258: To Q or Not to Q – That is the Question (But, Will We Get a Good Answer?)

Welcome to episode 258 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan dig into all the latest earnings reports, talk about the 57 announcements made by AWS about Q, and discuss the IBM purchase of HashiCorp – plus even more news. 

Make sure to stay for the aftershow, where the guys break down an article warning about the loss of training data for LLM’s.

Titles we almost went with this week:

• Terraform hugs to Big Blue (Bear)
• The CloudPod hosts again forgets to lower their headphone volume
• AWS fixes an issue that has made Matt swear many times
• Google gets mad at open-source
• Azure has crickets
• HashiCorp’s Nomadic Journey to the IBM Oasis
• It’s Gonna be Maaay!

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:  

Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod 

General News 

01:48 It’s Earnings TIme!

Alphabet (Google)

• Alphabet beat on earnings and revenue in the first quarter, with revenue increasing 15% from a year earlier, one of the fastest growth rates since 2022.  
• They also announced its first dividend and a $70 billion dollar stock buyback. Using layoff money for something other than a buyback? IN THIS ECONOMY? 
• Revenue was 80.54 Billion vs 78.59 expected, resulting in earnings per share of 1.89.  Google Cloud Revenue was 9.57B vs 9.35 B expected. 
• Net income jumped 57% to 23.66 B up from 15.05B a year ago. 
• Operating income of the cloud business quadruped to 900M, showing that the company is finally generating substantial profits after pouring money into the business for years to keep up with AWS and Azure. 

03:54 Justin – “Yeah, I mean, they’re doing pretty well… I think AI is helping them out tremendously in this regard.  I believe it includes G Suite as well. But I mean, like I don’t know how much revenue that is comparatively, but your Google cloud is definitely the majority of it, I think at this point..”

04:20 Microsoft

• MSFT fiscal third quarter results exceeded on the top and bottom line, but revenue guidance came in weaker than expected. 
• Consensus estimate said Q4 should be 64.5B but Microsoft CFO called for 64B.
• Revenue grew 17% year over year in the quarter, net coming was 21.94B up from 18.30 billion. 
• Micosoft said that currently near term AI demand is higher than their available capacity, and is focusing on buying more Nvidia GPU units.
• Azure Revenue a