312: Azure Firewall Finally Learns to Spell (FQDN Edition)

Welcome to episode 312 of The Cloud Pod, where your hosts, Matt, Ryan, and Justin, are here to bring you all the latest in Cloud and AI news. We’ve got security news, updates from PostgreSQL, Azure firewall and BlobNFS, plus TWO Cloud Journey stories for you! 

Thanks for joining us this week in the cloud!  

Titles we almost went with this week:

• Git Happens: Why Your Database Pipeline Keeps Breaking
• PostgreSQL and Chill: Azure’s New Storage Options for Database Romance
• NVMe, Myself, and PostgreSQL
• Canvas and Effect: AWS Paints a New Picture for E-commerce
• Oracle’s $30 Billion Stargate: The AI Infrastructure Wars Begin
• Larry’s Last Laugh: Oracle Lands OpenAI’s Mega Deal
• AI Will See You Now (Couch Not Included)
• Purview and Present Danger: Microsoft’s AI Security SDK Goes Live
• The Purview from Up Here: Microsoft’s Bird’s Eye View on AI Data Security
• Building Bridges: Azure’s Two-Way Street to Active Directory
• Domain Names: Not Just for Browsers Anymore
• FUSE or Lose: Azure’s BlobNFS Gets a Speed Boost
• When Larry Met Andy: An Exadata Love Story
• Bing There, Done That: Azure’s New Research Assistant
• The Search is Over: Azure AI Foundry Finds Its Research Groove
• Memory Lane: Where AI Agents Go to Remember Things
• Elephants Never Forget, and Now Neither Do Google’s Agents
• Z3 or Not Z3: That is the Storage Question
• Local SSD Hero: A New Hope for I/O Intensive Workloads
• Azure’s Certificate of Insecurity
• KeyVault’s Keys Left Under the Doormat
• When Your Cloud Provider Accidentally CCs the Hackers

AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money 

03:09 RYAN DOES A THING FOR SECURING AI WORKLOADS

• Ryan was recently invited to Google’s Headquarters in San Francisco as part of a small group of security professionals where they spent time hands-on with Google security offerings, learning how to secure AI workloads. 
• AI – and how to secure it – is a hot topic right now, and being able to spend time working with the Google development team was really insightful, with how they work with various levels of protections in place in dummy applications. 
• Ryan was especially interested in the back-end logic that was executed in the applications. 

05:32  Ryan – “I was impressed because there’s how we’re thinking about AI is still evolving, and how we’re protecting it’s gonna be changing rapidly, and having real-world examples really helped really flesh out how their AI services are, how they’re integrated into a security ecosystem. It was pretty impressive. And it’s something that’s near and dear. I’ve been working and trying to roll out Google agent spaces and different AI workloads and trying to get involved and make sure that we, just getting visibility into all the different ones. And that was, it was really helpful to sort of think about it in those contexts.”

10:13 OpenAI secures $30bn cloud deal with Oracle

• OpenAI signed a $30 billion annual cloud computing agreement with Oracle for 4.5GW of capacity, making it one of the largest AI cloud deals to date, and nearly triple Oracle’s current $10.3 billion annual data center infrastructure revenue.
• The deal represents a major expansion of the Stargate data center initiative, a $500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund aimed at building AI infrastructure across multiple US states, in...

Chapters

• (00:00:00) - Azure Firewall: Learning to Spell,
• (00:01:04) - Azure Bug in the Show Notes Bot
• (00:02:25) - How to Secure AI workloads with Threats
• (00:07:10) - GCP vs. AWS: Minimum-Viable Platforms
• (00:08:53) - Oracle to Buy 400,000 Nvidia GB200 Chips
• (00:15:54) - Google's New AI Tools for Mental Health
• (00:18:23) - Oracle Database at AWS
• (00:23:56) - Google Cloud's New Lustre Storage: General Availability
• (00:27:44) - Vertex AI Memory Bank Now in Public Preview
• (00:30:17) - Google Expands Z3 Storage Optimized VM Family
• (00:33:04) - Azure Adds Postgres to Kubernetes Database
• (00:35:42) - Kubernetes in the Wild: Data, Security, Continuous
• (00:39:22) - Kubernetes in the Wild: What is GitLab?
• (00:41:30) - Microsoft Purview SDK and APIs Announced
• (00:46:45) - Microsoft Entre Domain: Two Way Forest