333: The Cloud Pod Goes Nano Banana

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to the cloud pod where the forecast is always cloudy. We talk weekly about all things aws, GCP and azure. [00:00:14] Speaker C: We are your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Ryan and Matthew. [00:00:18] Speaker A: Episode 333 recorded for December 2, 2025. The Cloud Pod goes Nano banana. Good evening, Ryan and Matt. How are you guys doing? [00:00:29] Speaker C: Doing awesome. [00:00:30] Speaker D: Post Thanksgiving fun. Yeah. [00:00:34] Speaker A: Who doesn't love post Thanksgiving fun? I mean, reinvent's happening underneath us right now and like it's been a crazy week of announcements. We'll talk about next week but you know, then it's been just other craziness of the world and it's been weird. I don't know. I just feel like vibes are off in the world since Thanksgiving. Like, I don't know. I don't know if I have definitely bad things to do this week or. Or what. But like the world's just in a weird vibe. [00:00:57] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I concur. [00:00:59] Speaker A: It's. [00:01:00] Speaker C: It's, you know, there's the. The holiday rush. Right. And then there's just the. The wrapping up everything by the end. [00:01:06] Speaker A: Of the year kind of. [00:01:07] Speaker C: Kind of press and then there's just kind of this general malaise. [00:01:11] Speaker D: Seems I just feel like everyone's blah right now in life. [00:01:16] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:01:16] Speaker A: Maybe Mercury's in retrograde. I don't know that. [00:01:18] Speaker C: Yeah. Stupid rocks. [00:01:21] Speaker D: Too close. [00:01:21] Speaker C: Floating on space. [00:01:22] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:01:23] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know, it's just been weird. I mean I came back from the Thanksgiving and I'm just like. Had hard to get into gear. Just not motivated this week. [00:01:31] Speaker D: I don't know. [00:01:31] Speaker A: It's been a tough one, but I haven't. I've been sort of enjoying wanting to watch all the re invent stuff. I've yet to watch a single keynote. So. Yeah, I'm only behind by a few days. [00:01:40] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:01:41] Speaker A: So hopefully. [00:01:42] Speaker D: Yeah, I'm in the same place you are in. [00:01:43] Speaker A: So I've got. I've got homework to do before we record next week. So thank God we didn't decide, like let's just push the recording out to Friday of the week of reinvent. We've done every year before and we're always like miserable because we're like always a disaster. Hey, we don't have time to research anything and to do anything. And so we're just like. Than has this thing and we're like, what does it do? I don't know. So we. We thought we'll just cover all non AWS news today. That way we get BET off the plate for next week and then we'll just hit all the Amazon news and they were very at a very busy pre invent and a very busy reinvent. So there's a lot to cover next week in a single, single show for them. So it's pretty good. And then hopefully after that everyone will start going on vacation for Christmas because. [00:02:19] Speaker C: Of course now you're telling everyone in advance, we'll have no excuse and we don't do the homework for next show, which will be. [00:02:25] Speaker A: I mean, you don't do the homework anyways. But I'll at least done the homework. [00:02:27] Speaker C: So I try to. [00:02:28] Speaker A: I. I can carry you on. So it's fine. [00:02:30] Speaker D: It's just a normal week here in the cloud pod. [00:02:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I was like. [00:02:36] Speaker A: Don'T tell anyone. One of the podcasts, there's a, there's a song and like at the end of their show, it's like a jingle and like one of the lines is like, John didn't do any research because Marco and. [00:02:48] Speaker A: What'S that guy's name? It's escaped my mind. Okay. No, whatever. Well, wouldn't let him. Yeah. [00:02:56] Speaker A: It'S funny. Oh well, anyways, all right, let's get right into AI is how ML makes money. And because we wanted to use the show title, we had to keep this one in there. We don't. There's really not much to say about it. [00:03:07] Speaker C: But Google's. [00:03:09] Speaker A: Google's launching Nano Banana Pro, which is Gemini 3 Pro, image editing and general availability on Vertex AI and Google Workspace with Gemini Enterprise support coming very soon. Gemini Enterprise support is what they called AgentSpace three weeks ago and now it's enterprise. Just to remind everybody, because branding is hard. The models Support up to 14 reference images for style consistency and generates 4K resolution outputs with multilingual text rendering capabilities. And the model includes Google search grounding for factual accuracy and generated infographics and diagrams. Plus built in Synth ID watermarking for transparency. Copyright identification will be available at general availability under Google Shared Responsibility framework. Enterprise integrations are live with Adobe Firefly, Photoshop, Canva and Figma mailing production grade creativity workflows and major retailers including Klarna, Shopify and Wayfair Report use the model for product visualization and marketing asset generation at scale. Developers can access nanobana Pro through Vertex AI with provisioned throughput and pay as you go pricing options plus advanced safety filters. So yeah, the biggest thing that's most important about this, you guys, is that when Nano Banana messes up the text, which it doesn't do as often, you can now edit it and actually edit it properly without generating a whole completely different image. Because that used to happen to me all the time. It's like, oh, I love this image. But they, it spelled screwed up the spelling. I would try, please respell that. And it's like no new image. [00:04:25] Speaker C: And then it's still a different way. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's been my experience and I think I've, I, maybe I've just been using regular nano banana. If there's a difference between pro and. [00:04:35] Speaker A: Nonprofit, really it's the higher resolution, some of the ability to do some of the 4K stuff. It's really the difference. But yeah, Nanobanana has been out for a few weeks now or months, month maybe. And yeah, it's so much better. I mean, but even, even chat GBT image generation has dramatically improved in the last six months. [00:04:54] Speaker C: Yeah, I really wish that. And I finally asked Claude enough times to where I got an answer for it. Like I noticed that a heavy revisions of, of images over and over and over again. The, the, the, the fidelity would decrease and it, it, it is, you know, I finally got an answer out of it, which is it is literally doing a copy and making an image from a copy of a copy of a copy when it's doing those edits. So it's, it's kind of, it was kind of an interesting sort of behind the scenes that I got out of the AI model itself. [00:05:23] Speaker A: Was that a video or was that a just a blog post? [00:05:26] Speaker C: No, it's just me asking the, the stupid bot, like why is why you suck. And then it. [00:05:31] Speaker A: I always wonder, I always wondered how that worked too. Like I was like, I don't, you know, like earlier today I was telling someone that, you know, his memory is out of a goldfish. And I, and he has a very distinctive facial features. I was like, I want this. I want a goldfish with his facial features. So I just put his photo in with the feet with and said I want a goldfish with these facial features. And I got it. And so then we all laughed and it was funny. And yeah, because I troll all my employees. It's what I do. But so that's all good. All right, moving on from Images, Cloud Opus 4.5 is now generally available across anthropics, API apps and all three major cloud platforms at 5 doll per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, representing a substantial price reduction that makes opus level capabilities more accessible. Developers can access it via the Cloud Opus 4 5, 20, 25, 1101 model identifier because that rolls off the tongue and the model achieves state of the art performance on software engineering benchmarks, scoring higher than any human candidate on Anthropic's internal performance engineering exam within a two hour time limit on SWE bench verified, it matches Sonnet 4.5's best score using 76% fewer output tokens at medium effort and exceeds it by 4.3 percentage points at higher effort while still using 48% fewer tokens. Anthropic introduces a new effort parameter in the API that lets developers control the trade off between speed and capability, allowing optimization for either minimal time and cost or maximum performance depending on the task requirements, and this combines with new context management and memory capabilities to boost performance on Agentic tasks by nearly 15% in their testing Cloud Code gains Plan mode that builds user editable plan MD files before execution and is now available in the desktop app for running multiple parasites, parallel sessions and the consumer app removed Message limits for opus 4.5 through automatic content summarization and Claude for Chrome