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!

• 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

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 CloudH...

Welcome to episode 307 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Who else is at a conference? Justin is coming to us this week from sunny San Diego where he’s attending FinOps – so we have that news to look forward to for next week. Matt and Ryan are also on hand today to share the latest news from Kubernetes, Salesforce acquisitions, and the strange case of Azure making AWS more cost effective.

• The Great Redis Escape: One Year Later, Valkey is Living Its Best Life
• Cache Me If You Can: How Valkey Outran Redis’s License Policies
• Tier Today, Gone Tomorrow: AWS’s New Storage Class That Moves Your Data So
• You Don’t
• Hey AI, Deploy My App: AWS Makes It Actually Work
• AWS Finally Calculates What You’ll Actually Pay
• The Price is Right: AWS Edition
• From List Price to Real Price: AWS Gets Transparent
• Red Hat and AWS Sitting in a Tree, R-H-E-L-I-N-G
• Dockerfile? More Like Dockefile-It-For-Me with Amazon’s New MCP Server
• Elementary, My Dear Watson: Amazon Q Becomes Sherlock Holmes for AWS
• CUD You Believe It? Red Hat Gets the Discount Treatment
• Committed Relationship Status: It’s Complicated (But 20% Cheaper)
• RHEL Yeah! Google Drops Prices on Enterprise Linux
• Disk Today, Gone Tomorrow: Azure’s Vanishing OS Storage
• ATL1: Where GPUs Meet Sweet Tea and Southern Hospitality
• AWS Launches Operation Cloud Sovereignty
• The Great Firewall of Europe: AWS Edition
• Amazon Builds a GDPR Fortress in Germany

01:46 What Salesforce’s $8B acquisition of Informatica means for enterprise data and AI | VentureBeat

• Salesforce just dropped $8 billion to acquire Informatica.
• This purchase was really about building the data foundation needed for agentic AI to actually work in enterprise environments – we’re talking about combining Informatica’s 30 years of data management expertise with Salesforce’s cloud platform to create what they’re calling a “unified architecture for agentic AI.”
• This acquisition fills a massive gap in Salesforce’s data management capabilities, bringing in critical pieces like data cataloging, integration, governance, quality controls, and master data management – all the unsexy but absolutely essential plumbing that makes AI agents trustworthy and scalable in real enterprise deployments.
• The timing here is fascinating, because Informatica literally just announced their own agentic AI offerings last week at Informatica World, so Salesforce is essentially buying a company that’s already pivoted hard into the AI space – rather than trying to build these capabilities from scratch.
• There’s going to be some interesting overlap with MuleSoft, which Salesforce bought for $6.5 billion back in 2018, but analysts are saying Informatica’s data management capabilities are more comprehensive and updated – this could mean some consolidation challenges ahead as they figure out how to integrate these overlapping technologies.
• For enterprise customers, this could be a game-changer because it promises to automate those painful, time-consuming data processes that typically take days or weeks. These AI agents can handle data ingestion, in...