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...

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...