Welcome to episode 271 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan and Matthew are your hosts today as we discuss the latest news in cloud and AI, including earnings reports, Google’s legal trouble, and SQL updates. We even take a minute to give some side eye to AWS’s deprioritization techniques. Spoiler alert: 0 out of 5 stars for keeping customers informed. 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• 🧐No Google, you can’t own Park Place, Boardwalk, the railroads and the utilities 
• 📷Amazons Titan Image Generator is no titan of photography
• ☎️BigTable graduates to SQL support
• 📹TikTok/Instagram, Azure Reliability and Temu bring down the big three clouds’ earnings
• 🧠Span your Mind to Graphs & Vectors
• 📰DOJ rules The Cloud Pod should be your default news source
• ☁️The CloudPod – now with SQL support
• 🛋️AWS Deprioritizes 7 Services, Cloud Pod Hosts Prioritize Therapy

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

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. 

Follow Up

00:45 Amazon decision to deprioritize 7 cloud services caught customers and 

even some salespeople by surprise 

• Jeff Barr confirmed on Twitter (Yes will always call it Twitter) after recording last week’s episode that they had made the tough decision to deprioritize 7 cloud services.  
• There is still no official blog post announcing this, beyond the confirmation from Jeff Barr. 
• Amazon is discontinuing new access to a small number of services in the tweet – but would continue to run them in a secure environment. 
• Jeff Bar confirmed the list of services to be S3 Select, CloudSearch, Cloud9, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline and CodeCommit. 
• An AWS Spokesperson claimed to Business Insider that the changes were communicated through multiple channels within and outside the company. 
  • But were they REALLY though? 

01:33 📢 Justin – “Yeah, they kind of took a leap out of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book and put the planning commission in the filing cabinet downstairs with the broken light.”

General News 

It’s Earnings Time!

07:35  Alphabet meets earnings expectations but misses on YouTube ad revenue 

• Alphabet revenue was up 14% YOY, driven by search and cloud, GCP surpassed $10B in quarterly revenues and $1 Billion in operating profit for the first time.
• GCP Cloud Revenue was 10.35 B vs the expected 10.20 billion. 
• Alphabet shares were down on the news due to a miss on YouTube advertising, with revenue at 8.66 billion vs 8.93 billion. Wop wop. 
• Cloud revenue was up 29% YOY.

08:23 📢 Matthew – “Amazing how much YouTube was down, you know, and how it negatively affected everything altogether. I’m also always fascinated by how much revenue they make from YouTube advertising.”

08:58 Microsoft shares dip as cloud miss overshadows better-than-expected  revenue and earnings

• Microsoft shares dipped on Wednesday as investors looked past better-than-expected earnings and revenue and focused instead on disappointing cloud results.  
• In spite of that, executives provided a dose of optimism when they predicted a cloud growth speed-up in the first half of 2025. 
• Revenue was $64.73 Billion vs 64.39 billion.
• Azure revenue grew 29% for the quarter but Wall Street had expected 31% . 

09:28 📢 Jonathan – “That’s interesting. 29 % for Azure, but I expected 31, but 29 % for Google was just fine.”

09:44 Amazon shares slide on revenue miss, disappointing guidance for third quarter 

• Amazon shares slid on revenue miss and disappointing 3Q guidance. 
• Amazon’s cloud business exceeded analyst estimates
• Revenue was 147.98 Billion, AWS was up 26.3 billion vs $26billion in revenue. 
• Amazon suffered from an overall lower average sell pricing (ASP) due to pressure from TEMU which is the reason for the retail findings. 

12:31 📢 Jonathan – “I was actually talking to somebody yesterday about buying from kind of like the Chinese resellers, even on Amazon. And their customer service is actually very good because they value your reviews so much that if you’ve got the slightest problem in your email and say, I’ve got an issue with this thing, I bought it three months ago, it’s not covered by Amazon’s return anymore, it stopped working. They’re like, here, have a new one, what’s your address? We’ll get it shipped out right away. No hassles whatsoever.”

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

13:11  Securely Deploy Custom Apps and Models with Snowpark Container Services, Now Generally Available  

• Snowpark Container Service is now generally available in all AWS commercial regions and Azure Public Preview. 
• Customers can get fast access to GPU infrastructure without needing to self procure instances or make reservations with their public cloud provider. 
  • GPU availability may be limited in certain regions.

13:41 📢 Justin – “But it’s interesting, because at some point I could see how Snowflake would potentially take something like this and saying, well, we’re now going to arbitrage against the cloud providers to get better pricing. Because if I now run in the containers and I’m an abstraction layer, I now have pressure to push on the cloud providers. Or do they build their own data centers at some point in the future and then start undercutting other vendors?”

AWS

15:22 Diving into OCI Image and Distribution 1.1 Support in Amazon ECR 

• Great blog post diving into their recent adoption of the Open Container Initiative OCI Image and Distribution Specification for Amazon ECR.  
• This latest version includes support for image referrers, as well as significant enhancements for distribution of non-image artifacts. 
• This allows customers to more easily manage their container images, wIth the ability for customers to push image signatures, Software Bill of Materials, Attestations, and other content related to a specific image right alongside their images in Amazon ECR. 

13:41 📢 Justin – “I mean, being able to push these other artifacts next to it is really key, especially as everyone needs to build these S -bombs out for all their software as a service that they have. And the attestations are always all useful. So keeping everything kind of in sync with the artifact and being able to say, in this version, we had this. And keeping everything in one place, I think, will streamline a lot of pain that people have to deal with right now.”

17:15 Amazon Titan Image Generator v2 is now available in Amazon Bedrock 

• Amazon is announcing the GA of Amazon Titan Image Generator V2 Model with new capabilities in Bedrock.  
• You can guide image creation using reference images, edit existing visuals, remove backgrounds, generate image variations and securely customize the model to maintain brand style and subject consistency. 
• Additional new features over V1:
  • Image Conditioning (using a reference image along with a text prompt)
  • Image guidance with color palette
  • Background removal
  • Subject Consistency for fine tuning
• We don’t know about you all… but we’re gonna stick with Open Ai and Gemini for my image creations. Because reasons. 
• Prompt:
  • Draw three podcast hosts sitting at a table. They are super annoyed, talking about their 1000th AI story and long for the days of talking about new instance types of network switches. The hosts should be male, one should be bald with a goatee, one should be balding with a goatee and one should have a normal haircut and no facial hair. 

Titan Image Generator V2

Gemini

We are working to improve Gemini’s ability to generate images of people. We expect this feature to return soon and will notify you in release updates when it does.  STILL BROKEN. 

ChatGPT

Even after getting Gemini to improve the prompt, no luck drawing.

ChatGPT attempt #2

Three podcast hosts sit at a table in a cozy recording studio, surrounded by professional microphones and scattered notes. Their expressions clearly convey frustration as they discuss their 1000th AI story, longing for the days when they focused on new instance types and network routing. The first host is a bald male with a goatee, the second is a balding male with a goatee, and the third is a male with a normal haircut and no facial hair. The studio is filled with various tech gadgets and equipment, creating an atmosphere that reflects their weariness with AI topics.

Titan Image generator new prompt

22:01 📢 Justin – “There’s a couple of things that were interesting. Number one is Titan is definitely creating images. It’s trying to recreate photos, which was sort of missed on me when I first wrote through the article and I didn’t realize as I was playing with it. And – it’s got a lot to be desired in general, I think. But yeah, this is a little bit of fun for you guys to check out.”

Looking for the “Real or AI” subreddit? We’ve got you covered – find it here. 

GCP

25:11 Now GA: Compute Engine C3 bare-metal and X4 instances

• Announced at Next the Compute Engine X4 and C3 bare-metal machine types are now GA.  
• These machine types address unique compute needs within the general-purpose and memory-optimized families:
  • The new X4 instance series include three new instance types to address extra-large in-memory databases such as SAP HANA
  • Three new C3 Bare-metal shapes cater to a variety of applications, such as commercial and custom hypervisors, that require direct access to CPU and memory resources. 
• Underpinning both of these instances is Titanium, Google Cloud Systems of purpose-built custom silicon and multiple tiers of scale-out offloads. 
• By freeing up the CPU, Titanium provides performance, reliability and security improvements for a variety of workloads. 

25:52 📢 Jonathan- “Awesome. Generally available. That means you can now ask your account rep if you can have someone that can say no in any region you choose.”

27:18 Unlock the potential of your data: Build reliable and intelligent applications with Spanner editions 

• Google Spanner is expanding the types of capabilities it can support with several new variants:
  • Spanner Graph is offering you an intuitive and concise way to match patterns, traverse relationships, and filter results in interconnected data, to serve common graph use cases such as personalized recommendations, finding communities or identifying fraud. 
  • Advanced Full-Text search builds on google’s decades of search expertise to bring powerful matching and relevance ranking over unstructured text. 
  • Vector search supports semantic information retrieval, the bedrock of generative AI applications, building on 12+ years of google research and innovation in approximate nearest neighbor algorithms. 
• In addition to meet the increased complexity, cost and compliance needs of enterprise customers they are launching:
  • Geo-partitioning which allows you to deploy while storing parts of your data in specific locations to support fast local access.
  •  Dual-region configurations offering multi-region availability properties while respecting data sovereignty requirements. 
  • Auto-scaling automatically adjusts the size of your spanner deployment, allowing you to quickly react to changes in traffic patterns without the need to overprovision. 
• These capabilities are available in the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus versions of Spanner.

28:38 📢 Jonathan- “As far as native cloud services go, Spanner is so much easier to use through Terraform. they sort of built their own standard for the GraphQri language they used, an open standard.which is nice GQL, because Neo4j doesn’t support GQL yet, and I think they’re still working on it. But that’s really nice, because now I can pivot to something else, if it sucks.”

