Welcome to episode 353 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio this week and ready to bring you all the latest news, including earnings from the big 3, a new agreement between the DOW and Google (Don’t be Evil), AI Agents, and more OpenClaw news (that your security team may not appreciate). Plus, DataCenters may not be great for the environment. Who knew?

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started!

• Who Let the Bots Out? AI Governance Has No Answer
• Microsoft Loses Its OpenAI Monopoly But Keeps the Parking Spot
• AWS But Make It Forklifts and Freight
• Bezos Built a Money Printer That Prints Data Centers
• GPT-5.5 Instant Arrives Faster Than Your Last Existential Crisis
• When Your AI Coding Tool Ghosts You for Seven Weeks
• No More Goldfish Brain for Your AI Agents
• Amazon Quick Connects Everything Except Your Work-Life Balance
• AWS WAF Now Knows Which AI Is Crawling Your Stuff
• Stop Pushing Broken Code to Staging Like a Caveman
• Your AI Agent Called It Needs Automated Therapy
• OpenAI Moves In, and AWS Didn’t Even Change the Locks
• AI Interviews Candidates So Recruiters Can Nap
• Foundry Gives AI Agents Long-Term Memory and a Diary
• Cloud Earnings are Up… but some day the Capex Bell will Toll for the AI Reckoning
• Who Let the Bots Out? AWS WAF now shows you

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

There are many cloud cost management tools out there, but only Archera provides insured commitments. It sounds fancy, but it’s really simple. Archera gives you the cost savings of a 1 or 3-year AWS Savings Plan with a commitment as short as 30 days. If you do not use all the cloud resources you have committed to, Archera will literally cover the difference. Other cost management tools may say they offer “insured commitments”, but remember to ask: Will you actually give me my rebate? Because Archera will.

Check out thecloudpod.net/archera to schedule a demo today.

We also wanted to tell you about something coming to the US for the first time — WeAreDevelopers World Congress!

They’ve been doing this in Europe for years, 15,000-plus attendees in Berlin, it’s one of the biggest developer events over there. Coté from Software Defined Talk is actually speaking at their Berlin event this summer, so we’ve got some firsthand context here. In September, they’re launching the North America edition. San José, September 23 to 25. 500-plus speakers, 18 tracks — cloud, infrastructure, DevOps, security, AI, data engineering, all of it. Speakers from Datadog, Honeycomb, Sentry, Google, LinkedIn, and Stack Overflow. Olivier Pomel, Christine Yen, Milin Desai, Kelsey Hightower – plus workshops and masterclasses, not just talks. These are people who know how to do a developer conference at scale. wearedevelopers.us, code DEVPOD26 for 15% off. Group rates on top of that for 4 or more.

It’s Earnings Time!

01:23 Microsoft (MSFT) Q3 earnings report 2026

• Microsoft posted Q3 2026 revenue of $82.89 billion, up 18% year over year, with Azure cloud services growing 40%, slightly ahead of analyst expectations in the 38-39% range.
• Capital expenditures came in at $31.9 billion, about $3 billion below the analyst consensus of $34.9 billion, contributing to the stock dipping 2% despite the earnings beat, reflecting investor sensitivity to AI infrastructure spending levels.
• Microsoft’s annualized AI revenue now stands at $37 billion, up 123% year over...