and Cloud for Excel expand to all Max Team and enterprise users. The model demonstrates improved robustness against prompt injection attacks compared to other Frontier models and is described as the most robust, roughly aligned model Anthropic has released to date. Congratulations. I was playing with this and I the way I play with Claude today is I use Bedrock because I got tired of paying Claude and everyone else for things every day. And so when I tried to use the last opus I racked up a 600 bill in one day and when I tried to do it yesterday and then I forgot about it and three days later I was like oh no, I forgot about putting it on Opus mode. I went into the bill and it was only $75. So either I'm coding less, which is not true, or it is actually cheaper. So congratulations on that. It's actually the most important part of the whole announcement is the cheaper context, you know, input and output tokens. I do sort of find it interesting though that you know, you pay for both the input and the output, but I only control the input, I don't control the output. So CLAUDE can just all the models like that. Yeah, I know it is, but it's always time for me. Like I have this indeterminate thing in the middle. It's going to output something that I can't predict or know what it's going to be and you get to pay for that. So it's just sort of funny now. [00:08:26] Speaker D: Do budgeting for my day job. How much is it going to Output. We don't know. How much is he going to charge you? We don't know. Your CFO really loves you. Will you tell them that? [00:08:36] Speaker C: I mean, at least at a larger scale you can sort of do trending and bucket. But it is, I know just from trying to manage my own, like, you know, API balance or token balance impossible. And it's just like I feel I'm constantly just doling it out like $20 at a time just because I'm so afraid I'm going to like let Justin right up a 600 bill. [00:08:58] Speaker A: Well, and that's why I, you know, I was doing that too and I was like, every day I'm getting like 420 transactions on my credit card and it was silly, but. Yeah, but then you do need to set up billing alerts if you're going to do it in the cloud. [00:09:12] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely was. So I'm definitely pleased that it's significantly. [00:09:15] Speaker D: Cheaper to use, but it feels a lot more efficient. [00:09:20] Speaker A: It's still not as cheap as sonnet 4.5 or, sorry, opus. Sorry, Sonnet Opus is still a little bit more expensive than that, but I wish they would get a nice model router so I could just route between them and it would make the decision which one's better. For this quoting question I have, like. [00:09:35] Speaker C: With the anthropic API. [00:09:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I wish cloud code would just kind of choose based on what it knows. Like, oh, I should use this one or you choose that one based on the complexity of this code I'm trying to analyze. [00:09:46] Speaker A: Well, guess what, guys? What's that? [00:09:49] Speaker D: Why? [00:09:50] Speaker A: You know, because there's now Claude. Snowflake also has Claude. [00:10:00] Speaker A: So if you want to use Claude Opus 4.5 or Cloud Sonnet 4.5 and general availability on Snowflake Cortex AI, it is available to you today, so you're welcome. [00:10:11] Speaker C: So now I know what we're going to do for the rest of the show. Every club better. [00:10:16] Speaker D: It's better than the blowhard. [00:10:18] Speaker A: Just saying it is. [00:10:19] Speaker C: It is much better. [00:10:20] Speaker A: I did figure out how to turn the down. So now next, when we do the blower, I probably can do without blowing out all of our listeners and your ears. So I was like, oh, there's a slider. [00:10:28] Speaker C: Who knew? [00:10:29] Speaker A: No, I should probably pay more attention. [00:10:30] Speaker D: I think you've known for a while. You've just decided not to. [00:10:34] Speaker A: I. I don't know. I don't. [00:10:36] Speaker C: I think he's also learned that he could probably turn it up on us now too. [00:10:38] Speaker A: So be warned, do it either way. You know, so OpenAI apparently is declaring code red as Gemini has gained 200 million users in three months. They basically this came from Sam Altman, who's issued an internal code red memo to refocus the company on improving ChatGPT after Google's Gemini 3 model topped the LMA arena leaderboard and gained 200 million users in three months. The directive delays plan features including advertising integration, AI agents for health and shopping, and the Pulse personal assistant feature. Google's Gemini 3 models released in mid November has outperformed Chapter GPT on industry benchmarks test tests and attracted high profile users like Salesforce CEO Mark Benoff. We publicly announced switching from ChatGPT after three years. The model's performance represents a significant shift in the competitive landscape since OpenAI's initial ChatGPT launch in December 2022. The situation mirrors December 2022 when Google declared its own code right after ChatGPT's rapid adoption. The CEO Sundar Pichai resigning teams developed the competing AI product that is now Gemini. OpenAI is implementing a daily call for teams responsible for chat GPT improvements and encouraging temporary team transfers to address the competitive pressure. And the company responses indicate they're maintaining market leadership is a conversational AI requires continuous iteration even for established product with large user bases. I mean I've sort of felt like this was, this has been the case the last years that OpenAI has sort of been losing its luster. I mean, at least for me, I've been on Claude now for over a year and I just love it and like there's so many great features in cloud that I love now. Like, you know, the fact that it can now look at all of our chat history and it can now rep. You know, it can basically replicate how I write, which is super helpful. So it doesn't sound like Gemini, which writes still very AI esque wording on everything it generates. And OpenAI has definitely some things I still use and I still enjoy as well. This is. I cannot pay for all three of them because why not? It's a tax write off. [00:12:25] Speaker A: I do compare them quite often all the time and I always typically either go even in my coding stuff it's either Gemini because of the big context window when something's really sticky, or it's it's Claude and it's not OpenAI. But I do use OpenAI more for image generation than I use Gemini and Claude if it had image generation would be insane I'm sure. And it just doesn't have it because they don't care about that. Which is fine and I'm okay with that. [00:12:48] Speaker C: Yeah, it's. I find myself like, I tried, you know, like I started on ChatGPT and tried to use it after adopting Claude. And then I try to go back every once in a while, especially when they were all, it's a new model and I end up going, going back to one of the anthropic models. So it's sort of like, you know, I can see why they're sort of declaring this code red because I do think that, you know, they've, they, they're struggling a little bit and the other, the model providers are, are sort of making up significant ground. I wonder how much of this is just going to be sort of like a hot potato where all of them are sort of doing this, you know, back and forth over the years. [00:13:31] Speaker D: Let's see. Yeah, I'm in the same boat as you. I feel like originally I used Chat GPT. I pretty much de facto I start my, anything I'm doing with Claude every now and then I'll pop over to Copilot and my day job because that's our primary tool, you know. And then I'm like, this isn't quite where I want to go. Though it does work a little bit better with, you know, scripting against Azure, weirdly, you know, so they clearly added a little bit of special sauce on there. [00:14:00] Speaker A: All right, well, let's move on to aws. Oh, wait, no AWS next week everybody. But there's lots of cool things happening there. Lots of AI models, lots of things. [00:14:10] Speaker A: I know if we didn't care about predictions being in keynotes, that there would definitely be some winners. I just don't know if those predictions happen to be in keynotes or not. So that'll be our debate for next week, I'm sure. I know one particular Jonathan's unhappy about was related to Lambda. [00:14:29] Speaker A: Because they announced it pre show. They did not announce it during the keynote. [00:14:33] Speaker C: I thought he was already doing his victory dance on that. That's funny. [00:14:35] Speaker A: No, no, he doesn't get a count. He doesn't get a point. It was announced on the Saturday before. [00:14:40] Speaker D: So. [00:14:42] Speaker D: Which is just weird that it was Saturday. [00:14:45] Speaker A: It was weird. It was like strange timing. I was like, why did this come out today? Oh, Google Cloud region has a new region coming to Turkey as part of a $2 billion investment over 10 years. It's really, really great timing on this, by the way. You announced you're a Turkey region on Turkey Day. [00:14:59] Speaker C: Like it's very nice, Very nice. [00:15:01] Speaker A: Well done, Google. I See what you did there? I the region targets three key verticals already committed