337: AWS Discovers Prices Can Go Both Ways, Raises GPU Costs 15 Percent

Welcome to episode 337 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matt, and Ryan have hit the recording studio to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, from acquisitions and price hikes to new tools that Ryan somehow loves but also hates? We don’t understand either… but let’s get started! Titles we almost went with this week

Prompt Engineering Our Way Into Trouble The Demo Worked Yesterday, We Swear It Scales Horizontally, Trust Us Responsible AI But Terrible Copy (Marketing Edition)

General News 00:58 Watch ‘The Thinking Game’ documentary for free on YouTube

Google DeepMind is releasing the “The Thinking Game” documentary for free on YouTube starting November 25, marking the fifth anniversary of AlphaFold. The feature-length film provides behind-the-scenes access to the AI lab and documents the team’s work toward artificial general intelligence over five years. The documentary captures the moment when the AlphaFold team learned they had solved the 50-year protein folding problem in biology, a scientific achievement that recently earned Demis Hassabis and John Jumper the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This represents one of the most significant practical applications of deep learning to fundamental scientific research. The film was produced by the same award-winning team that created the AlphaGo documentary, which chronicled DeepMind’s earlier achievement in mastering the game of Go. For cloud and AI practitioners, this offers insight into how Google DeepMind approaches complex AI research problems and the development process behind their models. While this is primarily a documentary release rather than a technical product announcement, it provides context for understanding Google’s broader AI strategy and the research foundation underlying its cloud AI services. The AlphaFold model itself is available through Google Cloud for protein structure prediction workloads.

01:54 Justin – “If you’re not into technology, don’t care about any of that, and don’t care about AI and how they built all the AI models that are now powering the world of LLMs we have, you will not like this documentary.” 04:22 ServiceNow to buy Armis in $7.7 billion security deal • The Register

ServiceNow is acquiring Armis for $7.75 billion to integrate real-time security intelligence with its Configuration Management Database, allowing customers to identify vulnerabilities across IT, OT, and medical devices and remediate them through automated workflows. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026 and aims to triple ServiceNow’s current $1 billion annual security revenue. The acquisition represents a strategic data play when combined with ServiceNow’s recent purchase of Data.World, giving the company both massive volumes of se...