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. 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• 🧙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

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

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Follow Up 

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.”

General News 

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 cybersecurity struggles to keep up with this evolving landscape. 
• Google points out that they have Threat Intelligence, Security Operations, and Consulting, but Wiz provides them with a seamless cloud security platform that connects all major clouds and code environments to help prevent incidents from happening in the first place.  
• Wiz’s solution scans your environment, constructing a comprehensive graph of code, cloud resources, services and applications — along with the connections between them. 
• It identifies potential attack paths, prioritizes the most critical risks based on their impact, and empowers enterprise developers to secure applications before deployments. 

06:24 📢 Ryan – “‘m very surprised by this announcement just because they’ve been really touting the Mandiant and both Chronicle into the existing Security Center tools. And then a lot of these reasons why they’re saying WIS is better is specifically stuff that’s been added, like Security Center Enterprise.I Wonder what they had to have from Wiz. With all the security tools that are out there, you buy the market leader for as much money as that.”

09:07 Google to buy cybersecurity firm Wiz for $32 billion, the largest deal in company history

• Google will buy cybersecurity firm Wiz for $32 billion for the tech giant’s in-house cloud computing amid burgeoning artificial intelligence growth. 
• The all-cash acquisition announced Tuesday would be Google’s biggest in its 26-year history, and is the biggest deal of 2025 so far. 
• “Wiz and Google Cloud are both fueled by the belief that cloud security needs to be easier, more accessible, more intelligent, and democratized, so more organizations can adopt and use cloud and AI securely,” Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport said in a blog post.
• Last summer Wiz rejected a $23B dollar bid from Google.  

AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All Its Money 

10:23 OpenAI’s proposals for the U.S. AI Action Plan

• OpenAI shared their recommendations with the White House Office of Science and T(OSTP) for the upcoming US AI Action Plan. 
• As Sam Altman, CEO, has written they are on the cusp of what he considers the next leap in prosperity: the intelligence age. But to do that, they must ensure that people have freedom of intelligence, by which they mean the freedom to access and benefit from AI as it advances, protected from both autocratic powers that would take people’s freedoms away, and layers of laws and bureaucracy that would prevent the realization of them. 
• So what exactly does Open AI Propose:
  • A regulatory strategy that ensures the freedom to innovate
  • An export control strategy that exports democratic AI
  • A copyright strategy that promotes the freedom to learn
  • A strategy to seize the infrastructure opportunity to drive growth
  • An ambitious government adoption strategy 
• You can read more about Open AI’s Economic Blueprint and see the official submission here.  

11:14 📢 Justin – “I love when the company that’s going to benefit the most makes all the laws…”

AWS

12:42 AWS Pi Day 2025: Data foundation for analytics and AI

• 3/14 just passed us by and another AWS Pi day occurred, this is the first year the blog post hasn’t been written by Jeff Barr who stepped away from the blog at the end of 2024
• This year’s PI day was a focus on accelerating analytics and AI innovation with a unified data foundation on AWS.  
• Several announcements that we’ll cover here in a few minutes… But it’s Pi Day and we really just wanted to be wowed by crazy metrics.
• S3 currently holds 400 Trillion objects, exabytes of data, and processes a mind-blowing 150M requests per second. 
• A decade ago they didn’t have 100 customers storing more than a Petabyte of data on S3, now they have 1000’s of customers who have surpassed the 1 PB milestone. 

14:01 📢 Matthew – “150 million requests per second! That’s crazy.”

14:14 Amazon S3 reduces pricing for S3 object tagging by 35%

• S3 is reducing pricing for S3 Object Tagging by 35% in all AWS regions to $0.0065 per 10,000 tags per month.  
• Object Tags are key-value pairs applied to S3 objects that can be created, updated or deleted at any time during the lifetime of the object. 
• S3 Object tags are used for a lot of use cases, including providing fine-grained IAM access, object lifecycle rules, and replication requirements between regions.  
• Along with S3 Metadata, you can easily capture and query custom metadata that is stored in object tags. 

