By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Even though its cloud division underperformed, quarterly earnings for Amazon surpassed expectations. Profits were up 88% from a year ago! Everyone was on Amazon buying canned goods and oxygen canisters because soon we won’t be able to go outside without having to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the half-zombie half-human who used to be our neighbor while a nuclear bomb explodes in the background. 
• In Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report, AI revenue was $3B above forecast. However, its cloud earnings fell short (the exact words from UBS analysts were “far worse than expected”), which led stock to dip 5%. 
• While AWS ramps up data center spending, Microsoft canceled leases with at least two private data center operators. It currently leases data center capacity from various suppliers, but recent cancellations may signal an oversupply (an “AI bubble”) issue—slow customer payoffs and the arrival of DeepSeek are two reasons why demand may be cooling. 
• So, what does this all mean for next quarter? Microsoft’s CFO says it’ll probably fall short again, citing influences like foreign exchange rates and businesses not dedicating budgets to AI. Also, spitting truth: “Customers feel that ‘sorely needed features, enhancements, and fixes to core products’ have been put to the side ‘in favor of trying to build a Copilot into everything.’” 
• A Microsoft executive said AI will transform wealth management, making it easier for smaller entities like startups to compete with big banks. This is because of AI’s ability to condense data and reduce costs. Specifically, agentic AI can replace people in jobs like customer advisement and portfolio construction with AI. 
• Is AWS the technology version of Carrie Bradshaw, who spends all her rent on shoes? The cloud giant is doling out the equivalent of a year’s revenue (~$100B) on infrastructure to support AI. 
• Have you ever renovated a kitchen? Here’s the tech version of that. 
• Microsoft doesn’t want Donald Trump to advance limits on AI chip exports to Chinese companies, and says doing so would be a “strategic misstep.” Oh really, has that happened lately? 
• According to a report from AWS, European startups are adopting AI much faster than their large enterprise counterparts—creating a “two-tier AI economy.” 
• Leaked documents revealed that Microsoft is far more involved with the Israeli military and its operations than previously known. 
• Allegations that DOGE is feeding sensitive Department of Education data to AI using Microsoft Azure is alarming to cybersecurity experts (and everyday people, too). 
• There are no private memos, OK? Just write like it’s gonna be leaked, because the people need their corporate bread and circuses. In this month’s leaked memo, managers will need to manage more, but also less. 
• CrowdStrike has made history as the first cloud-native cybersecurity ISV to earn more than $1B in annual sales from AWS Marketplace. Why yes, we DID do marketing work for them. 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Mondelēz International, the snacks and confectionary company that produces Oreos and Sour Patch Kids—which are chock full of red dye 3 and make your kids lose their goddamn minds—is moving to AWS. 
• Investigative analytics software provider Cognyte is integrating its solution to be deployable with Microsoft Azure. This will bring Cognyte tools into Azure to process and analyze unstructured data. Am I ever going to read something about data and not think of The Goonies? Probs not. 
• Following an investment from Microsoft, Veeam will build AI products. Veeam’s core products focus on cybersecurity. 
• VC firm General Catalyst is partnering with AWS to co-develop and deploy integrated AI products for healthcare—predictive care insights, diagnostics, patient engagement, and platform interoperability. My favorite part of this article is that they included the misspelling in Matt Garma’s emailed quote. Someone get ahead of this man and send him a there-they’re-their primer. 
• AWS is going to help Honda transition from hardware-based vehicles to software-based ones using generative AI, IoT, and AWS compute. And, in partnership with AWS, automotive technology company Valeo is building new solutions for software-defined vehicles. 
• Wow, AWS really is putting the wheeling back into dealing because there is more vroom vroom news. AWS is expanding its presence as the global technology provider for SRO Motorsports Group to “digitally transform the science of racing.” 
• Educational publisher Pearson is expanding its use of AWS, including AI capabilities, to further personalize learning. 
• Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is collaborating with AWS to accelerate breakthroughs in cancer research by applying AI to multimodal data. The deal will also support AI-powered drug discovery efforts. Montefiore Health System is doing similar stuff with AWS. 
• Clinical AI company Aidoc has entered into a strategic collaboration with AWS, which will start with optimizing Aidoc’s CARE Foundation Model. The FM helps doctors with real-time identification of suspected critical conditions. 
• Defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton is working with AWS to “enhance technology for federal agencies.” Great timing. 
• Snowflake is expanding its partnership with Microsoft to bring OpenAI’s advanced models straight to customers through Snowflake Cortex AI on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry. 
• Faros AI is collaborating with Microsoft to bring its data platform for optimizing engineering to Azure. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• A hacker named Codefinger (ewww) is targeting Amazon S3 buckets, and the ransomware campaign is so effective, organizations are reporting that they can’t shut it down without issuing payment. This could potentially affect supply chains. Um…it’s Cadbury crème egg season, so there better not be supply chain problems. 
• Russian scammers are posing as Microsoft tech support on Microsoft Teams, even doing video calls in some cases and getting employee permission to take over screens! Can you imagine watching someone download malware on your computer screen in real time? Talk about a bad day. 

