Welcome to episode 287 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! 2025 is already shaping up to be another year of “unprecedented” times, but have no fear, Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, and Matthew are all in the house and (mostly) recovered from the holidays – and just in time to bring you all the latest new year news in the cloud world. 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• ☁️Everyone is investing in AI… but you could invest in the cloud pod
• 💰Oracle Exadata X11M: Burn a big pile of money
• 🛟The cloud pod has better security than Microsoft – mk
• 🎙️The new and improved Cloud Pod 4.0
• 🌥️Cloud Nine… Figures (or $80 billion)
• ⚔️$60 Billion and Counting: The Ai Arms Race
• 🔥Oracle Exadata X11M: For When You Absolutely, Positively, Have to Burn Money
• 🤑The Cloud Pod rebrands to The Cloud AI so we can get 11B in funding

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. 

General News

2:42 Oracle’s rampant cloud growth wasn’t enough for Wall Street, and its stock slides after-hours 

• We missed talking about Oracle’s earnings call on December 9th, since we were in the middle of our re:Invent shows. Apparently, their rapid cloud growth was not sufficient to appease the Wall Street gods., but honestly – what is ever good enough for them?  
• They reported earnings of 1.47 a share, just shy of the 1.48 expected by the analysts. Revenue was up 9% from a year before, at $14.06B below the street’s target of $14.1 Billion.
• Income was up 26% from prior year, to 3.15B.  
• Revenue from cloud services and license support was up 12% to 10.8 billion. 
• Oracle CEO Safra Catz said growth in the AI segment was nothing short of extraordinary, with 336% growth in GPU unit consumption from the prior year. 
• Despite positive signs, Oracle guidance was soft and this also angered the Wall Street gods. 

04:09 📢 Justin – “…now in January, their stock is, up a dollar 11 today, but, looking at the month, they haven’t really recovered from earnings quite yet. So we’ll see how they do as they continue through the year. But, yeah, I mean, tech in general is down. I mean, everything’s down. Everyone’s waiting for the election to, election, the, the soaring in and the new administration to come in as we’re past that.”

04:34 HashiCorp 2024 year in review

• 2024 was a busy year for Hashicorp, and they wrote up a blog post to point out the highlights.
  • IBM + Hashicorp signed an agreement to be acquired by Big Blue. With IBM, they believe they can bring modern infrastructure and security practices to an even greater number of organizations around the world, and they are excited for the possibilities. 
  • Terraform got numerous updates including:
    • Terraform Stacks
    • Module Lifecycle Management to simplify day 2
    • Terraform Migrate for HCP Terraform adoption
    • Test-integrated module published
    • Ephemeral Values
    • Config-driven state updates for refactoring and importing resources
    • Pre-written sentinel policy library co-developed with AWS
  • Packer 1.11
    • New plugin loading process
    • Packer and plugin version tracking
    • CI/CD Pipeline metadata
  • Nomad got significant upgrades this year
    • Nomad Bench for load testing and benchmarking Nomad
    • NVIDIA device driver added support
    • Enhancements for GPU scheduling and resource quotas
    • Exec2 task driver
    • Libvirt task driver beta for improved virtual machine support
  • Vault
    • Secrets Sync
    • Autorotation and dynamic secrets
    • WIF Support
    • Vault Secrets Operator for K8
  • HCP Vault Radar (New product)
    • Scans your digital estate for unmanaged secrets and PII
  • Consul
    • Transparent proxy for ECS
    • Consul DNS views for K8
    • Registration CRD for Consul for K8

06:28 📢 Ryan- “I was as surprised as you are with the Nomad news. But then I was thinking about it and it’s just like, there isn’t the greatest of options for managing infrastructure if you’re not on a cloud hyperscan or so. It’s like, you can use OpenStack, which gets a little bit of support, but I don’t think it’s really, I don’t know if it’s, I still don’t know what that is for, and I don’t know if it manages infrastructure.”

07:17 IBM acquisition of HashiCorp again in peril as antitrust looms

• Not so fast Hashi on that acquisition…
• Britains Competitions & Markets authority is going to investigate IBM’s acquisition of Hashicorp. It has launched a merge inquiry, with a deadline of February 25th. 
• They are asking for parties to comment before Jan 16th. 
• The big prize IBM is after is of course Terraform… which has some conflicts with IBM owned Red Hat Ansible. 

09:25 📢 Jonathan – “Well, just like any government agency they are somewhat self, what’s the word, you create an agency that does something, they have to do it, they have to justify their own existence, you know?”