14:37 📢 Justin – “And I was thinking to myself, hmm, why would they need this? Most people don’t tag their stuff in S3, but then they released a feature not too long ago called S3 metadata, which allows you to easily capture and query custom metadata from your data and then store that in the object tag. And so I’m going to guess a lot of customers were very surprised about how much their tags were costing them. so Amazon agreed and gave you a discount. So you’re welcome.”

16:14 Amazon S3 Tables add create and query table support in the S3 console

• Amazon S3 tables are now GA and support create and query table operations directly from the S3 console using Amazon Athena. 
• With this new feature, you can now create a table, populate it with data, and query it with just a few steps in the S3 console.

16:34 📢 Justin – “Anything to make me not go to Athena is a win.”

20:42 Collaborate and build faster with Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, now generally available

• Amazon is announcing the GA of Amazon Sagemaker Unified Studio, a single data and AI development environment where you can find and access all of the data in your organization and act on it using the best tool for the job across virtually any use case.  
• Announced at Re:Invent last year, the studio is a single data and AI development environment. It brings together a wide range of tools and standalone apps including Amazon Athena, EMR, Glue, Redshift, Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow and the existing Sagemaker Studio. 
• In addition they have announced several enhancements including:
  • New Capabilities for Amazon Bedrock in the Sagemaker Unified Studio
  •  Integration of the foundational models, including Claude 3.7 Sonnet and DeepSeek-R1, which enables data sourcing from S3 within projects for KB creation, extends guardrail functionality to flows and provides a streamlined user management interface for domain admins to manage model governance across AWS accounts. 
  • Amazon Q Developer is now Generally Available in the Sagemaker Unified Studio, the most capable generative AI assistant for software development, streamlines development in Sagemaker Unified Studio by providing natural language, conversational interfaces that simplify tasks like writing SQL queries, building ETL jobs, troubleshooting and generating real-time code suggestions

22:28 📢 Ryan – “I’m sure there’s data teams that love this, right? This is a tool that is built for them. It’s built for data spelunking and reporting on those jobs  across large data as well. So I’m sure it makes a lot of sense if you’re in that world every day, but it’s what I’m just trying to do, like whatever my podunk use case is. Like, I just want to graph out how many people log in or use this feature, do this thing. Gets a little complex.”

23:25 Amazon S3 Tables integration with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse is now generally available

• Amazon S3 tables with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse is now generally available, providing a unified S3 table data access across various analytical engines and tools. 
• You can access Sagemaker Lakehouse from Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, a single data and AI development environment that combines functionality and tools from AWS analytics and AI/ML Services. 
• All S3 tables data integrated with SageMaker Lakehouse can be queried from SageMaker Unified Studio and engines such as Athena, EMR, Redshift, and Iceberg-compatible engines like Spark and Iceberg. 

23:48 📢 Ryan – “and you’ll need the studio, right? Because you’ll need all those services so you can do nine different ways of doing ETL and try and run a report across all of it. Makes perfect sense.”

24:51 Announcing support of AWS Glue Data Catalog views with AWS Glue 5.0

• AWS is announcing support for AWS Glue Data Catalog with AWS glue 5 for Apache Spark Jobs.  Seems like a sticky situation. 
• AWS glue data catalog views allow customers to create views from Glue 5.0 spark jobs that can be queried from multiple engines without requiring access to referenced tables. 

26:24 Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow introduces a new visual editor to improve DNS policy editing

• Amazon Route 53 traffic flow now offers an enhanced user interface for improving DNS traffic policy editing. 
• Route 53 traffic flow is a network traffic management feature which simplifies the process of creating and maintaining DNS records in large and complex configurations, by providing users with an interactive DNS policy management flow chart in their web browser. 
• With this release you can easily understand and change the way traffic is routed between users and endpoints using the new features of the visual editor.  

26:40 📢 Matthew – “OK, so about 10 years ago when they updated the Route 53 console, I did it like it then. And every time I go into it today, I get mad at it because I can’t figure out how to put a DNS entry in. Because you have to like, select, be like, type, and do that. I’m so used to Terraform. And this just makes me mad thinking about how bad it’s going to be. All I want to do is just put an A record somewhere.”

