Welcome to episode 366 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Ryan is back from “vacation,” aka his other job (moonlighting as the admin of the Eagles’ biggest fan Facebook group), and this week we’re talking a lot about security, how orgs are managing threats, and whose turn it is to release a new hoard of patches. Plus, we’ve got news from BigQuery, JWT, MCP, and Cloudflare – and so much more, so let’s get started!
Titles we almost went with this week
- GitHub’s New Stack Overflow: PRs Edition
- North Korea Debugs Its Way Into Your NPM Packages
- Amazon Bedrock Googles Itself, Skips the Middleman
- Kiro, Claude, and the Quest for Sane Code Review
- Bezos Bucks: AWS Revenue Growth Defies Gravity
- Google Tears Down Data Walls with Borderless Lakehouse
- BigQuery Goes Full Nomad, Crosses Clouds Without a Passport
- Chollima Chaos: DPRK Hackers Crash the NPM Party
- Bedrock Bets Big on Bing-Free Web Search
- Microsoft’s Azure Hits Triple Digits, Xbox Hits Snooze
- Google Automates the DBA Out of Day 0
- MCP Servers Turn Data Chaos Into Actual Answers
- Cloudflare Gives Agents a Computer, Not Containers
- 200 OK, Zero Trust: Cloudflare Traces Agent Fails
- Amazon is all about the Quota
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General News
It’s Earnings Time!
01:12 Google (GOOG) Q2 2026 earnings report: Live updates
- Google Cloud revenue grew 82% year over year to $24.8 billion, the standout number in an otherwise mixed earnings report, and beat Wall Street’s overall revenue expectations of $116.93 billion with $119.80 billion.
- Alphabet raised its 2026 capex guidance to $195-205 billion, up from the $180-190 billion forecast given just last quarter, with Q2 capex alone up 100% year over year to $44.9 billion. CFO Anat Ashkenazi cited continued supply constraints and strong demand from both external cloud customers and internal AI workloads.
- Despite the cloud growth and revenue beat, stock dropped in after-hours trading, suggesting investors are more focused on the scale of AI infrastructure spending than current cloud performance gains.
- Google’s Antigravity AI coding tool reported 2.4 million weekly active users, and the Gemini App has scaled to 950 million monthly active users processing 22 billion tokens per minute, indicating substantial adoption of Google’s AI products.
- Competitive pressure is mounting from Chinese open-weight models pushing token costs down, prompting Google to release three cheaper Gemini models this week.
- Gemini 3.5 Pro remains in testing after reported delays, while compute is already being allocated toward Gemini 4 to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI’s frontier models.
04:19 AW
