Peter Zairsev (@PeterZaitsev, Founder of @Percona) talks about the history of OSS databases, and how AI is reshaping the demands on modern databases.

SHOW: 991

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #991 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

• Percona website

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show, Peter. Give everyone a brief introduction, and we’ll also dig into the details of Percona after that.

Topic 2 - Percona is basically a household name in our space. Part of that is the excellent tech, and part of that is the longevity. Tell everyone the origin story of Percona.

Topic 3 - How have OSS databases evolved? Going back 20 years is a bit far, but what recent trends stand out? How have cloud (i.e. the hyperscalers) and SaaS in particular changed this landscape

Topic 4 - Percona plays in the same space, and with, MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL. If you don’t mind, help everyone connect the dots there and why that matters.

Topic 5 - What are the typical business cases and implementations you are seeing today? What are organizations trying to solve for the most?

Topic 6 - How has AI and the rise of embeddings and vector databases impacted the OSS space? What are your thoughts here? Is this complementary/competitive/both?

Topic 7 - What do you wish people knew more about Percona?

FEEDBACK?

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Aaron Delp (@aarondelp), Brian Gracely (@bgracely) and Brandon Whichard (@bwhichard, @SoftwareDefTalk) discuss the top stories in Cloud and AI from December 2025.

SHOW: 990

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #990 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

• Link to December 2025 News and Articles

FEEDBACK?

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Aaron and Brian make some bold predictions for the 2026 Cloud and AI markets, as well as reviewing the biggest issues going into 2026.

SHOW: 989

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #989 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - NOV 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - OCT 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - SEPT 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - AUG 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JUL 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JUN 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - MAY 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - APR 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - MAR 2025 (show)

2026 CLOUD + AI PREDICTIONS (AND BIG ISSUES TO REVIEW)

• OpenAI Revenues and Focus Areas
• NVIDIA customer profitability
• Companies moving to GOOG TPUs
• Enterprise success beyond CoPilot/Gemini
• Enterprise data+model trainability
• Enterprise price hikes
• Broadcom, AMD, Groq - alternative HW options
• Data Center buildouts
• Does AI spending shift
• What is Agentic AI?
• Long term spending + short term refocuses

PREDICTIONS:

• At least one big AI IPO in 2026, and it won’t go well. (Aaron says Anthropic)
• People will question whether Sam Altman is the right person to lead OpenAI
• AI will be a central issue in the 2026 US elections, either about job losses or electricity prices
• One major LPU/TPU/dedicated inference chip will break through in 2026
• Azure will be the Number One Cloud… (Aaron has to keep it going)
• We will start to see a shift in the Enterprise from big models in the sky (1+trillion parameters) to dedicated, purpose-built models of 500M or less in size for efficiency and security
• Gemini will dominate the consumer/prosumer space, OpenAI will go through the trough of disillusionment
• The industry will shift to a base/instruct and a reasoning split of models
• AWS and Azure will double down on being a solutions provider instead of a primitive supplier for AI and infrastructure

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A lot changed in the world of Cloud and AI this year. And then it changed some more, and some more, and so more. The only constant was change.

SHOW: 988

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #988 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES

IT WAS AN INTERESTING YEAR IN CLOUD AND AI TECHNOLOGY

• AI has become a mainstream technology, political and social talking point
• AI went through 7yrs of news cycles in 1 yr
• DeepSeek - Maybe NVIDIA chips aren’t needed?
• NVIDIA acquihired Grok and their technology
• Maybe AWS’ lead in the cloud is now in question
• Google got their act together with GenAI, after inventing the technology in 2017
• Microsoft and OpenAI sort of broke up, or at least they are seeing other people
• OpenAI forecasts 100x their current revenue in future computing needs
• The US Gov’t either bailed out, or socialized Intel
• Bitcoin - 94k, up to 125k, down to 84k

FEEDBACK?

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Aaron and Brian review the Year in AI, hand out AI awards, and discuss the biggest AI trends from 2025. Maybe a few predictions will be made as well.

