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...