as customers. Custom financial services like Guarantee bba, Yapi Credit bank modernizing core banking systems, Airlines, the Turkish Airlines improving flight operations and the local presence. Stresses data residency requirements and provides low latency access for organizations that need to keep data within their national border. Technical capabilities include standard Google Cloud services for data analytics, AI and cybersecurity with data encryption at rest and in transit, granular access controls and threat detection systems meeting international security standards. The announcement emphasizes digital sovereignty as the primary driver of government officials, highlighting the importance of local infrastructure for maintaining control over national data while accessing hyperscale cloud capabilities. No pricing details, no exact timing when this will be launched officially, but I assume probably sometime in 2027, two years from now. [00:15:53] Speaker D: Yeah, I was doing that math in my head that took me way too long. I guess it's a year plus, but. [00:15:57] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean it depends on how fast I think these, they typically take. [00:16:02] Speaker A: Multiple years, but yeah, yeah, it's typically, I mean you assume they, they've already done ground prep and they've already started probably construction before they even announce it, you know, three to four months in advance and then you know, they announced this thing and then typically 18 months after that they finally can stand up services. And then it also depends on government regulations, import taxes, you know, all kinds of things. Like KSA took longer, I think the. [00:16:22] Speaker D: Ability of buying RAM at this point. [00:16:25] Speaker A: GPUs, you know, all kinds of things that are factors in being able to build a data center at scale. So Google is launching BigQuery Agent Analytics, a new plugin for their agent development kit that streams AI agent interaction data directly to BigQuery with a single line of code. The plugin captures metrics like latency, token consumption, tool usage and user interactions in real time using the BigQuery storage write API, enabling developers to analyze agent performance and optimize costs without complex instrumentation. The integration allows developers to leverage BigQuery's advanced capabilities including generative AI functions, vector search and embedding generation to perform sophisticated analysis on agent conversations. Teams can cluster similar interactions, identify failure patterns and join agent data with business metrics like CSAT scores to measure real world impact, going beyond basic operational metrics to quality analysis. Plugin includes three core components, an ADK plugin that requires minimal code changes, a predefined optimized BigQuery schema for storing interaction data and low cost Streaming via the BigQuery storage Write API and developers maintain full control over what data gets streamed and customized pre processing currently available in preview for ADK users with support for other agent frameworks like Langgraph coming very soon. And pricing follows standard BigQuery costs for storage and queries with storage right API offering cost effective real time streaming compared to traditional batch loading methods. [00:17:42] Speaker C: Yeah this is an interesting model like for you know, providing both the schema and the the the already instrumented integration. Like I'm not I feel like a lot of times with other types of development you're sort of left to your own devices and so like this is kind of a neat, neat thing if you're as you're developing agent, you know everyone is sort of instrumenting these things in odd ways and it's very difficult to sort of compile the data in a way where you get usable like queries out of it like you know, so it's, it's kind of an interesting concept. I like does sound expensive. That's the only thing that I would worry about a little bit is you're not in control over what you're consuming and, and it's in BigQuery which isn't cheap in terms of queries and storage. [00:18:27] Speaker A: But yeah, who doesn't have a problem? Who cares about this though? [00:18:32] Speaker D: None of this sounds cheap. AI, BigQuery analytics, you name a word in this press release that is cheap, let me know. Yeah, it's all going to be expensive, but it just depends how your business. [00:18:44] Speaker A: Uses it and nothing is cheap anymore. That's the, that's the truth about this economy. [00:18:52] Speaker A: Google is announcing Tailay Link, a new subsea cable connecting Australia and Thailand via the Indian Ocean, taking a western route around the Sundew Strait to avoid congestion from existing cable paths. This cable extends the Interlink system from the Australia Connect initiative and will directly connect to Google's planned Thailand cloud region and data center. The project includes two new hubs in Mandurah, Western Australia and South Thailand, providing diverse landing points away from existing cable concentrations in Perth and enabling cable switching, content caching and colocation capabilities. And Google is partnering with AIs for the South Thailand hub to leverage existing infrastructure. Tail Link forms part of a broader Indian Ocean connectivity strategy, linking with previously announced hubs in the Maldives and Christmas Islands to create redundant paths between Australia, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle east. Supports the Thailand's digital economy transformation and. [00:19:41] Speaker D: Is moving around it's amazing about subsea cable congestion that there's how many cables can be there, that there's congestion I could get for availability reasons, but the word congestion just sounds strange to me in that one. [00:19:58] Speaker A: Yeah, it was a little strange bit of wording there. [00:20:02] Speaker C: Well, yeah, I mean it's, yeah, it's funny to think about. And then, I mean I was, I was instantly terrified like, oh, we've already got enough subsea cables where we've got like congestion problems and, and you know, looking at the link like, you know, just looking at the picture like it's, the route is pretty close to the, the last subsea cable they just announced a few months ago. So it's kind of. [00:20:23] Speaker A: Well then they say they're, they said they're going to connect it to the Malaysia one, which was what? That was a couple months ago, I. [00:20:28] Speaker C: Think the Avaro link cable, which is. Yeah, and they, you know, they do both route through Christmas island and then out, out from there. So does make sense. Okay, very fun. [00:20:43] Speaker A: I mean I assume that a lot of the original cables that go through Perth and that part of the world were, you know, laid a long time at the beginning of the Internet. And they just, you know, they, maybe they are only a single strand or multiple, you know, not single strand, but you know, a smaller amount of concurrency through them and they're probably just, you know, you've maximize what you can do through that amount of fiber and so now you need new ones to address congestion. As my gas, that's the only thing I can think of what congestion could be. [00:21:07] Speaker D: I mean from [email protected] which is, you know, where I always go just when I completely get digressed, when we have these conversations, there's a lot of freaking cables in that area of the world. Like in that area, like the diagram is pretty big. [00:21:24] Speaker C: There's not a lot of points, right? [00:21:25] Speaker D: Yeah, but like off, you know, there's Malaysia and Thailand and all that. There's a lot of cables that all kind of go through that one little area of the world. So one drag anchor and they're gonna have problems, which is I guess why. [00:21:41] Speaker A: They'Re trying to diversify this. Yeah, I mean that's a risk anywhere in the world, unfortunately. [00:21:46] Speaker D: Yeah, but there looks like a ton of cables compared to like most other places have a little bit extra, you know, room. [00:21:54] Speaker C: I mean it looks like it's probably by necessity. Right. [00:21:56] Speaker D: Like it's, well, you gotta go that way through the street. Yeah, that's the closest path. Otherwise you essentially have to go around. [00:22:04] Speaker A: Which is what this one's doing. [00:22:06] Speaker D: It's going to go probably out to the Indian Ocean and then to Christmas island and kind of come down that way. [00:22:12] Speaker A: Well, Cloud Opus 4.5 is now officially on vertex AI. [00:22:18] Speaker D: Where's the clapping? Oh, there we go. [00:22:22] Speaker A: In this particular announcement, they do want to point out that Vertex AI is a unified platform for deploying CLAUDE with enterprise features, including global endpoints for reduced latency provisions, provision throughput for dedicated capacity at fixed costs and prompt caching with flexible time to live up to one hour. The platform integrates with Google's Agent Builder stack, including the Open Agent development Kit, agent to agent protocol, and fully managed agent engine for moving multiple step workflows from prototype to production. And so yeah, there you go. [00:22:52] Speaker A: If you are excited to go to Las Vegas and you're disappointed that you are