Welcome to episode 333 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are taking a quick break from re:Invent festivities. They bring you the latest and greatest in Cloud and AI news. This week, we discuss Norad and Anthropic teaming up to bring you Christmas cheer....
Welcome to episode 333 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are taking a quick break from re:Invent festivities. They bring you the latest and greatest in Cloud and AI news. This week, we discuss Norad and Anthropic teaming up to bring you Christmas cheer. Wait, is that right? Huh. We also have undersea cables, some Turkish region delight, and a LOT of Opus 4.5 news. Let’s get into it!
Titles we almost went with this week
- Boring Error Pages Not Found
- Claude Goes Native in Snowflake: Finally, AI That Stays Where Your Data Lives
- Cross-Cloud Romance: AWS and Google Make It Official with Interconnect
- Google Gemini Puts OpenAI in Code Red: The Tables Have Turned
- Azure NAT Gateway V2: Now With More Zones Than a Parking Lot
- From ChatGPT to Chat-Uh-Oh: OpenAI Sounds the Alarm as Gemini Steals 200 Million
- Users **Anthropic
- Scheduled Actions: Because Your VMs Need a Work-Life Balance Too
- Finally, Your 500 Errors Can Look as Good as Your Homepage
- Foundry Model Router: Because Choosing Between 47 AI Models is Nobody’s Idea of Fun
- Google Takes the Scenic Route: New Cable Avoids the Sunda Strait Traffic Jam
- Azure Application Gateway Gets Its TCP/IP Diploma
- Google Cloud Gets Its Türkiye Dinner: 2 Billion Dollar Cloud Feast Coming Soon
- Microsoft Foundry: Turning AI Chaos into Compliance Gold
AI Is Going Great, or How ML Makes Money
02:59 Nano Banana Pro available for enterprise
- Google launches Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image) in general availability on Vertex AI and Google Workspace, with Gemini Enterprise support coming soon.
- The model supports up to 14 reference images for style consistency and generates 4K resolution outputs with multilingual text rendering capabilities.
- The model includes Google Search grounding for factual accuracy in generated infographics and diagrams, plus built-in SynthID watermarking for transparency. Copyright indemnification will be available at general availability under Google’s shared responsibility framework.
- Enterprise integrations are live with Adobe Firefly, Photoshop, Canva, and Figma, enabling production-grade creative workflows. Major retailers, including Klarna, Shopify, and Wayfair, report using the model for product visualization and marketing asset generation at scale.
- Developers can access Nano Banana Pro through Vertex AI with Provisioned Throughput and Pay As You Go pricing options, plus advanced safety filters. Business users get access through Google Workspace apps, including Slides, Vids, and
Chapters
- (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod: This Week's News
- (00:03:02) - Google Launches Nano Banana Pro in Google Workspace
- (00:05:59) - Cloud Opus 4.5 Availability and Performance
- (00:10:41) - OpenAI Declares Code Red as Google's Gemini GPT G
- (00:14:00) - AWS 10: Prediction vs. Keynotes
- (00:14:49) - Google Cloud Region Coming to Turkey
- (00:18:52) - Google to Build New Subsea Cable Link Between Australia and Thailand
- (00:22:12) - Google Cloud Next
- (00:25:57) - Google Cloud VPN Flow Logs now support Cross-Cloud Networks
- (00:29:43) - Amazon Cloud Connects to Google Cloud
- (00:32:10) - Azure Application Gateway: TLS and TCP Protocol Termination
- (00:35:39) - Azure 2.8: Agent to Agent in Public Preview
- (00:37:02) - Microsoft Cloud Open Sport 5
- (00:39:10) - Azure DNS & Security: Threat Intelligence Feed Blocking
- (00:41:22) - NAT Gateway: Standard V2 SKU and Public Preview
- (00:45:23) - Azure app service: Custom Error Pages now in general availability
- (00:47:22) - Microsoft Foundry
- (00:51:02) - Microsoft's AI Orchestration Layer Gets Scheduled Tasks
- (00:56:18) - Week in the Cloud: AWS Extravaganza
- (00:57:06) - NORAD's AI-powered Holiday Tools
- (01:00:34) - Elf Photo Day
- (01:01:20) - Unifi: Printer v2 local