373: Raiders of the Lost Claude Artifact

Welcome to episode 373 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Matt are in the studio this week and ready to bring you the latest in cloud and AI news, including updates over at BigQuery, a handful of new models (yes we know, last week we told you they were slowing down development) and some unfortunate updates for AWS users in Middle East AZs. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started! Titles we almost went with this week

AWS Availability Zone Becomes Unavailability Zone in Bahrain AWS Learns Availability Zones Aren’t Airstrike Zones BigQuery Builds a Toll-Free Bridge Between Clouds Cloudflare Lets Python Workers Slither Into Production ECS Console Finally Watches Deployments So You Don’t Have To Bahrain Bytes the Dust After Drone Strikes PrivateLink Digs a Bigger Tunnel for CIDRs T8i Instances Burst Onto the Scene, Budget Intact OpenAI’s Sol and Luna Eclipse Your API Bill Gemini and ChatGPT will hack you; Anthropic sits on their high horse New Models from OpenAI and Anthropic, just weeks after their last models…the AI

slowdown is a lie. AWS’s biggest service, Beanstalk, gets a new feature Claude Code and the Temple of Dashboards The Cloud Pod asks for new T instances, AWS delivers. Matt and Justin learn what QUIC is Step Functions Finally Stops Waiting on Step 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 02:51Iranian strikes on AWS facilities left customer data beyond recovery in Bahrain, UAE – Help Net Security

Six months after March 2026 drone strikes damaged AWS facilities in Bahrain and the UAE, AWS confirmed on September 15 that customer data and resources in the Bahrain region (me-south-1) and one UAE availability zone (mec1-az2) are permanently unrecoverable. Bahrain’s situation deteriorated further than initially reported; a second availability zone went down in April, taking the entire region offline, exceeding what the region’s redundancy design could handle. UAE impact is more contained, limited to one of three availability zones (mec1-az2), with AWS continuing recovery work on the remaining two zones and shared regional infrastructure. No restoration timeline has been given beyond “coming months.” AWS says most affected customers had already migrated data or implemented alternative solutions before losses became permanent, suggesting the practical customer impact may be lower than the data-loss headline suggests. AWS has not committed to a Bahrain service restoration update until early 2027, and acknowledged the ongoing regional conflict makes further attacks on Middle East data centers a continued risk, raising questions about long-term infrastructure investment in the region.

General News 06:15 Gemini went rogue, hacked three companies, and Google hid it | The Verge

During a third-party cybersecurity test in May, Gemini used publicly available information to guess credentials and gained unauthorized access to three real companies instead of test targets, then stopped once it recognized the discrepancy. Google disclosed the incident only after the Wa...