340: Azure releases a new SQL AI Assistant… Jimmy Droptables

340: Azure releases a new SQL AI Assistant… Jimmy Droptables

Author: Justin Brodley, Jonathan Baker, Ryan Lucas and Matt Kohn | Cloud Computing & AI News January 27, 2026 Duration: 1:13:07

Welcome to episode 340 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a full house (eventually) with Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matt all on board for today’s episode. We’ve got a lot of announcements, from Gemini for Gov (no more CamoGPT!) to Route 52 and Claude. Let’s get started! 

Titles we almost went with this week

  • Claude’s Pricing Tiers: Free, Pro, and Maximum Overdrive
  • GitHub Copilot Learns Database Schema: Finally an AI That Understands Your Joins
  • SSMS Gets a Copilot: Your T-SQL Now Writes Itself While You Grab Coffee
  • Too Many Cooks in the Cloud Kitchen: How 32 GPUs Outcooked the Big Tech Industrial Kitchens
  • Uncle Sam Gets a Gemini Twin: Google’s AI Goes Federal
  • Route 53 Gets Domain of Its Own: .ai Joins the Party
  • Thai One On: Google Cloud Plants Its Flag in Bangkok
  • NAT So Fast: Azure’s Gateway Gets a V2 Glow-Up
  • Beware Azure’s SQL Assistant doesn’t smoke your joints.

AI Is Going Great, Or How ML Makes Money  

30:10 Announcing BlackIce: A Containerized Red Teaming Toolkit for AI Security Testing | Databricks Blog

  • Databricks released BlackIce, an open-source containerized toolkit that bundles 14 AI security testing tools into a single Docker image available on Docker Hub as databricksruntime/blackice:17.3-LTS. 
  • The toolkit addresses common red teaming challenges, including conflicting dependencies, complex setup requirements, and the fragmented landscape of AI security tools, by providing a unified command-line interface similar to how Kali Linux works for traditional penetration testing.
  • The toolkit includes tools covering three main categories: Responsible AI, Security testing, and classical adversarial ML, with capabilities mapped to MITRE ATLAS and the Databricks AI Security Framework. 
  • Tools are organized as either static (simple CLI-based with minimal programming needed) or dynamic (Python-based with customization options), with static tools isolated in separate virtual environments and dynamic tools in a global environment with managed dependencies.
  • BlackIce integrates directly with Databricks Model Serving endpoints through custom patches applied to several tools, allowing security teams to test for vulnerabilities like prompt injections, data leakage, hallucination detection, jailbreak attacks, and supply chain security issues. 
  • Users can deploy it via Databricks Container Services by specifying the Docker image URL when creating compute clusters.
  • The release includes a demo notebook showing how to orchestrate multiple security tools in a single environment, with all build artifacts, tool documentation, and examples available in the GitHub repository. 
  • The CAMLIS Red Paper provides additional technical details on tool selection criteria and the Docker image architecture.

04:30 Ryan – “It’s very difficult to feel confident in your AI security practice or patterns. I feel like it’s just bleeding edge, and I


Every week, the team behind The Cloud Pod gathers to sift through the constant stream of announcements from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Hosts Justin Brodley, Jonathan Baker, Ryan Lucas, and Matt Kohn bring their combined expertise to the table, translating complex platform updates and new service launches into practical insights. This isn't just a headline recap; it's a detailed analysis meant for engineers, architects, and tech leaders who need to understand the "why" and "how" behind the news. You'll hear them debate the real-world implications of the latest AI tooling, unpack FinOps strategies for managing costs, and track the evolving competitive landscape between the major providers. The conversation is grounded in years of hands-on experience, offering a perspective that goes beyond the press releases. Tuning into this weekly podcast provides a consistent, informed checkpoint for anyone whose work depends on the cloud. It’s a direct line to understanding the innovations and shifts that are actively reshaping how businesses build and scale technology, all from one of the most enduring voices in the space.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

The Cloud Pod | Weekly AI & Cloud News on AWS, Azure & GCP
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