World domination 

• Microsoft went into full diva mode with its creation of a NEW FORM OF MATTER. That’s right—its “topological qubit” is not gas, liquid, or solid, and it can be used to drive quantum computing (which Microsoft researchers now believe is years away instead of decades). 
• The AWS cloud region in Thailand, which includes three Availability Zones, is now up and running. Microsoft is planning to build there but it hasn’t yet. In Singapore, AWS unveiled its Asia-Pacific hub office. 
• AWS announced a $5M investment in “mega data centers” for Central Mexico. 
• The UK has dropped its investigation into a potentially anti-competitive deal between Microsoft and OpenAI—for now, regulators say. 
• Years after Europe asked for more data sovereignty, Microsoft completed its EU Data Boundary project. This will allow EU countries to remain compliant with local regulations, such as storing data in European Free Trade Association regions. 
• AWS launched a CloudFront Edge region in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and hopes to have a fully operational cloud region by 2026. And Saudia Arabia’s STC Group will work with AWS to speed up AI-powered innovation. 
• I didn’t know there was any room left in New York City, but apparently there is, because AWS launched a new, upgraded Local Zone Edge location there. 
• Australia has entered a Whole-of-Government agreement with AWS. And Australian CommBank extended its agreement with AWS to include customer service optimization and AI innovation. 
• India will see $15B in data infrastructure investments from AWS. Also, India’s Tata Power will use AWS AI and IoT to improve things like predictive maintenance for grid resilience. 

New stuff 

• AWS previewed its Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect, which helps service reps avoid platform switching and gives them a choice in the digital channels they use. So, now Karens can unload all their repressed existential angst and political fear on someone either through Salesforce or Connect. 
• It must be Christmas because Santa has visited us all, and in his sleigh is the best present of all: no more Chime. You’d think it would be hard to come up with a gift that every single person on Earth would be happy to receive, but NO, it wasn’t hard.
• And following suit, Microsoft is retiring Skype and moving users toward Teams. 
• AWS issued a new rule for third-party SaaS vendors on Marketplace that want a discount: They’ll need to be running 100% on AWS. 
• Microsoft’s new podcast, Leading the Shift, will feature interviews with experts, customers, and partners on what they’re doing with AI, data, and the cloud. 
• Are we all ready for Microsoft Build? This reporter expects several Copilot announcements.
• Welcome the o3-mini reasoning model to the world, now available in Microsoft Azure OpenAI.

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Julianne Medenblik

As a writer by trade, I’m supposed to tell you that generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT aren’t good enough—that you need a human like me to tell your story. In reality, that statement is only half true. 

Having already moved through the stages of grief, I can honestly say that generative AI has already changed how we work…and it will continue doing so. It wouldn’t have that impact if it were entirely useless, right? There are many ways I now use platforms such as Claude to ideate, tweak a sentence, summarize, or ask for explanations. It’s pretty good, and there are times when it produces something that only needs slight refinement. In quantitative terms, I give it a 7 out of 10. 

But other times, it needs real work, and businesses are taking risks by copying and pasting generative AI content onto their websites or marketing materials. Whether it’s a notably inaccurate summary, a word-bloated paragraph, or a straight-up hallucination—all of which I’ve seen—it’s a bit of a time bomb for brands that aren’t using writers as gatekeepers (as opposed to product marketers, for example). 

It also begs a really big question: Do you want to send 7-out-of-10 content into the world? Does 7/10 content give you a competitive edge, or does it file you into the ranks of the average, along with all the other companies doing the same thing? 

Embracing the writer–generative AI hybrid 

If you’re thinking about using generative AI more, we won’t stop you—but we strongly advise you to still include professional writers with subject-matter expertise throughout your process. At 2A, we know the risks companies take by avoiding this route.  

Here are four essential ways writers can protect you from the pitfalls of generative AI. 

1. We keep you from sounding like everyone else 

Whatever generative AI is writing for you, it’s also writing for everyone else. You may have noticed that marketing content, such as product descriptions, sounds too close to those from competitors. Content often includes overused transitional phrases such as “Additionally” and “In summary.” 

This leads me to ask: Is this a ninth-grade book report? 

Generative AI is good at business rhetoric. It sounds professional, intelligent, and confident. But it’s a mirage. The technology creates content based on all the content it has received or been trained on, and it doesn’t differentiate for you. It doesn’t filter out mediocre writing because it doesn’t understand what mediocre writing is. As a result, it’s not uncommon to receive content that uses passive voice (a no-no in “good” writing) and features wandering sentences. Sometimes, you have to feed it back its own content, then ask it to remove redundancies, be more concise, or stick to active voice. While generative AI can be impressive, it still can’t match—or beat—writing with a human brain. Do you think it could write a blog just like this one? Nope. 

In summary, it’s not there yet (see what I did?). 

Would this opening really hook readers and differentiate 2A’s brand more than the opening we wrote above?  

2. We know all the tools and prompt hacks 

I’ve found that most non-writers who are using generative AI tend to use one platform. For example, they solely use ChatGPT or Copilot. They usually provide relatively basic prompts, such as “Take this marketing brief and turn it into three lines of social copy.” We use generative AI as an assistant in various ways, such as brainstorming, catching typos, and summarizing our human-created content—but we never use it as a primary creator. That’s because it takes as much work to refine as it does to just do it ourselves. The key to reducing the work is a stellar prompt. 

At 2A, our writers have experimented with the full spectrum of generative AI platforms and learned how to craft an excellent prompt that yields the best results. There’s a science to it that takes time, study, and practice to perfect. Some platforms are better for editing or rephrasing, while others are best for context setting. A good prompt should have several elements and set clear parameters. Nuanced content requires several rounds of prompting—and cobbling pieces of each result together. If you’re going to rely on generative AI, it’s your best bet to consult a writer with subject-matter expertise in creating the prompts, running iterations, and finalizing content. 

When you’re a prompting pro, the results are so much better.

3. We safeguard from lies, lies, dirty rotten lies 

Last week, I asked a generative AI platform to explain the concept of a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). What I got back had enough inaccuracies that it would have created problems if it ended up in public-facing marketing content—and this wasn’t the first time that I’ve received incorrect information. When I was writing a personal blog, I asked generative AI to provide a brief history of an organization, and while 99% was correct, it gave me the wrong founding year and the wrong number of organizational members. I have no idea where it pulled those from. Imagine if that kind of nonsense was in your global marketing assets! 