AI Is Going Great – Or, How ML Makes All its Money 

10:00 Why OpenAI’s Structure Must Evolve To Advance Our Mission

• Open AI’s board of directors is evaluating their corporate structure in order to best support the mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity, with three objectives:
  • Choose a non-profit / for-profit structure that is best for the long-term success of the mission.
  • Make the non-profit sustainable.
  • Equip each arm to do its part.
• As they enter 2025, the Open AI business has expanded beyond a research lab, and then a startup to now they need to become an enduring company. The board is consulting with outside legal and financial advisors to determine the best structure of OpenAI to advance the mission.
• WIll keep an eye on this as it continues to develop. 

11:36 OpenAI o1 and new tools for developers  

• OpenAI is introducing their more capable models, new tools for customization of those models and upgrades that improve performance, flexibility and cost-efficiency for developers building with AI. 
  • OpenAI o1 in the API, with support for function calling, developer messages, structured outputs, and vision capabilities. 
  • Realtime API updates, including simple WebRTC integration, a 60% price reduction for GPT-4o audio, and support for GPT-4o mini at one-tenth of previous audio rates
  • Preference fine-tuning, a new model customization technique that makes it easier to tailor models based on user and developer preferences
  • New Go and Java SDKS available in Beta

12:39 📢 Jonathan – “I think the branding’s kind of messed up. Because they were really the first to launch a decent consumer-facing service, ChatGPT is like the brand name, just like Google. And so the fact that they’re not using, not calling it ChatGPT 01, it just boggles me. don’t know. I understand why they want to separate the web service from the underlying models, but at the same time, who really cares?”

16:01 A.I. Start-Up Anthropic Is in Talks That Could Value It at $60 Billion

• Anthropic is in talks to raise a new round of funding that could value the company at $60B, up from the $16B less than a year ago. 
• Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the new round could pump an additional $2B into the company. 
• Since the company was founded in 2021, it has raised more than 11.3B from Venture firms.
•  The talks come in the midst of a new surge of funding talks with the industry’s most prominent AI startups. Including the 6B raised by xAI and the 6.6B raised by OpenAI. 

16:43📢 Jonathan – “What’s weird is of course the Chinese models like DeepSeek and Qwenn, which are trained on cheaper hardware that they have access to for much less money. I think DeepSeek was trained for like a tenth the price of any of the competing models. We’ve kind of forced the Chinese AI engineers to be really innovative because of the trade restrictions and they’re gonna eat the lunch of these companies here.”

AWS

18:15 Amazon refuses Microsoft 365 deployment because of lax cybersecurity 

• Amazon CISO CJ Moses publicly shamed Microsoft security, halting his employer’s deployment of M365 for a full year as the vendor tries to fix a long list of security problems Amazon identified. 
• Industry security executives are of two minds. Some applauded Amazon, saying that the online retail giant has the revenue and employees to push Microsoft to fix issues like this. 
• Others though were cynical, saying that the move is less altruistic, and more to improve cybersecurity and a thinly disguised sales pitch for AWS.  
• Moses says they conducted their own analysis of the software and asked for changes to guard against unauthorized access and create a more detailed accounting of user activity in the apps. He said they deep-dived O365 and all of the controls around it and held. 
• Amazon requests included modifying tools to verify the users accessing the apps are properly authorized and once in, that their actions are tracked in a manner that Amazon’s automated systems can monitor for changes that might indicate a security risk.   

20:07 📢 Matthew – “That’s a stretch because also looking at S3 and it doesn’t really follow the same IAM model and you know EC2 and VPC falls into the EC2 world, which doesn’t really follow the same model. like any legacy services that you try to fit into the box don’t really work great. So I almost feel like, yes, I’m not disagreeing with them where it is a hodgepodge of technologies they’ve merged together over the years into what it is now. There definitely are things that they need to clean up. But I also think that AWS still has some things there too that need to be improved.”

22:11 Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large is now available in Amazon Bedrock 

• Pre-announced at Re:Invent 2024, Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large is now actually available in Bedrock allowing you to generate high-quality images from text descriptions in a wide range of styles to accelerate the creation of concept art, visual effects and detailed product imagery for customers in media, gaming, advertising and retail. 

23:21 📢 Jonathan – “One of the interesting use cases I think is becoming more popular is people making AI generated adult content and publishing it on things like OnlyFans. And they’re not even real people behind these accounts, they’re literally just machines cranking out images of people that don’t exist.”

29:50 AWS says it’ll invest ‘at least’ $11B to expand data center infrastructure in Georgia  

• AWS has announced plans to invest $11B in Georgia to expand its infrastructure to support various cloud and AI technologies. AWS estimates it will create roughly 550 jobs in the state. 
• This comes 8 months after they announced the intent to invest 11B in datacenters in Indiana as well. 

