Welcome to episode 249 of the CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, Justin and Ryan put on their scuba suits and dive into the latest cloud news, from Google Gemini’s “woke” woes, to Azure VMware Solution innovations, and some humorous takes on Reddit and Google’s unexpected collaboration. Join the conversation on AI, storage solutions, and more this week in the Cloud!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Gemini Has Gone Woke? Uhhh…ok. 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel. 

General News 

01:48 DigitalOcean beats expectations under the helm of new CEO Paddy Srinivasan

• Quick earnings chat. Digital Ocean, under their new CEO Paddy Srinivasan reported earnings of 44 centers per share, well ahead of Wall Street’s target of 37 cents per share. 
• Revenue growth was a little sluggish at 11% more than a year earlier, but the companies 181 million in reported sales still beat analysts expectations. 
• Full year revenue was 693M for the year. 
• We’re really glad to see the business is still going, and instead of going back on-premise, we think it’s a viable option for many workloads so don’t sleep on them.

02:46  Ryan – “I like that, you know, while they are very focused on, you know, traditional compute workloads, you can still see them. Dip in their toes into managed services and, and, um, their interaction with the community and documentation of how to do things. I think it’s really impactful.”

03:34 VMware moves to quell concern over rapid series of recent license changes  

• As we have reported multiple times on the VMWARE shellacking they are doing to the customers, Vmware has released a blog post trying to convince you that they’re **not** screwing you. 
• Broadcom has realigned operations around VMWare Cloud Foundation private cloud portfolio and data center-focused VMWare Vsphere suite, and no longer sells discrete products such as vSphere hypervisor, vSAN virtual storage and NSX network storage virtualization software.  
• They also are eliminating perpetual licensing in favor of subscription-only pricing, with VCF users getting vSAN, NSX and the Aria Management and orchestration components bundled whether you want them or not. 
• Broadcom says this is about focusing on best-of-breed silos, and not disparate products without an integrated experience.