If no one is fact checking and verifying sources in every aspect of what generative AI is producing, you’re absolutely taking risks. So, love your human writers, who will go through your generative AI content with a fine-toothed comb. 

We’re not into zippers. 

4. We bend it to your brand 

Brands that hire us have a thorough set of style guidelines we follow. This keeps their content both unique and consistent. For example, some brands ask that we not spell out certain acronyms, while other brands provide a list of terms we need to avoid (such as “execute”). For assets focused on cybersecurity, we’re often asked to avoid fearmongering. These notes are still too abstract for generative AI—but not for us. 

If you’re using generative AI casually to create content, you aren’t using a robust program that allows you to feed it an 80-page style guide. And even then, generative AI can get it wrong. 2A’s writers can customize AI-generated content to follow your brand guidelines in ways that technology simply can’t do right now. 

Want the best of both worlds? Great! You have options: Send us your generative AI–produced content for us to vet and improve, or just send us your resources and provide access to your subject matter experts. We’ll use our know-how to create a stellar final product…one that won’t tell you David Bowie invented the elevator (or that the elevator was invented by David Bowie). Contact us. 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Gossip (for nerds) 

• A survey found that 87% of Amazon employees expect their productivity to slide when they return to the office (RTO). And 45% said that even with RTO, they’ll still be in a different location than their manager. Unsurprisingly, 48% of staff are actively seeking new jobs. 
• Maybe that last stat will help with a minor detail: Locations such as New York and Atlanta don’t actually have the room for everybody to RTO. 
• Apple is using custom AI chips from AWS to power its search services. It’s evaluating the newest chip to pretrain Apple Intelligence and similar models. This could make AWS more competitive with NVIDIA. 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Product design software provider Ansys and generative AI simulation platform Cognata are collaborating with Microsoft on a web-based testing solution for autonomous vehicle sensors and driver assistance systems. 
• Philips has expanded its collaboration with AWS to unify workflows for integrated diagnostics, such as bringing together pathology, cardiology, and radiology.  
• GitLab is combining its Duo AI Assistant with Amazon Q to “accelerate software innovation and developer productivity.”
• Microsoft bought 485,000 NVIDIA AI chips—twice as many as Meta. 
• Marvell—not the cool superhero franchise (that’s one “l,” Marvel), but the “leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions”—has signed a five-year deal with AWS. Marvell will supply essential silicon technologies to AWS while using the cloud company’s scalable compute capabilities to design new stuff. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• Let’s start with the good news: Microsoft patched three flaws in Dynamics 365 and Power Apps Web API. Yay! 
• Now, for everything else: Microsoft says passwords are over, and it will delete them for ONE BILLION users (say that like Dr. Evil). They’ll be replaced by passkeys that use biometrics and PINs. 
• That plan might work after Microsoft addresses weaknesses in its multi-factor authentication (MFA) process. Hackers found a way to bypass a couple flaws in the MFA alert systems and gained unauthorized access into Windows accounts. 
• AWS will not deploy Microsoft 365 for at least another year—not until Microsoft fixes all the security issues that AWS has identified. 

World domination 

• Somehow, Microsoft has become the first big tech company to receive certification from South Korea’s Cloud Security Assurance Program. Not only that, but South Korea’s public institutions—which face “constant cybersecurity threat from North Korea”—will use Azure. 
• Two French “cybercrime gangs”—ShinyHunters and The Nemesis, both of which sound like great band names—stole AWS credentials by scanning millions of websites for vulnerabilities. But they got caught after misconfiguring the Amazon S3 buckets that held the stolen data. “We’re the wet bandits! That’s W-E-T….” 
• Norwegian-owned telecom company Telenor is moving all of its TV streaming services to the AWS Cloud. 
• After moving one million 5G customers to the AWS Cloud, Telefonica Germany is working with AWS to test quantum technologies on its mobile network. Just in time: Google announced Willow, its latest quantum chip. 

New stuff 

• Quantum computing hype is starting to replace AI hype. The new AWS Quantum Embark program will help businesses learn how to use the technology when it’s ready, including pinpointing use cases and figuring out technical enablement. 
• The AWS Education Equity Initiative has committed $100M to training students in underserved communities in AI, cloud computing, and more. Oh, but don’t think a penny of this will go toward teachers—no, no. This is $100M in cloud credits. The way AWS pushes cloud credits, you’d think it’s the new dogecoin. ::Fans last spark of willpower to stay alive:: 
• Coming soon is Azure OpenAI’s o1 multimodal model, which early adopter customers say provides improved response accuracy and can fulfill complex requests, such as automating tasks for lawyers. 
• Hope you’re not thirsty! Water usage has been a big concern for data centers, especially with the advent of mainstream AI. Currently, Microsoft consumes 125 million liters per data center annually. Lucky for us, Microsoft is planning to apply a zero-water design for data centers starting in 2027. 
• AWS is also looking at resource optimization for power and cooling, such as direct-to-chip cooling for energy efficiency. 
• Azure AI Agent Service helps developers build and deploy AI agents without having to manage compute or storage. 
• AWS has created a “Buy with AWS” button that partners can add to their websites, making it easier for customers to make purchases through their AWS accounts. 
• Security, at your service: AWS launched Security Incident Response, which helps security teams resolve ransomware attacks and other security intrusions. This journalist says that the new service isn’t too different from what other incident response services have to offer, including those from AWS partners. 
• AWS customers can upload their data to physical terminals called Data Transfer Terminals. It requires a scheduled date and time at a place where there are no signs for any kind of terminal because it’s a secret mission-type thing. Seriously: Look at these pictures! 
• A total of 10 new products (via five keynote speeches) were unveiled at re:Invent (wow, they are SO edgy, starting the name with a lowercase letter). Read a summary in TechCrunch (and also here), which felt like the only news source heavily covering re:Invent this year. 
• The general availability of Trainium2 AI chip-powered EC2 instances was announced at re:Invent, along with Trainium3 chips and “UltraServers,” which allow customers to connect multiple servers to a giant one. 
• Amazon Nova is a foundational model only available on Amazon Bedrock that lowers costs and latency for generative AI tasks. 
• Amazon Aurora DSQL is a new, serverless distributed SQL database that’s four times faster than “leading distributed databases” such as Google Spanner. 
• Oracle has released a limited preview of its Oracle Database@AWS. Customers can connect their enterprise data in Oracle to the AWS Cloud. 

Best Friends Forever 

• Saifr, which provides financial compliance technology, added its AI models to Microsoft’s Azure AI model catalog. 
• New to Microsoft Marketplace: Keyless, a biometric authentication solution; DigiCert ONE, a trust management platform; and Aquant’s Service Co-Pilot, an AI model that improves troubleshooting and proactive maintenance. 
• Marchex, an AI and analytics provider for vertical markets, joined the Microsoft Cloud AI Partner Program. 
• Mirakl’s Marketplace Platform, which helps businesses manage marketplace and dropship operations, is now in AWS Marketplace. 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Rachel Adams

After taking graphic design as a high school freshman in Missoula, Montana, Nicole was hooked. She was so diligent about immediately practicing her newly acquired skills that classmates came to know Nicole’s design prowess, to which she applied her great sense of humor. 

“I used to photoshop my classmates’ faces onto images. When Miley Cyrus released her ‘Wrecking Ball’ video—I had fun with that.” Soon, she was flooded with requests. It’s rare to be so certain about a career path at the tender age of 14, but Nicole’s passion for digital creativity never wavered. And sometimes, it even got her out of math class. “If the school newspaper needed something, I’d be excused from whatever class I was in to help,” she said. 

From real estate, to public health, to Gartner 

Nicole majored in graphic design at Montana State, where she interned for the athletic department’s marketing team. And she may have completed one of the more unique theses on Earth for graphics students: to raise awareness of a chronic condition from which a family member suffered, she designed a website for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS). Not long after graduating, Nicole moved to Texas and embarked on a professional journey that can best be described as eclectic. She created beautiful things for a boutique real estate brokerage business; inventive images for a logistics company; stunning designs that supported public health awareness campaigns; and corporate creative at Gartner, the tech research and consulting firm. 

Finding a home away from home 

With a desire to continue trying new things and build on what she learned at Gartner, Nicole applied to 2A. “What I love most about 2A is the people—we have a great team,” Nicole said. “Everybody here cares, and that’s hard to find at other jobs.” 

Nicole learned this firsthand, when she flew to Washington state for her first 2A retreat—only to be struck down by food poisoning. “I was excited to meet my coworkers in person and was like, ‘Hi! I have to go throw up!’” she recalled. “So many people at 2A helped me get through that.” Since joining 2A, Nicole has learned a lot and said 2A’s culture has fostered that growth. “I love that we have creative freedom and are encouraged to try to do things differently.” 

A bit of botany 

Outside of design, she has a love for two kinds of living things: dogs and plants. Nicole recently added a puppy to accompany her dog Odie, and she and her husband tend to a collection of 117 plants—a habit that began after she was encouraged to take a spider plant home from the office years ago. Beyond that, Nicole paddleboards in the summer, but mostly appreciates spending time with family. Every now and then, she makes a point to check out Austin’s food truck scene. “If there is a plant nursery near a food truck, that’s where we go,” she joked (but come on, we know she’s totally serious). 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Trazillionaire Elon Musk has upped the ante on his lawsuit with OpenAI, because he apparently has nothing better to do before he starts running our government so deep into the ground that it touches the Earth’s lava core. He claims that both Microsoft and OpenAI have prevented competition from surviving in the market—in addition to prioritizing profits over the public good. Kind of like…releasing self-driving cars that burst into flames and run people over…BUT I DIGRESS.
• The principal just walked in and asked Microsoft to step outside—the US Federal Trade Commission has its sights set on the technology company’s anticompetitive practices, which include Azure’s restrictive licensing. In a couple months, I’m sure the Department of Government Efficiency will be thrilled to help. 
• Remember all those AWS employees who were “so excited” about the return to the office (RTO)? Well, they might be surprised to hear that a bunch of “distraught” employees wrote an open letter to CEO Matt Garman being like, WTF, dude. The RTO deadline is in January, which is also when the TikTok ban starts, so I hope you like misery. 
• Between January and August of this year, Amazon cut its US advertising budget by 20%. Including its AWS arm, Amazon’s budget for all types of promotional costs has decreased by millions. 
• Increased spending on AI will slow Microsoft’s growth this quarter. Financially, the company can’t address its AI capacity constraints until the second quarter. 
• It hasn’t been announced yet, but Microsoft will use HarperCollins books to train a mysterious AI model. Authors can opt in for the low, low price of one human soul. 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Amazon doubled its investment in AI startup Anthropic with another $4B in funding. Moving forward, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.
• This is just in time to give US intelligence the power of generative AI, along with Palantir. The press release can’t actually tell us what the CIA will do with this technology, so hats off to the author, who somehow managed to craft six paragraphs of absolutely nothing but filler text.
• On the other side of the spectrum, the press release about the expanded partnership between AWS and MongoDB tells you waaaay more than you want to know.
• Nokia will provide routers and switches for Azure datacenters in an extended agreement between the two companies. This is funny because Amazon sued Nokia a few months ago for patent grabbing. Which happened a year after Nokia sued Amazon for patent infringement—and blogged about it! Let’s all just sue each other back and forth forever until we die.
• AWS announced a Generative AI Partner Innovation Alliance that will help customers build their own AI solutions. It’s launching with nine partners, one of them being a government intelligence and weapons systems contractor, which makes complete sense because we are the worst.
• Cognizant is partnering with AWS to deliver smart manufacturing capabilities for the industrial sector. Maybe they can smartly manufacture a way for me to get out of this country.
• Technology and communications company Lumen will supply AWS with its fiber network to improve datacenter connectivity. In turn, Lumen will use AWS solutions, including those for generative AI, to modernize its systems.
• Outbrain has agreed to improve its advertising platform by scaling its operations on Azure and enhancing its services with generative AI solutions from Microsoft.
• Money launderers, we just wanna get to know ya. Is green your favorite color? AWS is partnering with Binance to help the crypto platform better screen customers using an AI integration. This comes after a shakeup in Nigeria, where one Binance exec escaped detention and left the country while another was thrown in prison for “suspicious cash flows.” But, please, focus on the customers.
• Europeans want a more compliant cloud. They’ll get one by the end of 2025, when the AWS Europe Sovereign Cloud launches, complete with regulatory-friendly partner solutions in its Marketplace.
• It’s now easier for AWS customers to extend their on-premises Nutanix environment to the cloud. Thank you, Nutanix!!!!!
• A collaboration between Microsoft and Kyndryl makes it easier for customers to extend their on-premises environment to Azure. 

