328: Shhh… It’s a Secret Region!

Welcome to episode 328 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are on board today to bring you all the latest news in cloud and AI, including secret regions (this one has the aliens), ongoing discussions between Microsoft and OpenAI, and updates to Nova, SQL, and OneLake -and even the latest installment of Cloud Journeys. Let’s get started! Titles we almost went with this week

• CloudWatch’s New Feature: Because Nobody Likes Writing Incident Reports at 3 AM
• DNS: Did Not Survive – The Great US-EAST-1 Outage of 2025
• 404 DevOps Not Found: The AWS Automation Adventure mk
• When Your DevOps Team Gets Replaced by AI and Then Everything Crashes
• Database Migrations Get the ChatGPT Treatment: Just Vibe Your Schema Changes
• AWS DevOps Team Gets the AI Treatment: 40% Fewer Humans, 100% More Questions
• Breaking Up is Hard to Compute: Microsoft and OpenAI Redefine Their Relationship
• AWS Goes Full Scope: Now Tracking Your Cloud’s Carbon from Cradle to Gate
• Platform Engineering: When Your Golden Path Leads to a Dead End
• DynamoDB’s DNS Disaster: How a Race Condition Raced Through AWS
• AI Takes Over AWS DevOps Jobs, Servers Take Unscheduled Vacation
• PostgreSQL Scaling Gets a 30-Second Makeover While AWS Takes a Coffee Break
• The Domino Effect: When DynamoDB Drops, Everything Drops
• RAG to Riches: Amazon Nova Learns to Cite Its Sources
• AWS Finally Tells You When Your EC2 Instance Can’t Keep Up With Your Storage Ambitions
• AWS Nova Gets Grounded: No More Hallucinating About Reality
• One API to Rule Them All: OneLake’s Storage Compatibility Play
• OpenAI gets to pay Alimony
• Database schema deployments are totally a vibe
• AWS will tell you how not green you are today, now in 3 scopes

General News

02:00 DDoS in September | Fastly

• Fastly‘s September DDoS report reveals a notable 15.5 million requests per second attack that lasted over an hour, demonstrating how modern application-layer attacks can sustain extreme throughput with real HTTP requests rather than simple pings or amplification techniques.
• Attack volume in September dropped to 61% of August levels, with data suggesting a correlation between school schedules and attack frequency: lower volumes coincide with school breaks, while higher volumes occur when schools are in session.
• Media & Entertainment companies faced the highest median attack sizes, followed by Education and High Technology sectors, with 71% of September’s peak attack day attributed to a single enterprise media company.
• The sustained 15 million RPS attack originated from a single cloud-provider ASN, using sophisticated daemons that mimicked browser behavior, making detection more challenging than typical DDoS patterns.
• Organizations should evaluate whether their incident response runbooks can handle hour-long attacks at 15+ million RPS, as these sustained high-throughput attacks require automated mitigation rather than manual intervention.
• Listen, we’re not inviting a DDoS attack, but also…we’ll just turn off the website, so there’s that.

AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money

04:41 Google AI Studio updates: More control, less friction

• Google AI Studio introduces “vibe coding” – a new AI-powered develo...