not sitting there right now in a reinvent session or dinner or drinking because it is a little bit later in the evening, you can go to Vegas in April of 20202026 for Google Cloud Next, which will be in April 22nd to the 24th. They moved it off my birthday weekend which is nice and sad at the same time. Yeah because I was enjoying getting going to Vegas for my birthday and then going to the conference, but that's okay. This represents the standard price description for Google's flagship annual conference at $999, which is the early bird pricing. And this will follow their record breaking conference attendance 2025. The conference will focus of course heavily on AI agent development and implementation, featuring interactive demos, hackathons and workshops designed to help attendees build intelligent agents. And next 2026 will offer hands on technical training through deep dive sessions, keynotes and practical labs aimed at developers and technical practitioners. And the event serves as a main networking hub for cloud practitioners who love Google. [00:23:49] Speaker D: Ryan, do you love Google? Justin, do you love Google? [00:23:53] Speaker A: I like parts of Google. [00:23:55] Speaker C: Love is strong. [00:23:58] Speaker C: I think with any cloud provider. I always have a low hate relationship. [00:24:01] Speaker A: Yeah, Amazon, I don't know that I loved either. I liked it greatly. I hate Azure. Loathe entirely. That's fine. [00:24:10] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't really. I have a hate hate relationship with Azure. Although there's now, there's, there's, there's now a couple of cracks in that facade and that I'm, I'm really starting to fall in love with some of their identity management which is funny. [00:24:25] Speaker A: I mean as Google, I mean Google has always had good IAM stuff and their workspaces product and how they, you know is not great in the UI. Like they, they're terrible at UIs just like Amazon is but they're like their APIs are so strong that you can kind of ignore their shitty AI or a ui. [00:24:42] Speaker C: Sorry. [00:24:44] Speaker C: I mean I'll have to take your word for it. I haven't tried it with Workspace, but Azure seems to be the first. I mean mostly for, you know, a lot of the integration with Office365 and Entre. Like they seem to be the first to really be leaning heavily into sort of temporary access patterns and really promoting that in a way that makes it easier to subscribe to than the other cloud providers. So. And you've always been able to sort of assume a temporary rule only if. [00:25:11] Speaker D: You pay for it. It is also very V2 licenses, you know, at like what, eight or ten dollars a person, you know, it adds up real fast. [00:25:21] Speaker C: Yeah. And you know, but it is something you get to reuse across Azure and Office365, you know. So yeah, it is sort of that. [00:25:28] Speaker D: But this is what I hate about it is you have to pay for security. It's not built in. [00:25:32] Speaker C: Yeah, that is true. [00:25:33] Speaker D: Why do I have to pay 10x for front door in order to be able to hit a private endpoint or to have a WAF on it? Just because you don't like security? I don't know. [00:25:45] Speaker C: Yeah, because it's expensive to provide, I'm guessing. Or because it's security teams. They're always tool happy and willing to pay it on one of those two Yep. [00:25:57] Speaker A: All right. VPC flow logs now support cloud VPN tunnels and VLAN attachments for cloud interconnect and cross cloud interconnects, extending visibility between sorry beyond traditional VPC subnet traffics to hybrid and multi cloud connections. This addresses a critical gap for organizations running cross cloud network architectures. We previously lacked detailed telemetry on traffic flowing between Google Cloud, On Premise infrastructure and other cloud providers. The feature provides five tuple granularity logging, which means source, destination, IP port and protocol, with new gateway annotations that identify traffic direction and context, the reporter and gateway object fields, and the flow analyzer. Integration eliminates the need for complex SQL queries, offering built in analysis capabilities including Gemini powered natural language queries and in context connectivity tests. Primary use cases include identifying elephant flows that can adjust to specific tunnels or attachments, auditing shared VPC bandwidth, consumption by service projects, and troubleshooting issues by verifying whether traffic reaches Google Cloud gateway at all. The feature is available now for both new and existing deployments through Console, cli, API and Terraform, with Flow Analyzer providing no cost analysis of logs stored in cloud logging and this capability is particularly relevant for financial services, healthcare and enterprises with strict Compliance requirements who need comprehensive audit trails across cloud and hybrid networking traffic. [00:27:14] Speaker C: Interesting. Yeah, because it is like the controls say that you have to have logging, not what the logging is and so very frequently it is sort of turn it on and sort of forget it. But I do think this is great. But it is sort of like they say the 5 tuple granularity will help you measure congestion but I don't see them actually producing any sort of bandwidth or request size metrics. So it is sort of an interesting thing but it's at least better than the nothing that we had before. So I'll take it. [00:27:44] Speaker D: Kind of amazing that they didn't have some of this there already and how enterprises were okay with that. But I guarantee you every security and compliance team is telling their cloud team, hey, this is released, we need to enable this right now. Which is I'm sure is, you know, Orion saying to his company, no, no. [00:28:03] Speaker C: I'm not because it's like I said, like I'm, I'm all for having visibility and being able to do forensic analysis on things, but I am not into the business of just maintaining logs, all the logs everywhere for, for the, since the beginning of time. [00:28:16] Speaker D: And that's because you've dealt with the other side of ingesting those logs. [00:28:21] Speaker C: Yeah, because I didn't always start with security. [00:28:23] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. [00:28:24] Speaker C: And you know, even now like, you know, much more involved in like you know, providing ETL pipelines and management and tiering of this data versus just sort of storing and incurring costs is, it is just, it just ends up being a ton of data that doesn't really end up being all that usable. And so like I think that's why, you know, big corporations and organizations have been okay without it because you can sort of stitch together what you need by looking at both ends of the tunnel, not tunnel itself. [00:28:55] Speaker C: But you know, we'll see. I think this is definitely, there's definitely, you know, areas where this is going to be useful and nice. [00:29:05] Speaker B: There are a lot of cloud cost management tools out there, but only Archera provides cloud commitment insurance. It sounds fancy, but it's really simple. Archera gives you the cost savings of a one or three year AWS savings plan with a commitment to shortest 30 days. If you don't use all the cloud resources you've committed to, they will literally put the money back in your bank account to cover the difference. Other cost management tools may say they offer commitment insurance, but remember to ask, will you actually give me my money back? Achero will click the link in the show notes to check them out on the AWS marketplace. [00:29:43] Speaker A: Google decided that they wanted to help out with some Amazon re invent previews because they announced this last week. But AWS and Google Cloud are jointly engineered a multi cloud networking solution that eliminates the need for manual physical infrastructure set up between their platforms. Customers can now provision dedicated bandwidth and establish connectivity in minutes instead of weeks through either cloud console or the API. The solution uses AWS Interconnect Multi Cloud and Google Cloud Cross Cloud Interconnect with quad redundancy across physically separate facilities and MacSec encryption between Edge routers. Both providers publish open API specifications on GitHub for other cloud providers to adopt the same standard. And previously, connecting AWS to Google Cloud required customers to manually coordinate physical connections, equipment and multiple teams over weeks or months. This new managed service abstracts away physical connectivity, network addressing and routing policy complexity into a cloud native experience. Salesforce is using this capability to connect their Data360 platform across clouds using pre built capacity pools and familiar AWS tooling. Collaboration presents a shift towards cloud provider interoperability through open standards rather than proprietary solutions. And I do want you guys to check the weather. Do you see pigs flying or anything crazy? [00:30:50] Speaker C: No, but it seems awfully cold in hell, so I'm surprised. [00:30:56] Speaker C: Yeah, this is, it is. I mean it's great because this is definitely a pain point that I've had to endure before. Trying to get crash cloud connectivity has never been fun. [00:31:06] Speaker A: No. And all the circuit connectivity and stuff is a nightmare to get set up and the vendors and you know, connecting to Equinix and all those things and, and you know, the big thing was that's why Equinix is sort of selling the cloud exchange because the reality is they were hosting both sides anyway so they could just cross connect them and right. You know, now you don't even have to deal with that. It's just abstracted away from you. Which is kind of nice. [00:31:26] Speaker C: So it's super nice. And that's, you know, it's definitely a huge advancement. [00:31:31] Speaker D: Yeah. The other thing I've had to help people do is set up, you know, there are, there's like providers essentially that you get like a direct connect, like five gate direct, five megabit or 10 megabit direct connect to their MPLS network which then connected to all of them which again it's just a level of complexity that wasn't needed. So it's exciting to see that this is actually coming out there and hopefully the clouds play a little bit nicer together. But Watch your egress cost still, it's still not cheap. [00:31:58] Speaker A: Totally. [00:31:58] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:31:59] Speaker A: That doesn't change. [00:32:00] Speaker D: Doesn't change. [00:32:01] Speaker C: They've made it easier to provision the faucet, but you're still going to pay to notice where everything goes through it. [00:32:10] Speaker A: All right, moving on to Azure. Azure Application Gateway is now supporting TLS and TCP protocol termination at general availability, expanding it beyond its traditional HTTP and HPS load balancing capabilities. This allows customers use application gateway for non web workloads like database connections, message queuing systems and other TCP based applications that previously required separate load balancing solutions. Thank you for developing Network Load Balancers. It's only, only how many years late on this one. [00:32:39] Speaker D: They had a different solution, just wasn't nearly as good. [00:32:44] Speaker A: I mean I sort of, it sort of bothers me that they just shove this into the application gateway. I'm like, why didn't you rebrand or do anything else? [00:32:54] Speaker D: Because they already have Azure load balancers and something else and they rather just. [00:33:00] Speaker A: Confuse people or just call it network load balancer like everybody else. I don't know. [00:33:05] Speaker C: Well, Amazon had classic load balancers. They moved away from that. You know you could just, you could follow that model too. [00:33:10] Speaker A: Yeah, that was. [00:33:11] Speaker D: Yeah, those were technically ELBs originally. Then you had ALBs and then they're like, whoa. Even like the terraforms, like wait, we actually called this thing an ELB. Then they just went to LBs with a type inside of it. [00:33:25] Speaker A: So yeah, because they were like, this is dumb. We have the same thing for basically the same. Yeah, it's like, okay, we gotcha. But oh well, it's the Amazon way. [00:33:33] Speaker C: To do six ways to do everything. [00:33:34] Speaker A: Yeah. And if, you know, you weren't excited about the fact that you can now terminate your TLS and TCP determination there, you can also make your life even harder by supporting mutual tls pass through via the Azure Application Gateway, allowing your backend applications to validate client certificates and authorization headers directly while still benefiting from web application firewall inspection. This addresses a specific compliance requirement where organizations need to end to end certificate validation but cannot terminate TLS at the gateway Layer feature enables scenarios where back end services must verify client entity through certificates for regulatory compliance or zero trust architectures particularly relevant for financial services, healthcare and government workloads. So I was doing something with Claude and I was architecting an idea I had and it was making suggestions and then it said, well, to do this connection we probably will need mutual tls. And I was like, no, no, that's not going to happen. What Else you got for. What else you got for me? And he's like, well, you could implement tailscale. I'm like, yes, we're doing that. [00:34:35] Speaker C: That is pretty funny. [00:34:37] Speaker D: While I totally get mtls and how useful it is, it is always a pain to manage. [00:34:43] Speaker A: It is a pain to manage for sure. I mean, it. It works when you get it working, but getting it working is stressful and. Yeah, very complicated. [00:34:51] Speaker C: I remember the days of S tunnel and having to set that up for everything. It didn't support native encryption. [00:34:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:34:56] Speaker D: God, I forgot about that. [00:34:57] Speaker C: And it was like I only barely half understood the encryption and how it worked. And so I was just, you know, the best of bad options. [00:35:04] Speaker A: And like, we were. Remember we were waiting for Amazon to support MacSec. They were like, we're gonna support Max. And we're like, come on, do it. We want to stop with this dumb S tunnels. And Then like, yeah, 17 years later, they finally announced Max. [00:35:14] Speaker C: They finally did. Yeah. [00:35:15] Speaker A: You told us that was going to be out like five years ago and we cared. Now we don't care. We've already done all the pain. [00:35:22] Speaker D: I did s Tunnel and MongoDB because it didn't support encryption for the longest time. [00:35:27] Speaker A: Yep, I remember that. [00:35:29] Speaker D: That was a fun one. That was like, I don't want to do that math in my head of how many years ago, but like 15 years ago. That was fun getting that disaster working. [00:35:39] Speaker A: Mm. In public preview, Azure API Management's adding support for agent to Agent APIs. Okay, so wait, you just supported MTLs and TLS and TCP on a load balancer, but you're already like, no, we're gonna support A2A right away. Come on. Like it's. [00:35:55] Speaker D: But that's a different service. It's on the apex. [00:35:56] Speaker A: Two different worlds at Azure. It's the we're in 1995 and it's. We're in the cutting edge 2026 of AI agent to agent. There's. There's nothing in between. [00:36:07] Speaker D: So APIMS, if you want to use a single one, not age A not in HA will also cost you $2,700 for one. [00:36:14] Speaker A: Oh, good. [00:36:15] Speaker D: Not in HA. So if you want two in the same region, you're already 58. Math quickly may have 5,400. Then if you want to have multi zonal support, you just might as well kiss your bill goodbye. [00:36:30] Speaker C: I'm just gonna take the outage at this point. [00:36:32] Speaker A: Like I'm. Yeah, it's probably gonna be better for all of us. [00:36:36] Speaker C: It's just gonna self heal in like 5 minutes. Probably fine at least. [00:36:40] Speaker D: Hopefully if you're on V2, V1 did not self heal that quickly. No, no, don't ask me, ask me after you ask me after the show how I know, right? [00:36:49] Speaker A: Yeah. See that scar on his back? That's where the knife went in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:36:55] Speaker C: That will require drinks. [00:36:58] Speaker A: Well, if you're looking for something to talk to your agent to agent. Oh and how I have Cloud Open Sport 5 available to you in Microsoft Foundry, GitHub Copilot paid plans and Microsoft Copilot Studio expanding Azure's Frontier model portfolio following the Microsoft Anthropic partnership announced at Ignite. The model achieves 80.9% on the SWE benchmark software engineering benchmark and is priced at one third the cost of previous Opus class models, making advanced AI capabilities more accessible for enterprise customers. Cool. It's in Foundry. Thanks. [00:37:30] Speaker D: Hooray. I'm just happy to have any Claude still. [00:37:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I wonder. They're going to move Copilot to Claude. That's like. So you've been able to use. Yes, but it's going to aws. [00:37:40] Speaker D: Aws and in the documentation it says that. So I assume when they get that. What was it, Iowa or what? Whatever. That. Yeah, that maybe at that point they will. [00:37:53] Speaker A: I might ask my GitHub rep like, hey, when is this coming? I haven't really pointed it out to Ryan too much because I didn't want him to start asking questions like, well, how do they secure that data from Copilot from Azure to like, I didn't want to get into it with him, but now he knows, so I had to keep moving. [00:38:08] Speaker C: We've got a license agreement with someone else's and it's their job. [00:38:14] Speaker D: So. [00:38:16] Speaker D: I mean, not my problem. That's what I just do. [00:38:18] Speaker A: You have to audit that they're actually doing something because like, do you trust Microsoft's actually doing. Doing that? Like, I mean, I wanna, I wanna. [00:38:25] Speaker C: Think so all I have to do is point to their attestation. It is, it is absolutely true. It's. Once I have a business agreement, I only have to secure the stuff that's in my responsibility boundary. The whole point of using a managed service is so that I can trust someone else to manage part of it. They're gonna do a better job than I am, most likely. [00:38:41] Speaker A: I mean, back in the day we had, you know, we had tested to safe harbor and that that was gonna solve all the problems and then it was thrown on court. So, you know, wait till that station's thrown out. [00:38:51] Speaker A: Burst my bubble saying you're you're relying on a legal construct and you were you're married and you're married to a lawyer. You should know better so well well. [00:39:01] Speaker C: That'S part of why I have the open and I do is I'm I'm realiz you realize very quick how little it matters what's this business agreement. [00:39:10] Speaker A: Yeah, well something that comes everyone's love is Azure DNS and now Security policies now include a managed threat intelligence feed that blocks queries to known malicious domains. Thank God this feature addresses the common attack vector where nearly all cyber attacks begin, with a DNS query, providing an additional layer of protection at the DNS resolution level. The service integrates with Azure's existing DNS infrastructure and uses Microsoft's threat intelligence data to automatically update the list of malicious domains. Organizations can enable this protection while managing their own threat feeds or maintaining block lists, reducing operational overhead for the security team. This capability is particularly relevant for enterprises looking to implement defense and depth strategies as it stops threats before they can even establish connections to command and control servers or phishing sites. Unless it's a zero day attack of a new might be host, the feature works alongside existing Azure firewall and network security tools to provide comprehensive production. General availability means the service now production ready with full SLA support across Azure regions and pricing details though were not specified. The announcement so expensive almost certainly right. [00:40:12] Speaker C: But it is something like being able to automatically take the results of a feed it will do any day just because it's these things are they're updated by many more parties and faster than I can ever react to our own threat intelligence. So that's pretty great. I like it. [00:40:32] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean it's a great feature integrates with the firewall so it's a good next step in a lot of their DNS and security world of it. I mean their DNS product at least from what I've seen for what we do use my day job is pretty solid. So hopefully this is just at the next level on top of it and they're building on those same building blocks. [00:40:55] Speaker C: But again is this one of those things that you have to pay for? So you know like I mean typically you know, if it's a managed sort of service where they're mood blocking you have to but I wonder if there's anything built in it's on my list. [00:41:06] Speaker D: To research more about for my day job. I just haven't had time yet to be honest with you. [00:41:12] Speaker C: Well they just launched it so that's. [00:41:13] Speaker D: Fair yeah, but I like to play with new shiny objects. All right. [00:41:17] Speaker A: Yeah, who doesn't love new shiny objects? It's great. [00:41:22] Speaker A: Azure is introducing another V2 product. I love these. [00:41:28] Speaker A: The standard V2 nat gateway and public Preview adding zone redundancy for high availability in regions with Availability zones. This upgrade addresses a key limitation of the original NAT Gateway by ensuring outbound connectivity survives zone failures, which matters for enterprises running mission critical workloads that require consistent Internet egress. The standard V2 SKU includes matching standard V2 public IPs that work together with the new NAT Gateway tier. Organizations using the original standard SKU will need to evaluate migration paths. And since zone redundancy represents a fundamental architecture change requiring new resource types rather than in place upgrades, this release targets customers who previously had to architect complex workarounds for zone resilient outbound connectivity, particularly those running multi zone deployments of containerized applications or database clusters. The preview allows testing of failover scenarios before production deployment. The announcement lacks specific pricing details for Both the standard V2 tier, though. Nat Gateway typically charges based on hourly resource fees plus data processing costs and I assume this will as well. The fact that this is just not an upgrade that I can check and I have to redeploy a whole new thing annoys the crap out of me. [00:42:31] Speaker D: It does. From Microsoft's perspective, it does make sense because IP addresses are not zonally redundant by default, which also confuses me. So IP addresses have to be a different zone. So like from the way they've architected it. But the fact that NAT gateways were not RA multi zone still baffles my mind. Along with the fact that they've had to like re architect this whole thing. I mean there's other improvements because it's multi zone, you get more speed and connections and everything else associated with it, but it all just feels like this should have been built into a NAT gateway solution in v1, like out the door, not v2. And the fact that not multi zonal. [00:43:15] Speaker C: In the sense that you it's abstracted away or you literally have to like you have to deploy a NAT gateway in every single az. [00:43:22] Speaker D: You had to deploy a NAT gateway in every single az. And it's not as easy as it is in AWS to do that. Oh man, that's a bummer because a NAT gateway can also have multiple IP addresses on like aws. So if you have, you know, you want to have enough traffic, it was. It's not fun from an architectural perspective. [00:43:42] Speaker C: So you can scale horizontally within a region by default but not across region. [00:43:47] Speaker D: Or sorry AZS I believe so you. [00:43:51] Speaker A: Can'T scale horizontally but you can scale vertically. [00:43:53] Speaker D: Yeah but given the fact that they moved their everything was equivalent to a public subnet before you had to been dealing with this for the last few months. So they pretty much got everybody on this thing and then said oh wait and here's this thing that fixes all your problems that forced you to have private subnets and everything else recently. So really feels like they should have done this one differently. But whatever. [00:44:18] Speaker A: Yeah I mean my other issue with the naming of this whole thing is why can't just be nats with multi. You know multi AZ support versus not and be a checkbox and yeah it may requires redeployment or whatever fine in the background I don't know. That's all noise to me. I don't. I mean how many people know their NAT gateway outbound IP addresses unless they have IP restrictions? Most probably don't. But the bigger problem is just like when you, you know, have an outage because you weren't using the Ultra disk, now you can be blamed for not using the V2 version of the NAT because of course V2 is better than V1 and so that's just more fun you get to explain to your boss when things go wrong. [00:44:57] Speaker C: It's one more number of course. [00:44:58] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. Well then there's migrations you have to do. So like apims if we were talking about above is apim's v2 which is completely different from apemv1 and even the architecture on the Azure side on the backend is completely different between them. But it's just a V2. [00:45:14] Speaker A: Yes, just a V2. [00:45:16] Speaker D: Again, ask me how I know. [00:45:19] Speaker D: The. [00:45:19] Speaker A: Other cigar on his back. [00:45:23] Speaker A: Well, if you're using Azure app service, you can now hide those pesky 500 errors with a beautifully branded one because now it supports custom error pages moving to general availability, allowing developers to replace default HTTP error pages with branded or customized alternative. This addresses a common requirement for production applications where maintaining consistent user experience during errors is important for brand identity and the user's trust. The feature integrates directly into app service configuration without requiring additional Azure services or third party tools. Developers can specify custom HTML Pages for different HTTP error codes like 404 or 500, which App Service will serve automatically from those errors when those errors occur. The capability is particularly relevant for customer facing web applications, e commerce sites and SaaS platforms where error handling needs to align with corporate branding guidelines. And the feature works across all app service tiers that support custom domains and SSL certificates. No additional cost is associated with custom error pages beyond standard app service hosting fees, which are approximately $13 per month for the basic tier, which you will earn out of very quickly and need the more expensive one. The general availability status means the feature is now production ready with full support coverage. Moving beyond the preview phase where it was available for testing. The documentation is available to you in the app or custom app service. Custom Error Page Guide I used to. [00:46:35] Speaker C: Not care about these features until I became the owner of the WAF service in