World domination 

• Microsoft ran out of places to shove Copilot, so it has expanded to a larger market—the limitless universe. In partnership with NASA, “Earth Copilot” will help us collect petabytes of data from observation satellites and make it easier for the general public to access it.
• If you Google news out of Sunbury, Ohio, you’ll mostly find obituaries and an inordinate number of animal-hoarding instances (What? Why? How?). Aside from that, you’ll learn that AWS is going to open a $2B datacenter there, which will be finished in 2028.
• AWS is giving away $110M in free computing power to researchers so long as they use Trainium AI chips. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• I need to learn how to code or something for Microsoft’s bug bounty program, which is awarding $4M to those who uncover security flaws. Look, if I win this thing and go on vacation and return to work suddenly looking a decade younger, I did NOT get a facelift, I just rested…with whoever Lindsay Lohan has been resting with. And if I DID get a facelift…no I didn’t.
• As I write this, millions of personal data points are up for grabs, thanks to developers who used Power Pages to build a website without implementing proper access controls. 

New stuff 

• It was a party at Ignite, starting with Microsoft’s unveiling of a custom AMD processor for virtual machine instances and two Microsoft-made chips, which is very demure and mindful of them.
• Azure AI Student has been packaged with other services and rebranded as Azure AI Foundry.
• Azure Local is a new cloud computing platform that allows companies to extend Azure to their on-premises and edge environments.
• Microsoft launched not one, but two infrastructure chips, meant to accelerate AI adoption and increase security.
• Leaving no stone unturned and no career unthreatened, Microsoft is building AI agents for lots of specific tasks, from real-time translations using your voice to processing invoice approvals and customer returns. Does Microsoft know that we, uh, need to like, buy food and stuff? To live? Pretty please, may we?
• It also introduced new AI models for industry. It has been building these pre-trained, fine-tuned models with big partners such as Siemens and Bayer.
• Fabric Databases, an addition to Microsoft Fabric, provisions autonomous databases in seconds.
• Redis can now be fully managed by Azure.
• Not on my 2024 bingo card (then again, neither was the CEO of the Worldwide Wrestling Federation becoming the head of education), but AWS will make it possible for Amazon Q to integrate with Microsoft Office 365.
• AWS App Studio is now generally available. It uses generative AI to build enterprise-grade apps. 

Professional Pivots 

AWS has hired Julia White (who killed Mr. Body in the library with the candlestick) as the company’s new chief marketing officer and VP. She previously spent 20 years at Microsoft and several years at SAP. 

Best Friends Forever 

• Splunk’s security observability and security platform is now available on Azure. 
• AI governance company Saidot can now integrate with Azure AI. 

New to Azure Marketplace 

• IBM subsidiary Apptio’s Targetprocess solution, which helps finance teams plan and manage budgets
• DataChant’s BI Pixie, which sounds like a little booster for Power BI
• Awardco, for employee recognition and rewards
• Shift Technology offers several products for property and casualty insurers
• Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux AI, a foundation model platform
• Cribl, which is too close to an offensive term for my comfort, is a data engine for IT and security
• IntelePeer’s SmartAgent and SmartOffice, which offer AI-powered communications automation 

New to AWS Marketplace 

• Jitterbit, which is also now an AWS Partner, a SaaS service that solves “hyperautomation issues”
• SugarCRM’s Sugar Sell and Sugar Market
• AttackIQ, which provides breach and attack simulation solutions
• Coder, an open-source platform for self-hosted development environments 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Gossip (for nerds) 

