308: SCC: Security Command Center or Super Cool Capabilities?

Welcome to episode 308 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt and Ryan are in the house today to tell us all about the latest and greatest from FinOps and SnowFlake conferences, plus updates from Security Command Center, OpenAI, and even a new AWS Region. All this and more, today in the cloud! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• I Left My Wallet at FinOps X, But Found Savings at Snowflake Summit
• Snowflake City Lights, FinOps by the Sea
• The Two Summits: A Tale of FinOps and Snowflakes
• Crunchy on the Outside, Snowflake on the Inside 
• AWS Taipei: Because Sometimes You Need Your Data Closer Than Your Night Market 
• AWS Plants Its Flag in Taipei: The 37th Time’s the Charm
• AWS Slashes GPU Prices Faster Than a CUDA Kernel
• Two Writers Walk Into a Database… And Both Succeed
• AWS Network Firewall: Now With Windows!
• The VPN Connection That Keeps Its Secrets
• Transform and Roll Out: Pub/Sub’s New Single Message Feature
• SAP Happens: Google’s New M4 VMs Handle It Better
• Total Recall: Google’s 6TB Memory Machines
• The M4trix Has You (And Your In-Memory Databases)
• DeepSeek and You Shall Find… on Google Cloud
• Four Score and Seven Vulnerabilities Ago – mk
• The Fantastic Four Security Features
• MCP: Model Context Protocol or Master Control Program from Tron?
• No SQL? No Problem! AI Takes the Wheel
• Injection Rejection: How Azure Keeps Your Prompts Clean

General News 

05:09 FinOps X 2025 Cloud Announcements: AI Agents  and Increased FOCUS Support

• All major cloud providers announced expanded support for FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) 1.0, with AWS already in general availability and Google Cloud launching a BigQuery export in private preview. 
• This signals an industry-wide standardization of cloud cost reporting formats.
• AWS introduced AI-powered cost optimization through Amazon Q Developer integration with Cost Optimization Hub, enabling automated recommendations across millions of resources with detailed explanations and action plans for cost reduction.
• Microsoft Azure launched AI agents for application modernization that can reduce migration efforts from months to hours by automating code assessment and remediation across thousands of files, while also introducing flexible PTU reservations that work across multiple AI models.
• Google Cloud unveiled FinOps Hub 2.0 with Gemini-powered waste detection that identifies underutilized resources (like VMs at 5% usage) and provides AI-generated optimization recommendations for Kubernetes, Cloud Run, and Cloud SQL services.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure added carbon emissions reporting with hourly power-based calculations and GHGP compliance, plus new cost anomaly detection and rules-based cost allocation features for improved financial governance.

06:11 Justin – “I mean, if I’m modernizing my application, typically it’s off .NET and Azure, but ok…” 

07:20 Broadcom reboots CloudHealt...

Chapters

• (00:00:00) - Don't Buy Software Named After Fuzzy Creatures
• (00:04:00) - FinOps X: Ranting About Finops Tooling
• (00:05:17) - Cloud Cost Reporting Standards 1.2 Spec
• (00:07:19) - CloudHealth's New Look for Finops
• (00:11:05) - FinOps and the dual-role
• (00:12:37) - Snowflake Summit 2018: Big Data, Intelligence & Security
• (00:17:29) - Snowflake Adds Postgres to its Cloud Platform
• (00:20:05) - OpenAI Adds Google Cloud to Its Infrastructure
• (00:23:34) - Mistral AI Releases Magistral, Their First Language Model
• (00:26:07) - Amazon Launches 37th Global Region in Taipei
• (00:31:25) - Wonders of AWS: Smithy API Models
• (00:37:34) - AWS to Lower GPU Prices for AI-based Instances
• (00:41:01) - AWS Open-Sourcing PG Active
• (00:44:43) - AWS Network Firewall: Monitoring Dashboard
• (00:48:35) - AWS Site to Site VPN: