331: Claude Gets a $30 Billion Azure Wardrobe and Two New Best Friends

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!   

Titles we almost went with this week

• 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

Follow Up 

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

General News

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...

Chapters

• (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod
• (00:01:04) - Matchbox: Microsoft's AI Announcement
• (00:05:04) - Cloudflare's Worst Outage Since 2019
• (00:07:32) - GPT 5.1 Release
• (00:11:21) - ChatGPT Launches Group Chat
• (00:14:53) - Microsoft Teams: Working in Teams with Copilot
• (00:16:16) - Gemini 3.0 Pro Launch at Google AI Conference
• (00:18:51) - Microsoft, Nvidia to Develop Cloud Models for Anthropic
• (00:22:45) - Ingress NGINX Controller to Be Retired
• (00:25:05) - Cloudflare Expands AI into the Edge with a Replicate
• (00:29:31) - AWS Lambda: Provisioned Mode for SQS
• (00:32:31) - Amazon EventBridge Expands Schema Aware with New Rule Builder
• (00:34:37) - Application Load Balancers support JWT Token Verification
• (00:37:51) - How Protective Reroute Improves Network Resilience
• (00:40:26) - Google Security Operations