• This month, Satya Nadella was like “Stoppppp giving me money” but the Microsoft board was like “Shut uppppp here are some cash wads to dry your tears.” Yes, it’s true: After asking for a pay reduction, Nadella instead got a 63% raise totaling $79.1M. It would have been $5.5M higher but he lost that incentive because of the company’s security issues. 
• AWS CEO Matt Garman said employees who don’t like the return to the office (RTO) mandate should make sure the door doesn’t slam their booties on the way out. 
• The response to “Well, then just quit” was “OK”: The company’s VP of AI dipped, along with a top exec in telecom for AWS. And a survey found that 73% of employees are thinking about leaving. Nah-uh, says Garman, who insists, in a conveniently leaked transcript, that 90% want—nay, are excited about!—RTO. 
• While Amazon is recalling people to the office, Microsoft EVP Scott Guthrie says don’t worry lil babies, I gotchu…with one caveat: Productivity must not drop. If it does, the floggings will continue until morale improves!!! 
• A flogging is exactly what Google is asking the EU to issue Microsoft, claiming that the cloud provider is giving Windows customers a choice between buying Azure or facing a 400% markup. 
• OpenAI will release its next-gen AI model, Orion, on Azure by December 2025. The model is expected to have 100 times more power, and be an “ultra-advanced model that approaches Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).” 
• That’s great and all (Is it, really?), except Azure’s CTO says the company is about to hit the power grid limit, tee hee. AI demands so much energy that the company may need to connect multiple data centers if it wants to train these advanced models. Energy needs underlie Microsoft’s nuclear energy efforts and its new virtual machines optimized for AI. 
• Meh, OpenAI is going full honey badger and doesn’t care—the company is telling Microsoft to move faster or move out of the way, and will start “lining up data centers and AI chips” outside of Microsoft. The New York Times says the bromance is starting to fray. 
• Despite this activity, some analysts think that interest in AI will dwindle as market demand corrects itself, forcing OpenAI to sell to Microsoft in the next three years. Or is this already happening? A Wall Street analyst with Oppenheimer lowered his projections for Microsoft in 2025 because Copilot sales fell below expectations. 
• Oh, look, exactly what I said would happen is happening. Researchers found that Whisper, OpenAI’s transcription tool that’s used by some medical centers, is whispering a whole bunch of CRAP. Eight out of every 10 audio transcriptions contained completely made-up chunks of text that were never spoken, including “racial commentary, violent rhetoric, and imagined medical treatments.” 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• When the military industrial complex says it’s too expensive, you know it’s too expensive. Yes, we’re still stuck on the Microsoft Goggles that cost $80,000 each. The Army said the price has to come down mucho if it’s going to order 121K of them. A deal would earn Microsoft $22B over a decade, also known as Satya Nadella’s next totally unwanted bonus that he absolutely must accept despite his protests. 
• Solutions provider Presidio signed a “huge deal” with AWS, applying its consulting services to the implementation of advanced AWS technology such as ML and AI. The duo will also develop industry-focused solutions. 
• Digital Domain has moved to AWS so it can build industry-specific Autonomous Virtual Humans. Because autonomous real humans must do pesky, work-disrupting things such as eat, sleep, shower, and feel feelings. 
• Smartsheet is partnering with AWS to connect with Amazon Q Business. This will let businesses answer queries on projects and other Smartsheet-related data. 
• Microsoft and NetApp collaborated with Tessell, a database-as-a-service platform, to create Copilot for Cloud Databases. 
• In China, now only enterprises, not individuals, can subscribe to OpenAI, which this article says will affect independent developers in the country. 
• Oncology technology company Ontada is collaborating with Microsoft using Azure AI to process unstructured oncology document components. I love document components! 
• Rezolve AI, which offers AI-powered solutions for commerce and retail, is using Azure to support its Brain Suite, helping increase digital customer engagement. 
• When the Beatles wrote you say you want a revolution, what they were REALLY talking about was Microsoft’s partnership with Medline to design a healthcare supply chain resiliency solution.
• AWS and SentinelOne are building on their existing partnership to improve AI-powered cybersecurity using the cloud provider’s AI infrastructure and SentinelOne’s Purple AI solution, which sounds like Prince invented it. 
• Databricks is using AWS Trainium AI chips so users can develop custom LLMs with Databricks’ Mosaic AI platform. 
• Behavioral health technology provider Kipu Health is using AI services from AWS to reduce customers’ administrative workloads through transcription note-generation and chart summaries. 
• Omnichannel payment solutions provider Valor PayTech migrated to AWS. 
• To address the lack of diversity in cybersecurity, AWS and the NFL are collaborating to provide more support and inroads for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. 
• Smarsh, a communications data and intelligence platform, is working with AWS to bring AI to financial services for risk detection and compliance automation. Wow, that solved my insomnia right away. 

World domination 

• The US Department of Defense awarded a $7.2M contract to AWS for a “zero trust pilot” of AWS Virtual Private Cloud for the Pentagon. 
• The UK government signed a five-year agreement, or 1,825 tea times, with Microsoft to bring AI to the public sector as part of a broader modernization push. In Italy, Microsoft will invest 4.3B Euros over two years in regional AI infrastructure, but it must do so at top volume while fervently gesticulating its hands. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

Whoopsies! Microsoft lost a month’s worth of security logs for some of its customers. Which means there’s nothing to return to for…idk…root-cause analysis. 