30:35 Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus delivers enhanced performance, availability and disaster recovery for SQL Server

• For customers running SQL Server on GCP Cloud SQL, they are pleased to give you GA of Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus edition for SQL.  SQL Enterprise Plus for SQL delivers new innovations that meet the needs of your most demanding SQL server workloads, while building on the core foundation of Cloud SQL:
  • Two new machine families for enhanced performance and higher memory per vCPU
  • A data cache for improved read performance
  • Advanced DR capabilities and 99.99% availability SLA for business continuity. 
• The existing version of Cloud SQL for SQL server will continue with no changes to features or pricing, but will now be known as the Cloud SQL Enterprise Edition Plus for SQL server. 
• The enhanced node types are performance memory optimized with up to 32g of ram per vCPU.  And as many as 128 vCPU in the performance optimized machine family. 
• For read intensive workloads, Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus provides a configurable data cache that delivers high read performance. Data cache leverages server-side SSD as a way to persist the most frequently accessed data, lowering read latency and improving throughput. 

31:29 📢 Matthew – “Your CFO will hate you if you launch 128 vCPU equal. That’s all I have to say.”

33:09 Bigtable transforms the developer experience with SQL support

• • Bigtable has grown up and become a true noSQL solution with the inclusion of GoogleSQL, an ANSI-compliant SQL dialect used by google products such as Spanner and BigQuery. 
  • Now, you can use the same SQL with bigtable to write apps for AI, fraud detection, data mesh, recommendations or any other application that would benefit from real-time data. 
• “Seamless SQL integration and efficient counter functionality will empower us to build more robust and scalable solutions for our customers. We applaud Bigtable’s commitment to innovation and eagerly anticipate leveraging these enhancements to simplify working with big, complex, and fast moving data.” – Jun Kusahana, Executive Officer, VP of Engineering, Plaid 

34:12 Simplifying VM deployments on Google Cloud Marketplace with a Terraform-based UI     

• For those of you who have security teams that will allow you to run arbitrary Terraform code against your Google Cloud Account, the Marketplace now provides an easy, step-by-step guide to deploy a marketplace VM using a Terraform script from the Google Cloud Marketplace UI, all in a few clicks. 
• We appreciate what they’re trying to do, but not the security of it.  

34:26 📢 Jonathan – “What could go wrong?

36:55 ‘Google is a monopolist’: Tech giant loses antitrust suit over search business in huge victory for DOJ

• Color us shocked. 
• A judge ruled Monday that Google Violated antitrust Law by paying other companies to make its search engine the default on smartphones. 
• The ruling could force Google to change the way it runs its business ,and impact several other antitrust lawsuits involving Amazon, Apple and Meta. 
• “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available. We appreciate the Court’s finding that Google is “the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users”, that Google “has long been the best search engine, particularly on mobile devices”, “has continued to innovate in search” and that “Apple and Mozilla occasionally assess Google’s search quality relative to its rivals and find Google’s to be superior.”  Given this, and that people are increasingly looking for information in more and more ways, we plan to appeal.  As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.” – Kent Walker, President, Global Affairs

37:46 📢 Jonathan – “The weird thing is, it’s common practice to pay for your product to be front and center. You just walk into a grocery store and those things aren’t placed randomly by employees. They’re carefully mapped out. Kellogg’s pay for their things to be on certain shelves, certain height above the floor, eye level for adults, eye level for kids. There’s a huge market in charging people for product placement. And I don’t see having Google search being the default search on iPhone any different than any other kind of product placement.”

Azure

44:32 Embrace the future of container native storage with Azure Container Storage

• Azure is announcing GA of Microsoft Azure Container Storage, a platform-managed container native storage service in the public cloud.  
• Azure container storage joins their suite of container services, tightly integrating with K8 and simplifying your stateful workload management across Azure’s set of comprehensive storage offerings. 
• Azure container storage supports ephemeral disk (local NVMe and temp SSD) and azure disks. 
• With Azure disks you can take advantage of built in resiliency by choosing between zone-redundant storage (ZRS) options or multi-zone storage pools on local redundant storage (LRS) to deliver a highly available solution across zones. 
• Server Side Encryption is provided by default with platform managed keys and enforced network security per respective backing storage options.  You can further enhance this by providing customer managed keys. 

45:21 📢 Matthew – “It’s a nice solid add -on I feel like that you can now actually have the ephemeral disk. Where, now, no different than EBS back containers and all that stuff. So I’m a little surprised it wasn’t there to start off, but you now have it.”

OCI

47:38 Announcing tunnel inspection for OCI Network Firewall 

• Thank you, Oracle for giving me something non-AI:  Tunnel Inspection for OCI network firewalls. 
• This feature allows for a new use case: using threat and analysis capabilities with their native virtual test access port service (tap). 
• This combination allows for comprehensive traffic analysis through a dedicated out-of-band channel.
  • It enables the detection of malicious sources or destinations, identification of inappropriate crypto traffic and spotting of SSH sessions targeting known command and control domains. 
• Packet mirroring… be still my datacenter heart.

47:51 📢 Matthew – “I miss just fun cloud announcements like this. Like it’s a good solid feature that they are adding to the cloud to make a compliance slash security person happy. Like this is sometimes what I just miss, just straight core cloud features that we don’t get all the time anymore.”

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