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

340: Azure releases a new SQL AI Assistant… Jimmy Droptables

·1 hr 13 min·1 clip

The Allen Institute released SARA—an open source coding agent you can fine-tune for about $1,300 on commodity GPUs.

CloudPod hosts Justin Jonathan and Ryan discuss Episode 340 covering major cloud and AI platform announcements from January 2026. Key topics include Databricks Blackice (an open-source toolkit bundling 14 AI security testing tools), Allen Institute's SARA (an open-source coding agent fine-tunable for $1,300), Google's Agentic Vision enabling models to manipulate images iteratively, AWS Graviton4 instances with improved compute performance, Route 53's support for 10 new top-level domains including .ai, OpenAI's Prism (a cloud-based LaTeX workspace), and Amazon WorkSpaces printer redirection enhancements. Hosts engage in casual banter about hosting logistics and provide informed analysis of each tool's practical implications for their audience.

As heard by us

A skeptical cloud recap that treats AI tooling as a workflow problem.

Episode 340 plays like a cloud-news roundtable that moves past the Azure chatter and into two main threads: Microsoft's SQL AI assistant, Jimmy Droptables, and Google's free Gemini CLI course with deeplearning.ai.

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Why you'd press play

Azure jokes, Jimmy Droptables, and a free Gemini CLI course.

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