digital, and most deployments are multi-cloud or hybrid. Both of which introduce complex management changes. This is occurring while software and AI platforms are becoming deeply embedded across products and operations.
• Traditional approaches to cybe...

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...

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. So how, you know, nice and clean cut over for people versus, you know, the Apple method of it just doesn’t work anymore. Good luck.”

04:41 HashiCorp officially joins the IBM family

• IBM has finished the acquisition of HashiCorp, which they had announced last year.
• Armon Dadgar wrote a blog post reflecting on the journey that Hashicorp has been on; he talks about the future and that his goal is to have Hashicorp in every datacenter.
• He says while they have made strides towards that goal, he feels incredibly optimistic with IBM, since they gain access to their global scale and increased R&D resources.
• There are also integration opportunities of IBM and the RedHat Portfolio....

Welcome to episode 294 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy!Ilya Boy, do we have a news packed week for you! Sutskever raised $30B without a product, Mira Murati launched her own AI lab, and Claude 3.7 now thinks before it speaks. Meanwhile, Microsoft casually invented new matter for quantum computing, Google built an AI scientist, and AWS killed Chime (RIP). At this rate, AI is either going to save the world or speedrun becoming Ultron. Let’s all find out together – today on The Cloud Pod!

• Ding – Chime is Dead
• Does your container really need 192 cores
• Quantum is the new AI
• AI is now IN the robots

02:41 Ilya Sutskever’s Startup in Talks to Raise Financing at $30 Billion Valuation

• It’s been a minute since we talked about former OpenAI executives and what they’re up to.
• Let’s start with Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati, post Open AI career
• The Information reports that Ilya Suskevers’ startup “Safe Superintelligence” is in talks to raise $1Billion in a round that would value the startup at $30 Billion.
• The company has yet to release a product, but based on the name we can guess what they’re working on…

03:22 Ryan – “It’s so nuts to me that they can raise that much without – really just an idea. Doesn’t have to have any proof or POC…”

07:07 Murati Joins Crowded AI Startup Sector

• Mira Murati confirmed one of the worst kept secrets in AI, by revealing her lab Thinking Machine Labs.
• Murati has lured away two thirds of her team from OpenAI.
• We’ll be waiting to see how the funding goes for this one.

08:02 Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code

• Anthropic is releasing their latest model Claude 3.7 Sonnet, their most intelligent model to date and the first hybrid reasoning model on the market.
• Claude 3.7 sonnet can produce near instant responses or extended, step by step thinning that is made visible to the user.
• API users also have fine grained control over how long the model can think for.
• Claude 3.7 shows particularly strong improvements in coding and front-end web development.
• In addition to the new model they have introduced a command line tool for Agentic Coding, Claude Code.
• Claude code is available as a limited research preview and enables developers to delegate substantial engineering tasks directly from the terminal (Justin reall...

Welcome to episode 293 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’ve got a lot of new and, surprise, a new installment of Cloud Journey AND and aftershow – so make sure to stay tuned for that! We’ve got undersea cables, Go 1.24, Wasm, Anthropic and more.

• Lets Go!
• Under Sea cables make AI go BRRRRRR
• The CloudPod says it will grow the listeners by 10x by 2027

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.

01:30 Go 1.24 is released!

• Go 1.24 has been released with a bunch of improvements!
• Go now fully supports generic type aliases.
• It also includes several performance improvements to the runtime that have reduced CPU overhead by 2-3% on average across a suite of representative benchmarks. (Say that 5 times fast.)
• Tool improvements around tool dependencies for a module.
• The standard library now includes new mechanisms to facilitate FIPS-140-3 compliance. And you know we love some good FIPS-140-3 compliance.
• Lastly, it includes some improved WebAssembly support – which we’ll talk about later.

04:46 Unlocking global AI potential with next-generation subsea infrastructure

• Meta announced their most ambitious subsea cable endeavor: Project Waterworth.
• Once the cable is completed, the project will reach five major continents and span over 50,000 KM (longer than the earth’s circumference) making it the world’s longest subsea cable project using the highest-capacity technology available.
• It will bring connectivity to the US, India, Brazil, South Africa, as well as other key regions.
• Waterworth will be a multi-billion dollar, multi-year investment to strengthen the scale and reliability of the world’s digital highways by opening three new oceanic corridors with the abundant, high-speed connectivity needed to drive AI innovation around the world.
• Meta has apparently developed 20 subsea cables over the last decade, including multiple deployments of industry leading subsea cables of 24 fiber pairs, compared to the typical 8 to 16 pairs of other new systems .
• They are also deploying a first of its kind routing system, maximizing the cable load in deep waters at depths up to 7,000 meters and using enhanced burial techniques in high-risk fault areas, such as shallow waters near the coast, to avoid damage from ship anchors and other hazards.
• They wrap up the article by basically saying they’re doing this for AI. Color us surprised.

06:25 Ryan – “I was sort of surprised that this is where Meta is investing. I don’t think of them in that space, like I do internet providers and cloud hyperscalers.”

07:50 Sam Altman lays out roadmap for OpenAI’s long-awaited GPT-5 mode...

Welcome to episode 292 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin and Jonathan are a dynamic duo, bringing you all the latest in news – and sound effects – because it’s earnings time! Plus we’ve got new from VS Code, Azure Data Studio, CodeBuild and more.

• The Cloud Pod Renames Cloud Earnings to ‘The Gulf of Capex’
• Sorry Elon, OpenAI Doesn’t Want Your Pocket Change
• MacOS gets into the Fastlane for Oil Changes

It’s earnings time!

01:29 Alphabet is planning to spend big on AI again this year, sending shares down

• Alphabet earnings were a bit of a let down with cloud revenue missing and their announcement of spending $75 Billion in CapEx (DeepSeek who?)
• Consolidated revenue rose 12% in the period to 96.5 billion.
• Capex investments of $75b shocked analysts who expected $57.9 billion.
• EPS was 2.15 vs 2.13.
• Revenue of 96.5 billion vs 96.62 expected.
• Ad revenue rose to 72.46 billion vs 71.3, Youtube advertising revenue was 10.47 billion vs 10.22 billion.
• Google Cloud was 12.0 billion vs expectation of 12.19 billion.

02:09 Jonathan – “I’m guessing ad revenue is gonna be down again, Q1, Q2 because I think a lot of ad revenue is driven by the election season. So that’s not looking too good for them.”

03:13 Microsoft GAAP EPS of $3.23 beats by $0.13, revenue of $69.6B beats by $790M

• Microsoft followed up with also weak growth in its Azure cloud computing unit.
• EPS was 3.23 beating expectations by 0.13
• Revenue of 69.6B beating by 780M
• Intelligent cloud revenue was 25.5 billion an increase of 19%
• Microsoft indicated they plan to spend 80 Billion in CapEx for AI and data center growth.

04:02 Justin- “Also international expansion still, I think a big area too, particularly for Azure and Google and even Amazon. Like they’re all announcing more and more regions, more expansion of data centers, lots of laws that are going to pass for data sovereignty that they have to deal with. there’s, there’s spend everywhere.”

04:23 Amazon earnings recap: Stock falls as guidance falls short, CFO indicates capex of more than $100 billion in 2025

• Amazon followed its peers by indicating they will invest $100B i...