Welcome to episode 337 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan have hit the recording studio to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, from acquisitions and price hikes to new tools that Ryan somehow loves but also hates? We don’t understand either… but let’s get started!

• Prompt Engineering Our Way Into Trouble
• The Demo Worked Yesterday, We Swear
• It Scales Horizontally, Trust Us
• Responsible AI But Terrible Copy (Marketing Edition)

00:58 Watch ‘The Thinking Game’ documentary for free on YouTube

• Google DeepMind is releasing the “The Thinking Game” documentary for free on YouTube starting November 25, marking the fifth anniversary of AlphaFold.
• The feature-length film provides behind-the-scenes access to the AI lab and documents the team’s work toward artificial general intelligence over five years.
• The documentary captures the moment when the AlphaFold team learned they had solved the 50-year protein folding problem in biology, a scientific achievement that recently earned Demis Hassabis and John Jumper the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• This represents one of the most significant practical applications of deep learning to fundamental scientific research.
• The film was produced by the same award-winning team that created the AlphaGo documentary, which chronicled DeepMind’s earlier achievement in mastering the game of Go. For cloud and AI practitioners, this offers insight into how Google DeepMind approaches complex AI research problems and the development process behind their models.
• While this is primarily a documentary release rather than a technical product announcement, it provides context for understanding Google’s broader AI strategy and the research foundation underlying its cloud AI services. The AlphaFold model itself is available through Google Cloud for protein structure prediction workloads.

01:54 Justin – “If you’re not into technology, don’t care about any of that, and don’t care about AI and how they built all the AI models that are now powering the world of LLMs we have, you will not like this documentary.”

04:22 ServiceNow to buy Armis in $7.7 billion security deal • The Register

• ServiceNow is acquiring Armis for $7.75 billion to integrate real-time security intelligence with its Configuration Management Database, allowing customers to identify vulnerabilities across IT, OT, and medical devices and remediate them through automated workflows.
• The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026 and aims to triple ServiceNow’s current $1 billion annual security revenue.
• The acquisition represents a strategic data play when combined with ServiceNow’s recent purchase of Data.World, giving the company both massive volumes of se...

Welcome to episode 335 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Welcome to the first show of 2026, and it’s a full house, too! Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matt are all here to reflect on 2025, plus bring you their predictions for 2026.

Let’s get started!

• SQL Me Maybe: AlloyDB Gets Chatty With Your Database **OpenAI
• SELECT * FROM natural_language WHERE accuracy LIKE ‘100%’ **Anthropic
• etcd You Were Worried About Database Limits: CloudWatch Has Your Back
• CSV You Later: Looker Adds Drag-and-Drop Data Uploads
• AWS Spots an Opportunity to Manage Your Container Costs
• EKS Network Policies: No More IP Address Whack-a-Mole
• AWS Security Hub Splits: It’s Not You, It’s CSPM
• Spot On: ECS Finally Manages Your Cheapest Compute
• TOON Squad: DigitalOcean’s New Format Makes JSON Look Bloated
• The Price is Wrong: AWS Breaks Two Decades of Downward Pricing Tradition
• Show Your Work: Why AI-Generated Code Without Tests is Just Expensive Spam
• No More Agent Orange: Google Simplifies VM Extension Deployment
• AWS Discovers Prices Can Go Both Ways, Raises GPU Costs 15 Percent
• Sovereignty Washing: When Your European Cloud Still Answers to Uncle Sam
• Agent Builder Gets a Memory Upgrade: Google’s AI Finally Remembers Where It Put Its Keys
• Ctrl+F for the Future: A year-end Scorecard & Next-Gen Bets
• AI Agents, GPU Prices, and The best of the Cloud Pod 2025
• Beyond the Hype: The Cloud Pods Definitive 2025 Year in Review
• Apocalypse Now… What? Our 2026 Forecast

01:27 RYAN’S PREDICTIONS

Ryan Score: 2/3

02:25 MATTHEW’S PREDICTIONS

Matthew Score: 3/3

03:22 JONATHAN’S PREDICTIONS

Welcome to episode 335 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This pre-Christmas week, Ryan and Justin have hit the studio to bring you the final show of 2025. We’ve got lots of AI images, EKS Network Policies, Gemini 3, and even some Disney drama.

Let’s get into it!

• From Roomba to Tomb-ba: How the Robot Vacuum Pioneer Got Cleaned Out **OpenAI
• From Napkin Sketch to Production: Google’s App Design Center Goes GA
• Terraform Gets a Canvas: Google Paints Infrastructure Design with AI
• Mickey Mouse Takes Off the Gloves: Disney vs Google AI Showdown
• From Data Silos to Data Solos: Google Conducts the Integration Orchestra
• No More Thread Dread: AWS Brings AI to JVM Performance Troubleshooting
• MCP: More Corporate Plumbing Than You Think
• GPT-5.2 Beats Humans at Work Tasks, Still Can’t Get You Out of Monday Meetings
• Kerberos More Like Kerbero-Less: Microsoft Axes Ancient Encryption Standard
• OpenAI Teaches GPT-5.2 to PowerPoint: Death by Bullet Points Now AI-Generated
• MCP: Like USB-C, But Everyone’s Keeping Theirs in the Drawer
• Flash Gordon: Google’s Gemini 3 Gets a Speed Boost Without the Sacrifice
• Tag, You’re It: AWS Finally Knows Who to Bill
• Snowflake Gets a GPT-5.2 Upgrade: Now With More Intelligence Per Query
• OpenAI and Snowflake: Making Data Warehouses Smarter Than Your Average Analyst
• GPT-5.2 Moves Into the Snowflake: No Melting Required

01:06 Meta’s multibillion-dollar AI strategy overhaul creates culture clash:

• Meta is developing Avocado, a new frontier AI model codenamed to succeed Llama, now expected to launch in Q1 2026 after internal delays related to training performance testing.
• The model may be proprietary rather than open source, marking a significant shift from Meta’s previous strategy of freely distributing Llama’s weights and architecture to developers. We feel like this is an interesting choice for Meta, but what do we know?
• Meta spent 14.3 billion dollars in June 2025 to hire Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang as Chief AI Officer and acquire a stake in Scale, while raising 2026 capital expenditure guidance to 70-72 billion dollars.
  • Wang now leads the elite TBD Lab developing Avocado, operating separately from traditional Meta teams and not using the company’s internal workplace network.
• The company has restructured its AI leadership following the poor reception of Llama 4 in April, with Chief Product Officer Chris Cox no longer overseeing the GenAI unit.
• Meta cut 600 jobs in Meta Superintelligence Labs in October, contributing to the departure of Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun to launch a startup, while implementing 70-hour workweeks across AI organizations.
• Meta’s new AI leadership under Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman has introduced a “demo, don’t memo” development approach, replacing traditional multi-step approval processes with rapid prototyping using AI agents and newer tools.
• The company is also leveraging third-party cloud services from CoreWeave and Oracle while buil...