Welcome to episode 306 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! 

This week, we have a bunch of announcements concerning the newest offering from Anthropic – Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4, plus container security, Azure MySQL Maintenance, Vertex AI, and Mistral AI. Plus, we’ve got a Cloud Journey installment AND an aftershow – so get comfy and get ready for a trip to the clouds!

Titles we almost went with this week:

• ECS Failures Now Have 4x the Excuses
• Nailing Down Your Container Security, One Patch at a Time
• HashiCorp’s New Recipe: Terraform, AI, and a Pinch of MCP
• Teaching an Old DNS New IPv6 Tricks
• Dash-ing through the Klusters, in an AWS Console
• Google’s Generative AI Playground Gets a Glow-Up
• Vertex AI Studio: Now with 200% More Darkness! Like our souls
• Claude Opus 4 Strikes a Chord on Google Cloud
• Sovereign-teed to Please: Google Cloud’s Royal Treatment
• Google’s Cloud Kingdom Expands its Borders
• Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s AI? Anthropic Drops Sonne(t) 4 Knowledge on Vertex
• Mistral AI Chats Up a Storm on Google Cloud
• Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Gets a Dose of Mistral Magic
• .NET Aspire on Azure: The App Service Strikes Back
• Default Outbound Access Retires, Decides Florida Isn’t for Everyone 

AI Is Going Great – or How ML Makes Money 

01:52 Introducing Claude 4

• Claude has launched the latest models in Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, setting new standards for coding, advancing reasoning and AI agents. Maybe they’ll actually follow instructions when told to shut down? (Looking at you, ChatGPT.)
• Claude Opus 4 is “the world’s best coding model” with sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows. 
• Opus 4 has 350 billion parameters, making it one of the largest publicly available language models. 
• It demonstrates strong performance on academic benchmarks, including research. 
• Sonnet 4 is a smaller 10 billion parameter model optimized for dialogue, making it well-suited for conversational AI applications. 
• Alongside the models, they are also announcing:
  • Extended thinking with tool use (beta): Both models can use tools – like web search – during extended thinking, allowing Claude to alternate between reasoning and tool use to improve its responses.
  • New Model Capabilities: Both models can use tools in parallel, follow instructions more precisely, and when given access to local files by developers — demonstrate significantly improved memory capabilities, extracting and saving key facts maintain continuity and build tacit knowledge over time
  • Claude code is now generally available: After receiving extensive positive feedback during our research preview, they are expanding how developers can collaborate with Claude.  Claude code now supports background tasks via gith