SHOW: 987

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #987 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

SHOW NOTES

• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - NOV 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - OCT 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - SEPT 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - AUG 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JUL 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JUN 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - MAY 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - APR 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - MAR 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - FEB 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JAN 2025 (show)

2025 AI YEAR IN REVIEW

• The Year of OpenAI
• The Year of NVIDIA
• The Year of Microsoft
• The Year of Google
• The Year of Oracle
• The Year of China AI
• The Year of Apple
• The Year of Coding Agents (Anthropic, Cursor, Windsurf, CLIs, etc..)
• The Year of Data Centers
• AI Highlights and Lowlights (Corporate Layoffs, Acquihires, Funding, etc..)
• 2026 AI Draft

FEEDBACK?

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If an AGI falls in the woods and nobody can define it, did it actually fall? This week we make an exact prediction of when AGI will happen, and the 10 ways it will immediately change the world.

SHOW: 986

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #986 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES

• Planning for AGI and Beyond (OpenAI)
• Machines of Loving Grace (Anthropic)
• Microsoft and Google has different visions/opinions on AGI
• Amazon reorganizes around new AGI team reporting to Andy Jassy
• Mistral CEO says that AGI is a marketing move
• AGI is defined by an independent committee in new Microsoft and OpenAI agreement
• Why does being first to AGI matter?
• Bret Taylor on the current status of AGI (Acquired/AC2 podcast, 2025)

WHAT DOES REACHING AGI PROVIDE FOR HUMANITY (or ANYTHING)?

• Y2K bug, 2038 Bug (techies are good at dates when things need to be patched)
• The % of people with Internet access
• The % of people with a smartphone
• The % of people with a certain level of education (basic or advanced)
• How much smarter is humanity than 10yrs ago? 20yrs ago?
• How much smarter could existing humanity be at any given time?
• Nobody has a consistent or measurable definition of AGI
• What are the Top 10 problems of humanity that need to be solved? (direct or indirect)
• Does reaching AGI enable certain government or corporate actions to start happening that couldn’t happen now?

FEEDBACK?

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Aaron and Brian review the Year in Cloud, hand out Cloud awards, and discuss the biggest cloud trends from 2025. Maybe a few predictions will be made as well.

SHOW: 985

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #985 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - NOV 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - OCT 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - SEPT 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - AUG 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JUL 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JUN 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - MAY 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - APR 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - MAR 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - FEB 2025 (show)
• CLOUD & AI NEWS OF THE MONTH - JAN 2025 (show)

2025 CLOUD YEAR IN REVIEW

• Cloud of the year
• Cloud concept of the year (non-AI)
• Cloud memory of the year
• Cloud revenues in 2025
• Are NeoClouds in the hyperscaler discussion?
• Was Cloud (circa 2007) the actual downfall of Intel? (Cloud vs Mobile choice)
• Rank the clouds, end of 2025 (cloud draft 2025)
• Do outages matter if they are only once a year?
• Where does AWS go next?

FEEDBACK?

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How difficult will it be to train and build an AI Agent that has expertise in a given domain? Will it happen in the next year, or 3 years or 10 years? And who will benefit in the marketplace from his evolution?

SHOW: 984

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #984 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSORS:

• [Mailtrap] Try Mailtrap for free
• [Interconnected] Interconnected is a new series from Equinix diving into the infrastructure that keeps our digital world running. With expert guests and real-world insights, we explore the systems driving AI, automation, quantum, and more. Just search “Interconnected by Equinix”.

SHOW NOTES

• OpenAI looks to train their models to replace junior bankers

WHAT WOULD BE THE STAGES OF AN EXPERT AGENT?

• Train it on a set of standard knowledge (e.g. Masters of Accounting, Auditing, International Tax)
• Train it on a set of well-defined case studies, to provide industry context
• Train it on a set of adjacent case studies and other domains (business, law, specific industries)
• How to train corner cases?
• How to train gray areas like ethics, morality, or cost-benefit analysis?
• Who is motivated to train these experts?
• What would the cost of these experts be? Can it be similar to a human, or need to be a fraction, or a premium?
• Is there a way to build memory (e.g. experience) without disclosing client information?
• Is there a way to build shareable knowledge between agents for reinforcement training/learning?

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