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.

06:26 GKE at 65,000 nodes: Evaluating performance for simulated mixed AI workloads

• Recently GKE announced it can now support up to 65,000 nodes (up from 15,000.)
• Saint Carrie be with your CFO.

09:15 How we built the new family of Gemini Robotics models

• Worried about Skynet taking over? Now is the time to check out these articles so you can learn about our robot overlord’s weaknesses.

09:58 Tuesday Night

Was anyone else weirded out by the scheduling? Did any listeners actually s...

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...