Welcome to episode 359 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin and Ryan are in the studio this week to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including AI governance, FinOps’ final conference, and even an earnings story courtesy of Oracle. These and so much more – so let’s get started!

• You Shall Not Pass Unless Your Network Policy Says So
• One CLI Wizard to Rule All AWS Agents
• AWS WAF Turns AI Crawlers Into Cash Cows
• No More Delete and Pray for AWS Cost Reports
• Stop Rolling Your Own Certificate Rotation AWS Did It
• Tux Gets a Security Checkup, Microsoft Antivirus Style
• Coal Plant to Cloud Plant Google’s Billion Dollar Glow Up
• FinOps Grows Up and Gets an AI Spending Problem
• Tokenomics Foundation Wants to Bill AI by the Word
• Sweet Home Alabama Now Runs on Google Cloud Infrastructure

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

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.

02:53 Microsoft restricts Claude Fable for employees over data retention concerns

• Microsoft has restricted Claude Fable 5 from its internal GitHub Copilot model picker, even though the model is available to external GitHub Copilot and Azure Foundry customers.
• All other Claude models remain available internally because they operate under Zero Data Retention rules.
• The core issue is that Claude Fable 5 requires data retention to power Anthropic’s new safety classifiers, meaning prompts and outputs are stored for up to 30 days by default, and up to two years if flagged for policy violations.
• This creates a meaningful conflict with enterprise data handling expectations.
• This situation highlights a broader tension cloud enterprises face when adopting frontier AI models that bundle safety mechanisms requiring data retention, since those requirements may conflict with internal legal and compliance policies around confidential information.
• The restriction is notable because Microsoft is both a distribution partner for Anthropic through Azure and a direct competitor via its own AI offerings, so internal adoption decisions carry weight beyond typical enterprise procurement concerns.
• For developers and businesses evaluating Claude Fable 5 through Azure Foundry or GitHub Copilot, this serves as a reminder to review the specific data retention terms for Mythos-class models before deploying them in workflows that handle sensitive or proprietary information.

04:23 Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

• The US government issued an export control directive requiring Anthropic to immediately suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, forcing a full custom...

Welcome to episode 358 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy!

Justin, Matt, and Ryan (who, rumour has it, was working on an Eagles music podcast) are in the studio this week to bring you all the latest in AI and cloud news (and begging for a AI spend limit increase), including anthropic wanting everyone – except themselves – to slow down AI development, GitHub’s insane number of commits, and even an announcement from CoreWeave, plus so much more. Let’s get started!

• Stop Configuring Domains One by One Like a Peasant
• SSH Into Your AI Agent Like It’s 1999
• Your AWS Bill Finally Has an AI Babysitter
• Stop Blaming Engineering, the AI Will Do It Now
• GPU Queue Anxiety Meet Your Serverless Spark Therapist
• One Wildcard Certificate to Rule All Subdomains
• One PTU Reservation to Rule All Regions
• Twelve Billion Parameters Walk Into a Laptop
• Squeezing Gemma 4 Until the Bits Cry
• Azure Cobalt 200 VMs Are Really Arm-ed and Dangerous
• AI has gone all Fables and Myth
• Arm-ed she blows: but probably not to a region near you
• Dash to change your password as Dashlane gets owned
• Siri AI shows just how slow Gemini is
• AI Announces going public, and then spreads Myths about AI development

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.

01:27 How GitHub plans to win developers back

• GitHub’s scale challenge has grown substantially beyond earlier projections.
• The platform processed 1 billion commits in all of 2025, but now handles 1.4 billion commits per month, with AI agents alone generating over 17 million pull requests monthly.
• The technical remediation work has shifted from surface-level scaling to architectural rebuilding. GitHub has addressed MySQL contention, moved webhooks off MySQL entirely, rewritten the GitHub Actions job dispatch system, and is migrating performance-sensitive code from its Ruby monolith to Go.
• GitHub’s migration to Microsoft Azure, previously reported as a capacity move, is now described as a deeper infrastructure overhaul.
• The goal is service isolation so that a degraded subsystem like Actions does not cascade failures to Git or other core services.
• Microsoft is providing engineering support from teams with experience scaling systems at comparable load levels, which represents a more direct operational involvement than what was previously discussed.
• New feature releases like the Copilot CLI app are being developed outside the core GitHub.com infrastructure, which GitHub says allows continued product work without adding risk to the systems currently under remediation.

03:0 Ryan – “I’d actually lik...

Welcome to episode 357 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin and Matt are in the studio this week to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news! Is AI costing more than the people it replaced? Are CEO’s suffering from AI psychosis? Is Opus 4.8 better than 4.7? We answer all of these questions and more this week – so let’s get started!

• Valkey Stops Forgetting Your Data Like Your Ex
• AI Coding Tools Cost More Than the Coders They Replace
• Microsoft Discovers AI Budgets Burn Faster Than Enthusiasm
• Executives Caught Hallucinating About AI Productivity Gains
• ABBA Said ” Dancing Queen”, but Google Said Data Center
• AI Now Tells Your AWS Apps How Fragile They Really Are
• Stop Playing VM Whack-a-Mole With Maintenance Windows
• Chaos Engineering for Apps Too Scared to Change
• AWS Rewires the Data Center With One Weird Optical Trick
• IAM the One Spending All Your Bedrock Money
• SQL Server Licenses Finally Pack Their Own Bags
• When AI Hype Meets Productivity Research, It Hurts
• CEOs Gone Wild: Demos Versus Deployment Reality
• Serverless Search Finally Learned to Nap Between Requests
• ElastiCache Finally Remembers Things After a Reboot
• Valkey Gets Durable So Your Data Stops Ghosting You
• Zero Data Loss Without Losing Your Microseconds Too
• Microsoft Build 2026 Scout AI and Quantum Dreams

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.

01:45 Microsoft data suggests using AI is more expensive than hiring people:

• Microsoft canceled most internal Claude Code licenses just months after encouraging widespread adoption, redirecting employees to GitHub Copilot CLI instead.
• This does not affect the broader Foundry partnership with Anthropic, but it signals that token costs at scale have become difficult to justify internally.
• Uber’s situation adds context here: the company reportedly burned through its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget in four months after internal teams were incentivized to compete on usage. This illustrates how adoption incentives can create runaway costs that outpace projected savings.
• The core economic tension worth discussing is whether AI tooling costs at scale can undercut the labor-savings argument.
• When compute bills approach or exceed payroll savings, the ROI case for broad AI deployment gets more complicated for finance and engineering leaders to defend.