The Cloud Pod | Weekly AI & Cloud News on AWS, Azure & GCP · Justin Brodley, Jonathan Baker, Ryan Lucas and Matt Kohn | Cloud Computing & AI News

We Were Right (Mostly), 2026: The New Prophecies

·1 hr 8 min·4 clips

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1. The Cloud Pod Episode 336 reviews 2025 predictions, 2026 prophecies, and show-history stats recorded on January 6th, 2026. 2. Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew host the episode, and Justin frames the segment around predictions, a 500-page archive, and new tooling. 3. The episode asks what the show got right in 2025 and what the hosts want to predict for 2026. 4. Justin says Ryan predicted quick LLM models for individuals, and he used Claude to help validate that call. 5. Matt gets credit for predicting Focus adoption by Snowflake, Databricks, Alibaba Cloud, and Grafana, plus ISO 42001 momentum. 6. Jonathan’s AGI-claim prediction is discussed alongside Integral AI, Jad Tarifi, and Sam Altman’s GPT-5 comments. 7. The hosts also revisit predictions about AI agents booking reservations, continuous learning, and OpenAI losing its leadership position. 8. Justin says 2025 included 1,308 stories from 15 unique sources and 49 episodes overall. 9. He notes cloud-provider coverage of 39% AWS, 22.9% Azure, and 38.1% GCP in 2025. 10. He contrasts that with 2019, when the show was 73% AWS, 16% Azure, and 11% GCP. 11. Justin says AI was mentioned 596 times in 2025, averaging 12.2 mentions per episode and 66.4% year-over-year growth. 12. The episode also counts 19 outages, 12 fiber and network infrastructure mentions, and five major deep-sea cable announcements. 13. Justin says the show had six episodes in 2025 with all four hosts present, and Jonathan appeared in 12 episodes because of personal issues. 14. The hosts joke about recurring phrases like “finally,” “Oracle arriving late to the party,” and the “rack Ryan” callback. 15. Justin lists deprecated or ended services including AWS Cloud Search, S3 Glacier, AWS Migration Hub, AWS Application Discovery Service, and Azure Consumption APIs. 16. He also mentions cloud acquisitions such as Cloudflare buying Replicate, Atlassian buying DX, Cognition buying Windsurf, and Meta buying Scale AI. 17. The episode’s tone is conversational and self-auditing, with the hosts trading predictions, corrections, and running jokes. 18. The format shifts from annual scorekeeping into personal favorites, then into detailed discussion of vibe coding, models, and workflow tools. 19. People interested in AWS, Azure, GCP, AI model shifts, and cloud industry tracking would get the most value from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a short, narrative-free cloud news recap may skip the long stats and tooling discussion.

As heard by us

A brisk annual audit turns cloud predictions, provider friction, and agent standards into a practical 2026 forecast.

The Cloud Pod starts 2026 with its annual look back at last year's predictions before laying out a fresh set of cloud bets for the year ahead.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want 2025 cloud predictions checked against reality before the 2026 prophecies start.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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