313: The Gartner Guide to Breaking Things on Purpose

Welcome to episode 313 of The Cloud Pod, where your hosts, Matt, Ryan, and Justin, are here to bring you all the latest in Cloud and AI news. This week we’ve got an installation of Cloud Journey featuring Gartner and chaos AND an aftershow! We’ve got acquisition news, new tools, an undersea cable, and even a little chaos, all right now in the cloud. Let’s get into it! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• From Vibe Check to Production Spec
• Node More Mr. Nice Guy: AWS Locks Down Access Until You Ask Nicely
• Grok’s New Feature: Ask Elon First
• The AI That Phones Home to Dad
• Musk-See TV: When Your Chatbot Needs Parental Guidance
• Oracle’s Federal Discount: 75% Off for Six Months (Terms and Conditions Apply)
• GameDay: Not Just for Sports Anymore
• Bob the Builder Center: Can We Fix AWS? Yes We Can!
• Bucket List: Google Cloud Storage Finally Lets You Pack Up and Move
• The Great Bucket Migration: No Forwarding Address Required
• Compose Yourself: Cloud Run Gets Docker-mented
• Survey Says: Your Team Needs a Performance Check-Up
• From Florida With Love: Google’s New Cable Has a License to Transmit
• Sol Train: Google Lays Track Across the Atlantic
• Finding the Right Gradient for Your AI Journey
• Google Cracks the Code on AWS’s Cloud Castle
• Breaking Cloud: Google’s Data Analytics Cook Up Market Share
• From Chat to Churn: The Great GPT Subscription Exodus
• AWS Finally Filters Out the Pricing Noise
• The Price is Right: AWS Edition Gets New Search Features
• Four Filters and a Pricing API Walk Into a Cloud
• Fee-fi-fo-fum who has a flash reasoning model

Follow Up

02:01 Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO

• Cognition acquired Windsurf’s IP, product, and remaining talent after Google hired away the CEO and senior staff, highlighting the intense competition for AI coding expertise among major tech companies.
• The deal follows a failed $3 billion acquisition attempt by OpenAI and Google’s $2.4 billion licensing and compensation package to secure Windsurf’s leadership, demonstrating the premium valuations for AI coding technology.
• Both companies develop AI coding agents designed to accelerate software development, with Cognition’s Devin agent and Windsurf’s tools representing the growing market for AI-powered developer productivity solutions.
• The acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees receive accelerated vesting and financial participation, addressing the disruption caused by the leadership exodus to Google.
• This consolidation in the AI coding space suggests smaller startups may struggle to retain talent and remain independent as tech giants aggressively pursue AI engineering capabilities.

AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money 

04:40 New Grok AI model surprises experts by checking Elon Musk’s views before

Chapters

• (00:00:07) - Breaking Things On Purpose
• (00:00:44) - Covid Has Hit
• (00:02:08) - OpenAI Buys Coding Startup Windsurf
• (00:04:34) - Grok 4: Elon Musk's Tweets Causes a Problem
• (00:06:50) - DigitalOcean Launches Unified AI Cloud Platform
• (00:08:58) - Enterprises Are Canceling ChatGPT Subscriptions
• (00:13:37) - DORA Survey Open Until July 18th
• (00:17:50) - GCP 2.8: Free to Use, Paid
• (00:21:23) - SSM: Free vs. Paid Features
• (00:24:33) - Kiro: AI-assisted Development with VS Code
• (00:31:29) - Curo: A New Way to Develop with Q IDE
• (00:34:14) - Amazon AWS Launches P6E GB200 Ultra for AI Training
• (00:37:09) - Wonders of AWS: Update to AWS Builder Center
• (00:42:01) - Amazon's AWS Pricing Server Open Source
• (00:42:48) - Amazon Cloud Portal: AI vs MCP
• (00:45:00) - Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB com