Welcome to episode 335 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Welcome to the first show of 2026, and it’s a full house, too! Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matt are all here to reflect on 2025, plus bring you their predictions for 2026.

Let’s get started!

Titles we almost went with this week

SQL Me Maybe: AlloyDB Gets Chatty With Your Database **OpenAI
SELECT * FROM natural_language WHERE accuracy LIKE ‘100%’ **Anthropic
etcd You Were Worried About Database Limits: CloudWatch Has Your Back
CSV You Later: Looker Adds Drag-and-Drop Data Uploads
AWS Spots an Opportunity to Manage Your Container Costs
EKS Network Policies: No More IP Address Whack-a-Mole
AWS Security Hub Splits: It’s Not You, It’s CSPM
Spot On: ECS Finally Manages Your Cheapest Compute
TOON Squad: DigitalOcean’s New Format Makes JSON Look Bloated
The Price is Wrong: AWS Breaks Two Decades of Downward Pricing Tradition
Show Your Work: Why AI-Generated Code Without Tests is Just Expensive Spam
No More Agent Orange: Google Simplifies VM Extension Deployment
AWS Discovers Prices Can Go Both Ways, Raises GPU Costs 15 Percent
Sovereignty Washing: When Your European Cloud Still Answers to Uncle Sam
Agent Builder Gets a Memory Upgrade: Google’s AI Finally Remembers Where It Put Its Keys
Ctrl+F for the Future: A year-end Scorecard & Next-Gen Bets
AI Agents, GPU Prices, and The best of the Cloud Pod 2025
Beyond the Hype: The Cloud Pods Definitive 2025 Year in Review
Apocalypse Now… What? Our 2026 Forecast

Follow Up

01:27 RYAN’S PREDICTIONS

Prediction Status Notes Quick LLM models for individuals ACCURATE Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, GLM-4-9B-0414, and Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct—each chosen for an outstanding balance of performance and computational efficiency, making them ideal for edge AI deployment. A new AI inference application called Inferencer allows even modest Apple Mac computers to run the largest open-source LLMs. AI at the edge natively (Lambda-esque) ACCURATE Akamai launched a new Inference Cloud product for edge AI using Nvidia’s Blackwell 6000 GPUs in 17 cities. AWS IoT Greengrass with Lambda functions for edge logic. “Edge AI allows for instant decision-making where it matters most—close to the data source.” Cloud native security mesh multi-cloud UNCLEAR Service mesh technologies continue to evolve (Istio, Linkerd), but I didn’t find a breakthrough “app-to-app at the edge” security mesh product announcement in 2025. This one needs more specific evidence.

Ryan Score: 2/3

02:25 MATTHEW’S PREDICTIONS

Prediction Status Notes FOCUS adopted by Snowflake or Databricks ACCURATE FOCUS version 1.2 was ratified on May 29, 2025. Three new providers announced support: Alibaba Cloud, Databricks, and Grafana. Databricks officially adopted FOCUS! AI security/ethical standard (SOC or ISO) ACCURATE ISO 42001 is the first international standard outlining requirements for AI governance. Major companies achieving certification in 2025: Automation Anywhere is among the first 100 companies worldwide to earn ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification. Anthropic also achieved ISO 42001 certification. Amazon deprecates 5+ services (WorkMail bonus) ACCURATE (no bonus) 19 services are mothballed, four are being sunset, and one is end of its supported life. Deprecated services include CodeCommit, Cloud9, S3 Select, CloudSearch, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline, QLDB, Snowball Edge, and more. WorkMail NOT deprecated – WorkDocs was (April 2025), but WorkMail remains active.

Matthew Score: 3/3

03:22 JONATHAN’S PREDICTIONS

Prediction Status Notes Company claims AGI achieved ACCURATE Integral AI, founded by ex-Google veteran Jad Tarifi, claims to have built a world-first AGI model (December 2025). Also, Sam Altman called GPT-5 “a significant step along the path to AGI” at release. AI agents booking reservations/real-world tasks FULLY ACCURATE OpenAI’s Operator can execute tasks like filling out forms, managing online reservations, and even booking tickets to sporting events. Google AI Mode’s agentic capabilities help take the hassle out of booking restaurant reservations, event tickets, or beauty and wellness appointments. Models that can learn in real-time PARTIALLY ACCURATE Extended context windows and memory systems have improved dramatically. Claude 4 has “memory capabilities, extracting and saving key facts to maintain continuity.” However, true real-time learning/weight updates during conversations haven’t fully materialized yet.

Jonathan Score: 2.5/3

05:07 JUSTIN’S PREDICTIONS

Prediction Status Notes GPT-5, Claude 4, and Gemini 3.0 FULLY ACCURATE GPT-5 (August 7, 2025), Claude 4 (May 22, 2025), Gemini 3 (November 18, 2025). All three major models have been released! Plus, we’ve already seen GPT-5.1, GPT-5.2, and Claude Opus 4.5. OpenAI is not seen as a leader ACCURATE ChatGPT’s user growth is slowing, and Google’s Gemini is gaining ground. Anthropic now holds 32% of the enterprise LLM market share by usage, with OpenAI at 25%—a sharp reversal from 50% vs. 12% in 2023. Sam Altman issued a “code red” memo following the release of Gemini 3. 10+ companies RTO 5 days after Q2 PARTIALLY ACCURATE Major announcements after Q2: Novo Nordisk, Paramount Skydance, NBCUniversal, Instagram, Starbucks, Samsung, Freddie Mac. Many 5-day mandates took effect in 2025 (Amazon, AT&T, JPMorgan, Dell), but several were announced pre-Q2. Close call.

Justin Score: 2.5/3

JONATHAN’S PREDICTIONS

Jonathan Score: 2.5/3

FINAL STANDINGS

Host Score Grade Matthew 3/3 A+ Justin 2.5/3 A Jonathan 2.5/3 A Ryan 2/3 B+

Key Takeaways for the Pod

The AI model predictions were NAILED – All three major model releases happened exactly as predicted.
OpenAI’s dominance really did slip – Anthropic now leads enterprise, Gemini is surging, Sam issued “code red.”
AI agents are HERE – OpenAI Operator and Google AI Mode are booking real reservations.
AWS deprecation wave was massive – Way more than 5 services axed (but WorkMail survived!)
Edge AI exploded – Akamai, AWS, and others went all-in on inference at the edge.e

Solid predictions all around – Matthew takes the crown!

06:08 Jonathan – “That’s good; it only took us 6 years to know what the hell we’re talking about!”

06:23 2025 Stats Review

We covered 1,308 stories from 15 different, unique sources.
Amazon accounted for 39% of those stories.
Ryan’s favorite, Azure, made up 22.9% of the stories (Thanks, Matt…)
GCP was 38.1% of our news announcements.
The official blogs from cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP, made up the bulk of the sources for the above stories.
This is an interesting change from the first year we recorded, 2019, when AWS accounted for 73% of the announcements.
When it comes to host participation, only 6 shows had all four hosts participating. Justin was present for 95%, Ryan for 85%, Matt recorded 78% (not bad with a new baby, honestly), and we had Jonathan for 12 episodes.
We only had one guest, and increasing the number of guests is one of our 2026 resolutions, so thanks to Elise for joining us.
AI was mentioned 526 times, averaging 12.2x per episode (which seems low to the show note editor), and has definitely been growing each year exponentially.
Outages were discussed 19 times (boooo).
And we got to talk about our favorite topic, deep-sea cables, 5 times.
There were 58.9 hours of runtime over the course of 49 shows, with an average length of 72 minutes.
The in memorium includes AWS Cloud Search, Glacier, Migration Hub, S3 Object Lamb...

336: We Were Right (Mostly), 2026: The New Prophecies