the company and now I'm all about this. [00:46:44] Speaker D: Don't blame me, it's the app. [00:46:47] Speaker D: Before for app service. I've dealt with this at my day job. It's crazy that this wasn't already there. The workarounds you have to do to make your own error pages and stuff like that was messy at best, if. [00:47:03] Speaker C: An option at all, right? So many times it was just you had to deal with whatever, you know, like you know, public error page generic. [00:47:12] Speaker D: Well then you know, from a security perspective you're leaking, you know, your more of your infrastructure, what it's running on, you know, so you know you're just giving people more information which isn't always. [00:47:22] Speaker A: You know, wanted Microsoft Foundry is reaching general availability as an enterprise AI governance platform that consolidates security compliance and cost management controls for IT administrators deploying AI solutions. The platform addresses the growing need for centralized oversight as organizations scale their AI initiatives across Azure infrastructure. The service integrates with existing Azure management tools to provide unified visibility and control over your AI workload, allowing IT teams to enforce policies and monitor resource usage from a single interface. This reduces the operational overhead of managing disparate AI projects while maintaining enterprise security standards. Foundry targets large enterprises and regulated industries that require strict governance frameworks for AI development, particularly organizations balancing innovation speed with compliance requirements. The platform helps bridge the gap between data science teams pushing for rapid AI adoption and IT departments responsible for risk. The general availability announcement indicates Microsoft's positioning Azure as the enterprise ready AI cloud to compete directly with AWS and Google Cloud for organization. Organizations prioritize governance alongside their AI capabilities, which makes sense, but again I feel. [00:48:27] Speaker C: Like everyone's saying it seems a little. [00:48:28] Speaker A: Overloaded on top of Foundry, isn't it? [00:48:30] Speaker C: Everything is overloaded on top of Foundry, right? Like it's anything data related, right? Just throw it in a Foundry. [00:48:35] Speaker A: Foundry is just their version of Vertex and SageMaker. That's what I just need to think in my brain with a really, really nice power BI module On top of it. [00:48:42] Speaker C: Is it though? Oh, okay. I mean that's because I, I always, I still don't understand. [00:48:46] Speaker A: It's like a, it's like a combination of SageMaker and Vertex, married data bricks and had a baby. Yeah, that's what Foundry is plus A plus, you know, has a report interface. Like that's really what it is. Yeah, I mean it's there. [00:49:00] Speaker C: I guess that's the confusing part for me was the, the power bi sort of integration on these things which is. [00:49:05] Speaker A: Sort of like, I mean like, I mean if you think about it, Google sort of has the same thing with Looker and Amazon has their thing that no one uses. So they sort of have the same stories. Quicksight. [00:49:17] Speaker C: Yeah, Quicksight. [00:49:18] Speaker A: So they, they all three kind of have that same story. It's just one of them is good, the other two are good. Ish. Well one's, I guess two of them are good, two of them are good and one is a half ass rotation of a tableau, I guess. I don't know. [00:49:33] Speaker D: I'm still trying to figure out if they bought like did AWS buy Quicksight for somebody else like originally because it's still a whole other area. Definitely feels that plugins like it really feels like Macy V1 and all the other tools they just kind of bought. [00:49:51] Speaker A: Decades. [00:49:54] Speaker D: Can you fix your. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think they. [00:49:59] Speaker C: Were trying to pull like you know, because there's definitely the, the concept of being able to generate reports and show data for people that may not have sort of an Amazon cloud principal id. Like it sort of made sense to me and they sort of followed the same path with like the builder space and some of the codestar and codeguru sort of things that they did. But yeah, it just confused everything to me. [00:50:22] Speaker A: Like yes, Quicksight was an acquisition of some small company that was trying to get into the space that they picked up probably for pennies then didn't invest in. Clearly. Clearly. [00:50:35] Speaker D: Yeah, well it's never fully integrated it. [00:50:39] Speaker A: Into their ecosystem which is not uncommon for things that people don't adopt. So yeah, I had high, I had high hopes for it. So then especially when they hired the old CEO from Tableau, I was like, oh this maybe he's real life. This thing needs to get way better and I'm gonna bring some people from Tableau. I know they can make this better. But no, that didn't happen. So yeah, no, I guess Washington does have non compete so that's why. Well, if you weren't excited about governance, risk and compliance in Foundry, Let me tell you, I got something else for you for Foundry, and that is a model router, which is now generally available as an AI orchestration layer that automatically selects the optimal language model for each prompt based on factors like complexity, cost and performance requirements. This eliminates the need for developers to manually choose between different AI models for each of their use cases. The service supports an expanded range of models, including the GPT4 family, GPT5 family, GPT OSS and Deep Seq models, giving organizations flexibility to balance performance needed against their costs considerations this addresses a practical challenge for enterprises deploying multiple AI models where the different tasks require different model capabilities. For example, simple queries could route to simple so smaller, less expensive models, while complex reasoning tasks automatically use the more capable models. The solution layer integrates with Microsoft's Foundry's broader AI infrastructure, allowing customers to manage multiple model deployments through a single interface rather than building custom routing logic to each of the models. No significant pricing details are provided in the announcement, though costs will likely vary based on underlying models selected by the router and the usage patterns in your system. And this is a great area to also get caching, so I assume that'll come some point, maybe in 2075 if it's following the Nat Gateway V2 path or it'll be Moderator V2 it'll be released next week. One of the two. It can only be one of the two. [00:52:22] Speaker D: One of the two, yeah, I mean I'm looking forward to using this just because like we've talked about here multiple times, using the right model at the right time and letting it kind of decide and or you know, it's not called out in here, but I can definitely see it being used for like availability of the model because you know, I've definitely run into times in Azure where I can't get the tokens even though I'm like here's my money, take my money, please take my money. They're like no, we don't have capacity. So here it's like, okay, well you don't have this one, this next one's good enough. So if you can shove the shim layer in and let it be the routing tool for you, hopefully life becomes better and I'll have to think about a lot of these things and they can kind of handle it. [00:53:07] Speaker A: Azure is getting scheduled tasks, or as they call them, scheduled actions, a feature which is now generally available, providing automated VM lifecycle management at scale with built in handling of subscription throttling and transient error retries. This eliminates the need for custom scripting or third party tools to start, stop and deallocate VMs on a recurring schedule and all I can see is a Windows box inside the Microsoft Azure environment running scheduled tasks. That's all I can see. The feature addresses common cost optimization scenarios where organizations need to automatically shut down development and test environments during off hours or scale down non production workloads on the weekend. Reduce compute costs by 40 to 70% for environments that don't require 24. 