30:02 AWS Backup adds logically air-gapped vault support for Amazon FSx

• Amazon is announcing the availability of AWS Backup logically air-gapped vault support for Amazon FSx for Lustre, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, and Amazon FSx for OpenZFS. 
• Logically air-gapped vault is a type of AWS backup vault that allows secure sharing of backups across accounts and organizations, supporting direct restore to reduce recovery time for a data loss event.  
• A logically air-gapped vault stores immutable backup copies that are locked by default, and isolated with encryption using AWS owned keys

GCP

31:31 Google Next is coming up in a few short weeks!

• April 9-11 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. 
• Two courses you should definitely be aware of (for guaranteed Cloud Pod stickers):
  • BRK2-024 – Workload-optimized data protection for mission-critical enterprise apps
  • BRK1-028 – Unlock value for your workloads: Microsoft, Oracle, OpenShift and more

33:59 Streamlined Security: Introducing Network Security Integration

• Many google cloud customers have deep investments in third party security tools, from appliances to saas applications. They enforce consistent policies across multiple clouds. 
• The challenge of these solutions is that each cloud application and environment comes with its unique paradigms and challenges. This may lead to network re-architecture, high cost of operations or difficulty meeting compliance requirements. 
• To help address this, Google is announcing Network Security Integration to address these challenges.  
• This will allow you to integrate third-party network appliances or service deployments with your Google Cloud Workload while maintaining a consistent policy across hybrid and multi-cloud environments without changing your routing policies or network architecture. 
• To do this, it leverages Generic Network virtualization encapsulation aka Geneve tunneling, to securely deliver traffic to third party inspection destinations without modifying the original packets. 
• In addition, the integration helps accelerate application deployments and compliance with a producer/consumer model. This allows infrastructure operations teams to provide collector infrastructure as a service to application development teams, enabling dynamic consumption of IaaS. Support for the hierarchical firewall policy management further enforces compliance without delays. 
• There are two primary modes for Network Security Integration:
  • Out-of-band integration (GA): Mirrors desired traffic to a separate destination for offline analysis. Supporting the following use cases:
    • Implementing advanced network security – use advanced offline analysis to detect known attacks based on predetermined signature patterns, and also identify previously unknown attacks with anomaly-based detection.
    • Improved application available and performance – diagnose and analyze what’s going on over the wire instead of relying on application logs
    • Support regularly and compliance requirements
  • In-band integration (preview): Directs specific traffic to a third-party security stack for inline inspection 
    • Integrate natively with Cloud Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) and Third-party firewall 
    • Insert your preferred network security solution into brownfield application environments
• Several partners have comments in this article including Palo Alto, Fortinet, Checkpoint, Trellix, Corelight, cpacket networks, netscout and extrahop

36:21 📢 Ryan – “I’m trying to figure out if this is amazing – or a way to burn money.”

39:25 Introducing Gemma 3: The most capable model you can run on a single GPU or TPU

• Google is introducing the latest version of Gemma – Gemma 3, a collection of lightweight, state of the art open models built from the same research and technology that powers the Gemini 2.0 models.  
• These are the most advanced, portable and responsibly developed open models yet.  
• They are designed to run fast directly on devices from phones and laptops to workstations, helping developers create AI applications, where people need them. 
• Gemma 3 comes in a range of sizes from 1B, 4B, 12B and 27B allowing you to choose the best model for the specific hardware and performance needs. 
• New Capabilities of Gemma 3:
  • Built with the world’s best single-accelerator model: Gemma 3 delivers state of the art performance for its size, outperforming Llama3-405B, DeepSeek-V3, and o3-mini in preliminary preference evaluations on LMArena’s leaderboard.
  • Go Global in 140 Languages, with out of the box support for over 35 languages and pretrained support for over 140 languages.
  • Create AI with advanced text and visual reading capabilities to analyze images, text and short videos, opening up new possibilities for interactive and intelligent applications. 
  • Handle complex tasks with an expanded context window: Gemma 3 offers a 128k-token context window to let your application process and understand vast amounts of information
  • Create AI-driven workflows using function calling, which lets you automate tasks and build agentic experiences
  • High performance is delivered faster with quantized models, reducing the model size and computational requirements while maintaining high accuracy
• Alongside Gemma 3, they are also launching ShieldGemma2, a powerful 4B image safety checker built on the Gemma 3 foundation. 
• ShieldGemma2 provides a ready-made solution for image safety, outputting safety labels across three safety categories: Dangerous content, sexually explicit and violence.  