New stuff 

• When it comes to nuclear power, mini meltdowns sound so much cuter than full-scale meltdowns. In an agreement with Dominion Energy, AWS will spend more than $500M to build small modular reactors that, with any luck, will be run by leprechauns (who will hopefully be piss tested every morning). 
• In a bid to capture some of Salesforce’s market share, Microsoft launched 10 ready-for-use autonomous AI agents for Dynamics 365. This comes just weeks after Salesforce announced its own autonomous agents, part of “the third wave of AI” that will move businesses beyond chatbots. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff (who looks like a hitman nearing retirement in this picture) slammed Microsoft’s new product, calling it “Clippy 2.0” and claiming “it doesn’t work.” In lieu of these pre-built agents, organizations can now create their own using Copilot Studio. 
• As Microsoft and Salesforce beef up their autonomous agents, AWS has added capabilities for Amazon Q in Connect. The big reveal? Companies can customize smart assistants’ responses to brand guidelines, womp womp. Things don’t stop there—how about some Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect? This keeps joint customers from having to do the integration themselves and allows them to use one platform for both solutions. 
• Meanwhile, Google signed a $2.7B deal with Character.AI to drive forward its own agentic AI line of business. Google is basically paying a lot of money to hire the notable AI brainiacs leading Character.AI and to license the company’s technology. 
• Microsoft is coming to rescue us from AI’s bad side with new product capabilities that will correct hallucinations in real time. 
• Drasi is Microsoft’s new event-driven platform for data processing. It helps businesses track data activity to better understand changing needs. 
• IT admins can now use AWS Chatbot to manage AWS accounts from third-party apps such as Microsoft Teams and Slack. 

Professional pivots 

• It may have lost some, but AWS also won some: Pilar Schenk, formerly a COO at Cisco, is now VP of sales operations. And Jon Jones, formerly VP for GTM at AWS, is now VP and global head of AWS Startups. 
• OpenAI yoinked Microsoft’s VP of GenAI research. The company is being transparent about the fact that this move is focused on furthering AGI efforts. 

Best friends forever 

It was like Chrismukkah for the AWS Partner network this month. 

• Insight, which helps businesses migrate to the cloud, achieved AWS Premier Tier Service Partner status. 
• Matellio, a custom software-engineering studio, and Cloudtech, a cloud-modernization services firm, both achieved AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner status. 
• Kasada, which helps defeat automated cyber threats, earned its AWS Security Competency. 
• Education technology company Everspring and appointment scheduling platform Coconut Software are now AWS Partners. 
• Cloudelligent, a managed services provider, achieved AWS Migration Competency status. Not to be confused with CloudHesive, which had its WAF validated by AWS (why does that sound inappropriate?). 
• Observability and OTel provider Embrace has joined the AWS ISV Accelerate Program and is also slapping its goods in AWS Marketplace. 

New to AWS Marketplace 

• Zoom’s Contact Center, so you can say “Sorry, I was on mute,” but now you can say it on AWS 
• Arduino Cloud, an all-in-one platform for building IoT applications 
• Zimperium, a mobile security provider 
• StackGen’s Generative Infrastructure from Code, which eliminates developer bottlenecks 
• Finzly’s FedNow Service, an instant payment service 

New to Azure Marketplace 

• Addlly AI, a customizable, zero-prompt AI playground that simplifies content generation 
• Ascendion AVA+ GenAI Core Platform, which helps businesses customize AI for use cases
• SqlSafeKeep, a compliance solution for developers and data scientists
• Mattermost, which offers secure collaboration and communication for government and other critical sectors 

By Jane Dornemann

When Jenni was in college, she knew one thing to be true: Whatever she became in life, it had to involve art. To some, that might seem like a risky pipe dream, but to Jenni, it was a framework. The key was to find a realistic way to make art that culminated in a steady career path. Being the open-minded, curious, and adventurous spirit she is, she decided to explore. Literally! She wandered the halls of her college, popping her head into classrooms, asking senior art majors what they were working on and what kind of jobs they planned to get. She chatted with future interior designers, visual artists, and graphic designers, eventually landing on industrial design. 

“People hear that and think I’m designing industrial buildings or something,” said Jenni. “But it’s really about designing physical objects through the lens of ergonomics and form—furniture, shoes, any object you can come in contact with.” 

Shortly after graduating, she found herself designing baby products at a Brooklyn-based company, where she hired our current managing designer and design operations lead, Rachel Adams. There, Jenni ended up doing a lot of graphic design because she was so good at it. “I could only resist my fate for so long,” she said. “I admit it, I’m a graphic designer.” 

Jenni and Rachel stayed in touch after going their separate ways, reuniting years later when Rachel asked Jenni to consider freelancing with 2A. Jenni’s initial interview, which was supposed to be a “temperature check” on how she felt about 2A, ended up being an onboarding call because she was so impressed. 

Lucky for us, Jenni’s innate, calculated risk-taking sets her work apart. She gives equal weight to aesthetics and function, resulting in designs that are visually pleasing but also purposeful. “I base my work on the structural aspect, such as branded guidelines and other criteria, but also have that ‘How can I make the client smile when they see this?’ approach,” explained Jenni. It’s all about bold balance and projecting her love of freedom and discovery—with a healthy dose of practicality. That’s important in the tech industry, where things are always changing. 

“Having to be nimble is a nice challenge. You can’t get too comfortable with anything, and that’s how I live life in general,” she said. This openness to change is at the core of what keeps her work fresh and exciting. 

These days, you can find Jenni habitually stepping out of her comfort zone on a yoga mat, in a Pilates class, or on a surfboard in the San Diego waves. As a yoga practitioner and certified teacher, Jenni has come a long way from being “the least athletic, least flexible person I knew.” Yoga helps her find equilibrium amidst her adrenaline-seeking adventures, which have included autocross racing, go-karting, and car racing ride-alongs with her dad. 