7 availability. I mean I really appreciate that they got this. Again, thank you for copying every other cloud that's had this forever. And none of the clouds though have what I the future I really want which is the hey, I just, I just knock on the door of this these services that are offline and please hold a second. Why I start them up because you made a request and how long would you like to use those services? Which would be amazing and no one's built that and I keep thinking someone will, but no one has. [00:54:09] Speaker C: Yeah, it is still, you know, like I've done similar things with like complex pipelines and you know, like where you do a whole bunch of things but you always have to build it all yourself, the spaghetti of it. And then you end up with this like crazy cold start issue where people are mad because they don't know that it's turned off. But it is sort of like is funny to me that they're just releasing the schnajeur because I just, I just assumed that this has always been in place, but I guess not. [00:54:36] Speaker D: I assume a lot of things are in place and then I go look for them and they don't exist. So I've learned to stop assuming that with Azure and this is one of them. [00:54:46] Speaker C: Like yeah, I guess now that I think about it, I've always had to manage the orchestration like timing elsewhere outside. Like I, you know, like I don't know, I can't think of actually being. [00:54:57] Speaker D: Able to set aws, definitely add this feature. AWS definitely had this feature a couple years ago. I mean it had to be at least five years ago. @ this point it just feels like, you know, this is if you're running your corporate or dev environments or stuff like that, or you've lifted and shifted and you still want to be able to turn on and off stuff for cost savings because this isn't then at that point leveraging scale sets, auto scaling groups, you know, whatever you want to call them, or leveraging any other automated scaling thing. This is, hey, I have 15 dev boxes and I want to turn them off on the weekend where developers aren't working or I manually have to configure these Windows boxes or this Linux box to do this thing because we haven't automated it. Cool. Let me turn it off when we're not using it. I'm not saying there's not good use cases for it. Install shield any you know is you know one that comes to mind or any other tool that is Mac address based licensing. So there's definitely reasons for it and I've definitely written enough custom code to do this in my career, probably multiple times at this point. So it's a useful feature. It's just still like one of those why wasn't this there a while ago? [00:56:05] Speaker D: That's the theme of Azure this. [00:56:07] Speaker A: Week. I mean scheduled tasks was hard to scale at this level. So you know. [00:56:14] Speaker A: Or maybe they finally discovered Crontab and Cron, I don't know. Well that is another fantastic week here in the Cloud minus aws. [00:56:23] Speaker A: So I guess we will wrap it up here. We do have an after show today, so for those of you who like to hear us talk about silly things, stick around after the close to hear us talk about those. But have a great week and we'll see you next week to do Amazon. [00:56:36] Speaker C: Extravaganza. [00:56:42] Speaker C: Bye. [00:56:42] Speaker D: Everybody. Bye. [00:56:43] Speaker B: Everyone. [00:56:47] Speaker B: And that's all for this week in Cloud. We'd like to thank our sponsor Archera. Be sure to click the link in our show notes to learn more about their services. While you're at it, head over to our [email protected] where you can subscribe to our newsletter, join our Slack community, send us your feedback and ask any questions you might have. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you on the next. [00:57:06] Speaker A: Episode. [00:57:18] Speaker A: We have an after show and to talk about how AI is infecting the world. The most recent example of that is that norad, norad, the people who you know, handle missiles and defense of the country but also have always had a cute little annual tradition of tracking Santa Claus as he crosses the world, delivering presents to billions of children across the world, has decided to partner with OpenAI. [00:57:46] Speaker A: Basically they're partnering with NORAD to add AI powered holiday tools. The annual Santa tracking tradition, creating three ChatGPT based features that turn kids photos into elf portraits, generate custom toy coloring pages and build personalized Christmas stories. These reference a consumer friendly application of generative AI that demonstrates how large language models can be packaged for mainstream family use during the holidays. The collaboration shows OpenAI pursuing brand building partnerships with trusted institutions like NORAD to normalize AI tools in everyday contexts from a technical standpoint of these tools showcase practical imputations of image generation, yada, yada yada. And although overall, I'm like, keep your AI away from my Santa Claus. That's what I want to. [00:58:24] Speaker D: Say. I will say I've never thought about using one of the AI image generation models to do, like, sketches for my kids to draw. [00:58:36] Speaker A: On. Oh, I've done that. Yeah, that's. That's a. [00:58:38] Speaker D: Good. I never thought about that one. I mean, I use it for stories with them and, you know, lots of other fun things with them, but never that. That. That's a pretty good, interesting use. Case I've ever thought of was, you know, because my daughter's into coloring a lot right now, and that would be very interesting to do. So that will be my weekend activity. And there goes my. [00:58:57] Speaker A: Printer. We can't hear it, so it's. [00:58:59] Speaker D: Fine. No, I meant, like, well, he's just. [00:59:02] Speaker C: Gonna. He's not. He's not gonna be able to afford. [00:59:04] Speaker A: Ink. I mean, also, I'm also. You're also assuming your printer is gonna work because you. When was the last time you used. [00:59:08] Speaker D: It? My wife probably did for our. [00:59:11] Speaker A: Return. [00:59:13] Speaker A: That's the number one use of my printer right now is return labels, too. So. [00:59:16] Speaker C: Weird. [00:59:17] Speaker D: Yeah. In the holiday season, we. We said cards, so we just print them, but that's about. [00:59:22] Speaker A: It. [00:59:22] Speaker D: Yeah. Gets used about four times a year. The print is probably like seven, eight years old at this point. Still just works because it. I'm probably still on the first ink. [00:59:30] Speaker A: Cartridge. Well, that's. That's impressive because those things are not even full. [00:59:34] Speaker D: Typically. That's. [00:59:35] Speaker C: True. You get like one print out of those these. [00:59:38] Speaker A: Days. Yeah. And then it's like you need more ink. It's like. Then it's always, you need this weird color. But I'm printing black and white. You say I was. Plenty of ink. Sorry. You. [00:59:47] Speaker D: Need. Now my printer's just the black and white laser and anything else we just. [00:59:52] Speaker A: Got. I did upgrade to a color laser printer, so. And then I bought fuser or toner for it one time, and I probably will never buy toner for it ever again in my lifetime because it'll. It has, you know, like 45,000 page cycle count on the toner cartridges. I'm like, yeah, that sucks to happen anytime soon. So. [01:00:11] Speaker C: Yeah. But marry a lawyer. That. You can go through that pretty. [01:00:14] Speaker A: Quick. Yeah, I don't. I don't have that problem. I. I need. I go through inkjet, ink like, it's going out of style for photos when Brandy needs to print out photos, you know, for something. Although we know we print them out. Kinkos and. Or. [01:00:25] Speaker C: Kinko. [01:00:26] Speaker A: What? I guess it's not. Does Kinko exist? It's part of FedEx. FedEx office. But, yeah, you know, whatever. We just go there and print out there because. [01:00:33] Speaker D: It'S. That's what we. [01:00:34] Speaker A: Do. Cheaper, faster at this point. But I do sometimes. I had to print something out here when necessary, so it's all good. Yeah. So anyways, and he's leave my Santa Claus alone. That's my opinion. Although I'll send you my elf. [01:00:48] Speaker C: Photos. Yeah, I'm totally gonna. I'm totally gonna make elf photos. I'm gonna make. I'm gonna abuse my, like, older children who are not gonna find this fun at. [01:00:55] Speaker A: All. [01:00:58] Speaker A: Well, maybe. Maybe before, you know, closer to Christmas, we can share our elf photos and drawing pages and that you've made. So I like it. You make your kids. You can make all your kids, you know, draw a color. The cloud pod logo. [01:01:14] Speaker A: That could be fun. All. [01:01:16] Speaker C: Right. It could be fun. See if they're, you know, suitable for. [01:01:19] Speaker D: Public. Can't even log into my printer's web. [01:01:22] Speaker A: Interface. Well, you're starting out strong. I was curious. I don't even know what the IP address of my printer is. I just know that it shows up in the printer thing and I probably need to update. [01:01:34] Speaker D: It. But I just logged into my unifi in order to get my IP address on my printer. To figure all this out, I went down that. [01:01:43] Speaker C: Hole. You know, unifi will do static IPs and host names. [01:01:47] Speaker A: Right? [01:01:47] Speaker D: Yeah. That would require me to actually know what the hostname I would have sent was again. Don't use the printer that. [01:01:54] Speaker C: Often. Yeah, mine's called Printer. [01:01:58] Speaker D: Local. [01:02:02] Speaker D: Then this is why we have V2 Ryan. Because when you print your dies, it's going to be printer v2 local. [01:02:10] Speaker D: This is how Azure name stuff. Got it. Azure and Ryan have the same naming. [01:02:13] Speaker C: Convention. Yeah, it's. [01:02:16] Speaker A: True. Well, I'm sure our listeners love hearing you guys talk about your printers. We're going to let them go. [01:02:19] Speaker C: Now. [01:02:21] Speaker C: This is fantastic. [01:02:23] Speaker D: Content. You're. [01:02:23] Speaker A: Right. [01:02:23] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:02:26] Speaker D: After. [01:02:26] Speaker A: Show. It is. After show. That's. [01:02:28] Speaker D: True. Bye, everyone.