372: Welcome to Microsoft Patch-A-Palooza

Welcome to episode 372 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt have their head in the clouds all week and are ready to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including Microsoft’s continued attempts to keep up with AI-detected issues, updates to Terraform and GKE, plus so much more. Let’s get started! Titles we almost went with this week

Bots Join the Slack Chat, Incidents Get Roasted Patch Tuesday Becomes Patch Everyday, 972 Times Over Big Logs, Big Gateway, Bigger Cloud Bills AWS Squeezes a Data Center Into a Closet Three Regions Walk Into a Root Login Terraform Gets Metrics, Platform Teams Finally Exhale Microsoft’s Vulnerability Count Breaks Records, IT Teams Break Down Natural Language Meets Unnatural Amounts of Logs Google’s Agent Substrate: Kubernetes Gets a Kernel Panic Buster OpenAI Lets Your Agents Call in Backup Sandboxes, Subagents, and API Fees, Oh My Sub-500ms Resumes Make GKE Agents Speedy Gonzales Betting the Database on One Big OpenAI Backlog GitHub Ships Headroom, Not Just Hotfixes Kurian’s Billion-Dollar Boast Fest at Goldman Summit

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack channel for more info. Security 03:18 Why this month’s Microsoft patch release is a doozy

Microsoft patched 972 vulnerabilities in September, 112 rated critical, surpassing prior records of 570 (July) and 620 (August) in consecutive months. Year to date, Microsoft has fixed 2,760 vulnerabilities in 2026, more than double last year’s total, and on pace to exceed the combined totals of 2023 through 2025. Over 100 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Google, and Microsoft, signed an open letter warning that AI-enabled attacks are shrinking the window defenders have to patch before exploitation occurs. Zero Day Initiative researcher Dustin Childs notes AI-assisted vulnerability discovery is accelerating patch volume, though active exploit rates have not yet spiked correspondingly. For IT teams, this trend means patch management cadence and prioritization processes need reevaluation, as monthly patch volumes at this scale strain traditional testing and deployment cycles.

AI Is Going Great – or How ML Makes Money 08:15 Introducing the Agents API

OpenAI released the Agents API in public beta, exposing the same harness and infrastructure that powers Codex and ChatGPT for Work, letting developers create production-ready agents with a single API call specifying task, model, tools, and environment. Developers get flexible compute options: an OpenAI-managed sandbox, self-hosted infrastructure, or