41:31 📢 Ryan – “These smaller models are getting me into AI because my initial forays with the larger models, like, this is not going to work. I don’t really want huge hardware, but I want to have the ability to have a model locally in my own environment. These are great because they’re quick and you can run them on just normal PCs. They work better if you do have GPUs, but they still work even on CPU.”

42:38 Announcing Gemma 3 on Vertex AI 

• Gemma 3 is of course available on Vertex AI Model Garden, giving you immediate access for fine-tuning and deployments. 
• You can quickly adapt Gemma 3 to your use case using Vertex AI’s pre-built containers and deployment tools. 

42:56 Gemini Robotics brings AI into the physical world

• Google is introducing Gemini Robotics, their Gemini 2.0 based model designed for robotics at Google DeepMind. 
• They have been making progress in how their Gemini model solves complex problems through multi-modal reasoning across text, images, audio and video. 
• Gemini Robotics is an advanced vision-language-action (VLA) model that was built on Gemini 2.0 with the addition of physical actions as a new output modality for the purpose of directly controlling robots. 
• The second model is Gemini Robotics-ER, a Gemini model with advanced spatial understanding. It enables roboticists to run their own programs using Gemini’s embodied reasoning (ER) abilities. (Is anyone else relieved this is embodied reasoning vs. emergency room?)
• Both of these models enable a variety of robots to perform a wider range of real-world tasks than ever before. As part of our efforts, they are partnering with Apptronik to build the next generation of humanoid robots with Gemini 2.0.  

43:57 📢 Ryan – “I’m not a nice person.One of my favorite things to do is yell at technology. The minute it has any kind of reasoning, this isn’t gonna go well for me.”

45:13 New Gemini app features, available to try at no cost

• Last week Ryan and Justin discussed how far behind Gemini seems to be in the market, and this week, Google is bringing new and upgraded features to Gemini Users, including Deep Research, 2.0 flash thinking, Gems, Apps and personalization.
• The new upgraded version of 2.0 flash thinking gets the ability to upload files as well as longer context windows up to 1 million token context windows. 2.0 Flash thinking is a reasoning capability. 
• In December, they pioneered a new Gemini product with Deep Research. 
  • The goal was to save you hours of time as your personal AI research assistant, searching and synthesizing information from across the web in just minutes and helps you discover sources from across the web you may not have otherwise found.   
• Now, they are upgrading Deep Research with Gemini 2.0 flash thinking (experimental.)  This enhances Gemini’s capabilities across all research stages — from planning and searching to reasoning, analyzing and reporting — creating higher-quality, multi-page reports that are more detailed and insightful.  Gemini now shows its thoughts while it browses the web, giving you a real-time look into how it’s going to solve your research task. 
• The Gemini is getting a new experimental feature called Personalization in the model drop-down. You can then ask food-related questions, and it will look at your recent food-related searches or provide travel advice based on destinations I’ve previously Googled.  
• Gemini is now starting to be able to access calendars, notes, tasks and photos with the new Flash Thinking 2.0.  
• This allows Gemini to better tackle complex requests like prompts that involve multiple applications because the new model can better reason over the overall request, break it down into distinct steps and assess its own progress as it goes.  So say in a single prompt you can ask Gemini: Look up easy cookie recipes on YouTube, add the ingredients to my shopping list and find me a grocery store that is open nearby.   Soon in google Photos it’ll be able to look at your photos and create an itinerary based on where you took photos or tell you when your driver’s license expires, assuming you’ve taken a photo of it before. 
• Gems are now available to everyone, letting you create your own personal AI expert on any topic. They are starting to roll out for everyone. Get started with their premade gems or quickly create your own custom gems, like a translator, meal planner, or math coach. 
• Just go to Gems Manager on the desktop, write instructions, give it a name and then chat with it whenever you want. 

