About this episode
Welcome to episode 324 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Jonathan are your hosts, bringing you all the latest news and announcements in Cloud and AI. This week we have some exec changes over at Oracle, a LOT of announcements about Sonnet 4.5, and even some marketplace updates over at Azure! Let’s get started.
Titles we almost went with this week
Oracle’s Executive Shuffle: Promoting from Within While Chasing from Behind
Copilot Takes the Wheel on Your Legacy Code Highway
Queue Up for GPUs: Google’s Take-a-Number Approach to AI Computing
License to Bill: Google’s 400% Markup Grievance
Autopilot Engages: GKE Goes Full Self-Driving Mode
SQL Server Finally Gets a Lake House Instead of a Server Room
Microsoft Gives Office Apps Their Own AI Interns
Claude and Present Danger: The AI That Codes for 30 Hours Straight
The Claude Father Part 4.5: An Offer Your Code Can’t Refuse
CUD You Believe It? Google Makes Discounts Actually Flexible
ECS Goes Full IPv6: No IPv4s Given
Breaking News: AWS Finally Lets You Hit the Emergency Stop Button
One Marketplace to Rule Them All
BigQuery Gets a Crystal Ball and a Chatty Friend
Azure’s September to Remember: When Certificates and Allocators Attack
Shall I Compare Thee to a Sonnet? 4.5 Ways Anthropic Just Leveled Up
AWS provides a big red button
Follow Up
01:26 The global harms of restrictive cloud licensing, one year later | Google Cloud Blog
Google Cloud filed a formal complaint with the European Commission one year ago about Microsoft’s anti-competitive cloud licensing practices, specifically the 400% price markup Microsoft imposes on customers who move Windows Server workloads to non-Azure clouds.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority found that restrictive licensing costs UK cloud customers £500 million annually due to lack of competition, while US government agencies overspend by $750 million yearly because of Microsoft’s licensing tactics.
Microsoft recently disclosed that
