376: Google Gemini Agents Gemini, Gemini Confused

Welcome to episode 376 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are in the studio this week bringing you the latest in cloud and AI news, including a slew of new models (yes, again), the always impressive stats from Amazon’s Prime Days, and some interesting updates to Lambda. There’s so much more where that came from, so let’s get started! Titles we almost went with this week

AWS Buys DuckDB, Ducks the Distributed Systems Fight Yo Dawg, We Put Gemini in Your Gemini AWS Lambda Webs Its Way Into Your Servers Serverless Finally Speaks Fluent Express DynamoDB Counts to 59 Trillion, Doesn’t Even Break a Sweat Gremlin Teaches AI to Break Things Nicely Prime Day Flexes AWS Muscles, Trillions of Requests Deep AWS Graviton Carries Prime Day Like It’s No Big Deal Maia 300 Says Nvidia Who? Azure’s New Chip Flex Nadella Says Trust No AI, Keep the Kill Switch Handy LiveTaskCount Crashes the Party, RunningTaskCount Goes Free AWS Boxes In Agents Before They YOLO Your Files Gemini, Meet Gemini AWS saw your edge Cloudflare and said “hold my beer” with Lambda Web Functions

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. Follow Up 01:24 Licensing costs driving 90 percent of VMware users to explore options: Survey

New Rimini Street survey data confirms the ongoing VMware exodus trend, with 90 percent of 300 surveyed organizations now actively exploring alternatives due to licensing costs, and 54 percent citing Broadcom’s termination of perpetual license support. Cost increases reported since the Broadcom acquisition vary widely, from 100 to 300 percent for most customers to 1,000 percent in extreme cases, reinforcing earlier reports rather than introducing new pricing-shock figures. The survey adds a more complete picture of why migrations remain difficult in practice: operational complexity (40 percent), multi-vendor management (38 percent), security concerns from an expanded attack surface (37 percent), and skills gaps (37 percent) are now quantified as the leading barriers. This update provides useful context for listeners tracking the broader VMware alternatives narrative, since it shows cost pressure hasn’t eased a year after the acquisition closed, while also tempering expectations about how quickly organizations can execute migrations. Worth noting is the source bias: Rimini Street sells third-party VMware support and benefits from customers feeling locked in or overcharged, though the involvement of independent research firm Unisphere and alignment with prior customer reports lend the findings some credibility.

01:51 Justin – “Congratulations...