30:40 📢 Justin – “11 billion dollars seems like a lot for a local zone…”

32:00 Announcing the new AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region 

• Amazon is announcing that the AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) region is now generally available with three AZ’s. 
• This is the first region in Thailand and the fourteenth region in Asia Pac. 
• The adoption of cloud computing has gained significant momentum in Thailand, driven by evolving business needs and government initiatives such as Thailand 4.0. 

GCP

33:27 Tech Google CEO Pichai tells employees to gear up for big 2025: ‘The stakes are high’ 

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai told his employees that the stakes are high in 2025, as the company faces increased competition and regulatory hurdles and contends with rapid advances in AI. 
• He addressed the need to move faster as a company as this is a disruptive moment. 
• “It’s not lost on me that we are facing scrutiny across the world,” Pichai said. “It comes with our size and success. It’s part of a broader trend where tech is now impacting society at scale. So more than ever, through this moment, we have to make sure we don’t get distracted.”
• AI, Regulation around them being a search monopoly…. Indeed it’s going to be a busy year for Google. 

34:40 📢 Ryan – “I think that just goes to show you that, you know, why some of the stakes are high and why the antitrust is there, right? Like, it’s sort of a fallacy that there’s multiple businesses within the Google ecosystem. You know, they did all the separation, but that was mostly for financial reasons and I think maybe it had some sort of driving force behind it.”

35:43 Database Center: Now with support for Bigtable, Firestore, and Memorystore

• Google is expanding the capabilities of Google Database Center with the addition of support for Bigtable, Memorystore and Firestore Database in preview. 
  • Gain a comprehensive view of your entire database fleet.
  • Proactively de-risk your database fleet.
  • Optimize your database fleet with AI powered assistance. 

36:41 📢 Ryan – “Yeah, I’ve seen many people screw this up too, because they’re thinking they’re using a cache, but they actually set a non-expiration date on it. So the data just lives in the cache forever. Yeah, where the data they put in there. Yeah, why does the data disappear? Yeah, I’ve seen that one too.”

Azure

39:22 Announcing the o1 model in Azure OpenAI Service: Multimodal reasoning with “astounding” analysis 

• Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service will support the o1 model soon.  
• The new model brings advanced reasoning capabilities and improvements that will significantly enhance your AI applications and solutions. 
• Weird to pre announce – and do a full court press release for something you can’t even use. We don’t understand your tactics, Azure.  

40:29 Microsoft to spend $80 billion in FY’25 on data centers for AI  

• Microsoft has earmarked $80B in fiscal 2025 to build data centers designed to handle AI workloads. 
• These AI enabled data centers will be designed to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world. 
• “As we look into the future, it’s clear that artificial intelligence is poised to become a world-changing GPT. AI promises to drive innovation and boost productivity in every sector of the economy,” Brad Smith Microsoft Vice Chair and President wrote. “The United States is poised to stand at the forefront of this new technology wave, especially if it doubles down on its strengths and effectively partners internationally.”

41:13 📢 Justin – “They’re building Skynet. It’s Microsoft. They’re building Skynet. It’s not going to be secure. It’s going to get taken over by somebody. We already talked about Microsoft. Were you here earlier?”

Oracle

42:58  Oracle Exadata X11M Delivers Extreme Performance, Increased Efficiency, and Improved Energy Savings for Data and AI Workloads 

• If you need a great way to burn that shiny new budget you received in 2025, Oracle is announcing the new and improved Oracle Exadata X11M, the latest generation of the Exadata platform. 
• The X11M has significant performance improvements over the X10M with 55% faster Vector Searches, 25% faster OLTP transactions and concurrent transactions and 25% faster analytic query processing. 
• The initial Exadata infrastructure that includes 2 database servers and 3 storage servers with 8 ECPU hours, will run you 12,799 dollars per month… it gets crazy real fast. Buyer beware! 
• Just bumping to 64 ECPU increases the price to 26,800 dollars. 

43:41 📢 Matthew – “How many seconds can you burn your budget in?”

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, toot, bluesky us with hashtag #theCloudPod The Cloud Pod, a renowned cloud technology platform, has recently rebranded itself as The Cloud AI with the objective of achieving a staggering 1B valuation. This strategic move aligns with their vision to leverage artificial intelligence capabilities for exponential growth. Stay updated with the latest developments and insights by visiting their website, theCloud Pod.net, where you can also subscribe to their newsletter, join their slack team, and engage with them on social media using the hashtag #theCloudPod.