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...