Welcome to episode 331 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Jonathan, Ryan, Matt, and Justin (for a little bit, anyway) are in the studio today to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news. This week, we’re looking at our Ignite predictions (that side gig as internet psychics isn’t looking too good) undersea cables (our fave!), plus datacenters and more. Plus Claude and Azure make a 30 billion dollar deal! Take a break from turkey and avoiding politics, and let’s take a trip into the clouds!

• GPT-5.1 Gets a Shell Tool Because Apparently We Haven’t Learned Anything From Sci-Fi Movies
• The Great Ingress Egress: NGINX Controller Waves Goodbye After Years of Volunteer Burnout
• Queue the Applause: Lambda SQS Mapping Gets a Serious Speed Boost
• SELECT * FROM future WHERE SQL meets AI without the prompt drama
• MFA or GTFO: Microsoft’s 99.6% Phishing-Resistant Authentication Achievement
• JWT Another Thing ALB Can Do: OAuth Validation Moves to the Load Balancer
• Google’s Emerging Threats Center: Because Manually Checking 12 Months of Logs Sounds Terrible
• EventBridge Gets a Drag-and-Drop Makeover: No More Schema Drama
• Permission Denied: How Granting Access Took Down the Internet

00:51 Ignite Predictions – The Results

Matt (Who is in charge of sound effects, so be aware)

1. ACM Competitor – True SSL competitive product
2. AI announcement in Security AI Agent (Copilot for Sentinel) – sort of (½)
3. Azure DevOps Announcement

Justin

1. New Cobalt and Mai Gen 2 or similar – Check
2. Price Reduction on OpenAI & Significant Prompt Caching
3. Microsoft Foundational LLM to compete with OpenAI –

Jonathan

1. The general availability of new, smaller, and more power-efficient Azure Local hardware form factors
2. Declarative AI on Fabric: This represents a move towards a declarative model, where users state the desired outcome, and the AI agent system determines the steps needed to achieve it within the Fabric ecosystem.
3. Advanced Cost Management: Granular dashboards to track the token and compute consumption per agent or per transaction, enabling businesses to forecast costs and set budgets for their agent workforce.

How many times will they say Copilot:

The word “Copilot” is mentioned 46 to 71 times in the video.

Jonathan 45

Justin: 35

Matt: 40

05:13 Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025

• Cloudflare experienced its worst outage since 2019 on November 18, 2025, lasting approximately three hours and affecting core traffic routing across its entire network.
• The incident was triggered by a database permissions change that caused a Bot Management feature file to double in size, exceeding hardcoded limits in their proxy software and causing system panics that resulted in 5xx errors for customers.
• The root cause reveals a cascading failure pattern, where a ClickHouse database query began returning duplicate column metadata after permission changes.
• This resulted in a significant i...

• Fastnet and Furious: AWS Lays 320 Terabits of Cable Across the Atlantic
• No More kubectl apply –pray: AWS Backup Takes the Stress Out of EKS Recovery
• AWS Gets Swift with Lambda: No Taylor Version Required
• Breaking Up Is Hard to Do: Microsoft Splits Teams from Office
• FinOps and Behold: Google Automates Your Cloud Budget Nightmares
• AMD Turin Around GCP’s Price-Performance with N4D VMs
• Azure Gets Territorial: Your Data Stays Put Whether It Likes It or Not
• AWS Finally Answers “Is It Available in My Region?” Before You Build It
• Getting to the Bare Metal of Things: Google’s Axion Goes Commando
• Azure Ultra Disk Gets Ultra Serious About Latency
• Container Size Matters: Azure Expands ACI to 240 GB Memory
• Google Containerises Chaos: Agent Sandbox Keeps Your AI from Going Rogue
• AWS Prints Money While Amazon Prints Pink Slips: Q3 Earnings Beat

02:08 Microsoft sidesteps hefty EU fine with Teams unbundling deal

• Microsoft avoids a potentially substantial EU antitrust fine by agreeing to unbundle Teams from the Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites for a period of seven years.
• The settlement follows a 2023 complaint from Salesforce-owned Slack alleging anticompetitive bundling practices that harmed rival collaboration tools.
• The commitments require Microsoft to offer Office and