49:59 Cloud Composer 3: The next generation of data pipeline orchestration

• Google is announcing the general availability of their 3rd attempt with Cloud Composer, Cloud Composer 3 the latest version of their fully managed Apache Airflow service.  
• This release represents a significant advancement in data pipeline orchestration, enabling data teams to streamline workflows, reduce operational overhead and accelerate time-to-value. 
• Cloud Composer has a host of new features:
  • Simplified networking: easily configure network settings with streamlined options, reducing complexity and management overhead
  • Evergreen Versioning: to stay up to date with the latest cloud composer releases
  • Hidden Infrastructure: focus on your data pipelines, not infrastructure. Cloud Composer 3 handles the underlying infra, allowing you to concentrate on building and running Dags
  • Enhanced performance REliability
  • Per Task CPU & Memory Control
  • Strengthen your security posture 

50:48 📢 Ryan – “When I first looked at Composer 2 trying to answer a research question for work, it was nothing more than a glorified deployment template. You still had to deploy all the Kubernetes, all the Amazon or all the Apache Airflow servers, all the infrastructure, all had to live within your project deployed on your network. If you needed to talk to another network, you had to plumb all the private service connects yourself and do all the things. So I’m really glad that GCP has finally figured out how to create a managed service.”

Azure

53:08 Microsoft Cost Management updates—March 2025

• Microsoft has their monthly update for finops practitioners this month bringing several improvements;
• Optimizing AKS with new cost analysis capabilities allows you to get granular cost information on your AKS clusters. 
• The views provide you with visibility into the cost of namespaces and all aggregated costs on all of your resources. You just need to install the cost analysis add-on to your cluster to enable this. 
• By deprecating the AWS connector on March 31st 2025, you will lose access to the connector and AWS cost and usage data stored in the cost management service, including historical data. (They won’t delete the CUR files in your S3 bucket though).  
  • They recommend moving to another reporting tool, or if you want the rollup in Azure to use standard FOCUS format and analytical solution in the Microsoft Fabric solution to analyze and report from various sources. 
• You can now exchange Azure OpenAI service provisioned reservations and you can also still request refunds as well
• If you have opinions about the future of cost reporting, and I’m sure some of you do, you can take the cost optimization survey to share that feedback. The link is in the blog post.

56:44 Announcing the Microsoft AI Skills Fest: Save the date!

• Microsoft AI Skills Fest is a global event this April and May designed to bring learners across the globe together to build their AI skills, from beginner explorers to the technology-gifted. 
• Registration opens March 24th, with the kickoff on April 8th. 
• For tech professionals you’ll learn how to build AI-powered solutions using Microsoft AI apps and services quickly. Gain skills and experience working with agents, AI security, Azure AI Foundry, Github Copilot, Microsoft Fabric and more
• Kickoff is at 9:00 AM on April 8th in Australia and will be a full 24-hour globe-spanning event. They are even trying to break a Guinness world record for most users to take an online multi level artificial intelligence lesson in 24 hours. 

59:08 Azure Database for MySQL triggers for Azure Functions (Public Preview)

• Azure is announcing that you can now invoke an Azure Function based on changes to an Azure Database for MySQL table. This new capability is made possible through the Azure Database for MySQL trigger for Azure Functions now available in public preview.  

59:24 📢 Justin – “PSA – If you’re using triggers in databases to do *anything* you should really rethink your architecture.”

Closing

And that is the week in the cloud! Visit our website, the home of the Cloud Pod where you can join our newsletter, slack team, send feedback or ask questions at theCloud Pod.net or tweet at us with hashtag #theCloudPod