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.

Welcome to episode 356 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! Justin and Ryan are in the studio this week and ready to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including the Pope coming out against AI, AWS introducing a new local zone, and GitHub having yet another crappy week. There’s a lot of news, so let’s get started!

• Istanbul Not Constantinople, But Definitely an AWS Local Zone
• 218 Billion Parameters Walk Into a Single GPU
• Postgres Walks Into a DynamoDB Bar
• NSA Slides Into Anthropic’s DMs With 9 Billion Reasons
• Spy Agencies Want Claude But Can They Afford the Terms
• Pre-Shared Keys Were So Last Decade Azure
• When the Church and Anthropic Agree on AI Ethics
• Microsoft Finally Joins the Linux Party. It Crashed
• Iran Wants Cable Fees, and That’s No Phishing
• When the Church, the Spies, and Iran All Come for Big Tech
• I was gonna record a podcast until I got a migraine

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.

03:31 Pope Leo, Anthropic Co-Founder Warn of AI Power Concentration, Labor Displacement

• Pope Leo XIV published a 42,000-word treatise called Magnifica Humanitas, outlining the Catholic Church’s position on AI governance, with a focus on labor displacement, power concentration among private tech companies, and autonomous weapons systems.
• Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited to participate in the Vatican’s AI encyclical event, and publicly acknowledged that large-scale human labor displacement from AI is a real possibility, framing support for displaced workers as a moral obligation.
• The document raises a structural concern relevant to cloud and AI businesses; that private transnational companies now hold more resources and influence over AI development than many governments, complicating regulatory oversight.
• The treatise specifically calls out the working conditions of data labelers, content moderators, and rare earth mineral extractors as forms of exploitation embedded in the AI supply chain, which touches directly on how cloud AI services are built and maintained.
• For cloud and AI businesses, this document signals growing institutional pressure from non-governmental bodies to factor employment protection and human dignity into product and infrastructure decisions, not just regulatory compliance.

04:41 Justin – “It’s not very often the pope weighs in on what you do for a day job.”

06:20 Iran demands Big Tech pay fees fo...

Welcome to episode 354 of The Cloud Pod, where the weather is always cloudy! This week was sort of a tire fire for the cloud, with US-East-1 losing power, TanStack Supply chain being hit with an impressively creative attack, and Linux getting hit with a second vulnerability in as many weeks. But it’s not all bad news – Microsoft finally figured out we don’t want (or need) Copilot in EVERYTHING, and Anthropic introduced dreaming via Claude managed agents. There’s even more where that came from, plus an aftershow, so let’s get started!

• IAM Not Messing Around With AI Agent Security
• Redis Who? Valkey 9.0 Crashes the Cache Party
• US-EAST-1 Loses Power Again, Architects Say Told You So
• HTTP 402 Payment Required Now Actually Required for Bedrock Agents
• ElastiCache Finds Your Data With Vectors and Vibes
• Stop Squinting at Logs and Let AI Do It
• GKE Nodes Finally Stop Taking the Scenic Route
• AWS MCP Server Goes GA So Your AI Stops Lying
• AI Agents Now Snitching on Your Sloppy Security Code
• TanStack Supply Chain Worm Trusted SLSA and Lied
• I wonder if Claude is dreaming about how bad my code is
• US-EAST-1 Loses Power Again, The CloudPod Say Told You So
• Will my credit card company accept my agent bought it as a fraud reason?
• Extended RDS and Cloud SQL is a TAX without representation
• Boston SQL Party – Throw your Extended RDS overboard
• Everyday is a bad day for Cyber Security
• Azure Scale Sets Finally Let Your VMs Grow Up
• From 200 to 1000 VMs Without Starting Over
• Availability Sets Pack Their Bags for Scale Sets

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.

01:26 Microsoft Cuts Copilot Bloat

• Microsoft is actively removing Copilot integrations from products where adoption was low or user feedback was negative, including Gaming Copilot on Xbox and several Windows 11 entry points in Photos, Widgets, and Notepad.
• The scale of the Copilot sprawl became concrete when a tech commentator counted 81 distinct Copilot products, a figure that circulated internally at Microsoft and drew attention from staff.
• Microsoft executive Jacob Andreou publicly acknowledged the need to cut underperforming Copilots before deleting the post, signaling an internal shift toward consolidation under a single combined consumer and enterprise Copilot organization.
• The financial case for trimming Copilots is direct: Microsoft noted during its most recent earnings that running certain Copilots was compressing margins, particularly free integrations in Windows where no additional revenue offsets the inference costs.
• The products Microsoft is choosing to retain, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, which saw 33 percent growth in paying users last quarter...

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...