“My yoga work has helped me change perspective about my perceived limitations versus my actual limitations, and to bring balance into my life,” added Jenni. It’s a good thing she’s centered, because when she’s not hitting a client’s project out of the park, she’s chasing after her toddler. “He’s doing something different every day! As I said, you can’t get too comfortable.” 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• It’s a big deal, literally: In a multi-billion-dollar co-investment, Intel has agreed to produce a custom AI chip for AWS. Following the news, Intel stock rose 14%. 
• On the brink of a history-making election and a world war, you know what we need? More dormant nuclear power plants to start back up. Despite a meltdown in 1979, Microsoft has entered a new energy-sharing agreement with Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island to produce clean energy that will power datacenters for AI. 
• You know what else we need? To never, ever let go of the HoloLens headsets for the Army. Even though it’s been an expensive, years-long failure, I say we keep going—and Microsoft agrees. It recently partnered with Palmer Luckey, an American entrepreneur who makes interesting facial-hair choices, to embed new software into the system that will “enhance soldiers,” much like “Starship troopers,” because war is a funny ha-ha movie. 
• SaaS log analytics platform Sumo Logic is strategically collaborating with AWS to enhance its services with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Security Lake. Also, Sumo Logic went full overachiever and earned three competencies in Cloud Operations for education, retail, and government. 
• Vodafone is unleashing the raw power of Microsoft 365 Copilot to help 68,000 employees get more work done. 
• AWS is the last of the three big cloud providers to say uncle to Oracle. Now, AWS customers can access Oracle’s databases on AWS infrastructure with zero-ETL integration. The companies will co-market the offering. 
• NetApp has signed an agreement with AWS to expand and accelerate generative AI efforts. This will increase AWS Marketplace purchases and make it easier for AWS customers to implement NetApp solutions. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• No single entity can fund the compute power AI needs, like, ruhl soon. So, conspiracy theory subject fan-favorite BlackRock has partnered with Microsoft to launch the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership (GAIIP). The program wants to raise $30 billion for datacenters and related energy infrastructure to power hungry, hungry hippos AI. NVIDIA will serve as an advisor for the initiative. I’m wondering if the first thing they’d advise is to have THOUGHT ABOUT THIS YEARS AGO before AI was forced into every Microsoft app imaginable, but maybe not. 
• After all, not everybody is down with this AI-in-everything approach. Customers testing Microsoft’s AI-shoving in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint have had a “lukewarm response” due to performance and cost issues. 
• Nonetheless, Microsoft says, ACTUALLY you’re wrong, people love us. People want to BE us—just look at these gains.
• And then Marc Benioff was like, that’s great, but no. The Salesforce CEO said that Microsoft’s AI products and strategy have “disappointed many customers,” then pivoted to why we should buy his sh*t instead, so…sounds like a bias-free assessment to me. 
• Will Amazon see a mass employee exodus after demanding a return to the office? A memo from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that everyone must come back in person, five days a week, by January 2, 2025, or GTFO. The company is also eliminating some management positions and bringing back assigned desks. 
• Companies that want to do new, shiny things with AI will need to cut budgets elsewhere if they hope to afford true transformation, says Microsoft’s VP for Azure. He also said some things that led his PR team to spontaneously combust, such as warning customers that there’s a risk AI could “do something unpredictable” and that organizations are encouraged to review their content because of Microsoft’s lack of transparency around data use. Finally, some honesty around here. 
• In 2024, more job postings require Azure skills and fewer are requiring AWS skills, compared to 2017. 
• Gartner named Microsoft a Magic Quadrant leader for container management and named AWS a Magic Quadrant leader for AI code assistants. 
• On-prem is back, baby! So says AWS. AWS customers are increasingly returning to on-premises infrastructure, which includes 29% of all cloud customers (not just AWS) in the UK. In EMEA, more than half of companies want to deploy workloads on legacy infrastructure. 
• Some rando in Forbes who keeps referring to “we” predicts Microsoft Azure will reach $200B in revenue in the next three years. Good thing you can use wads of cash to plug leaks in nuclear power plants. 
• Microsoft isn’t the only cloud computing company going nuclear—AWS is looking to hire a principal nuclear engineer for its datacenters. In March, the cloud provider acquired an entire nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. 

World domination 

• South African gold-mining firm Gold Fields is moving to AWS. I’d expected the press release to give it a greenwashing spin, but it was good enough to spare us the bullsh*t. 
• Brazil is getting even more datacenters after AWS pours $1.8 billion into expanding infrastructure. 
• AWS announced that it will invest more than $10 billion into AI infrastructure in the UK through 2028. 
• Oooooooo, high-speed Japanese trains! The Central Japan Railway Company is using AWS for its Yamanashi Maglev Line. The transportation company will use IoT, AI, and ML technology from AWS to reduce maintenance costs and improve operations. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• Lots of people didn’t have their precious apps for nearly eight hours when a distributed denial-of-service cyberattack hit Azure. Even the UK’s Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service went down, leaving judges to sit in their wigs for HOURS with nothing to do! Microsoft said Azure’s defense response made it worse. 
• To prevent a repeat of the CrowdStrike debacle, Microsoft held a closed summit with its security partners and government officials about better collaboration for testing and deployment. Actions will include investments in anti-tampering protections, such as hiring a dad who can hear you turning up the thermostat from a different room. 
• Microsoft released a progress report six months after its promise to make security a priority across the board, which include improved audit logs, a security skilling academy, and reduced token access. Good thing it hasn’t reduced tokin’ access, or I’d be super sad. 

New stuff 

• New upgrades to Copilot include agents that you can boss around, an upgraded LLM, meeting summaries, and more.
• AWS is offering more value to partners through its new Global Passport Program. A select number of international ISVs will participate. The program includes guidance, strategic support, and resources, such as market-evaluation workshops and multi-region deployments. 
• You’ll be interested to know that Amazon Connect now supports AWS CloudFormation. JK, you won’t be interested to know. 
• Azure Advisor Well-Architected Assessment is in public preview. It provides tailored guidance to optimize cloud infrastructure. 
• Is it Fashion Week? Because Microsoft launched three new models for its open-source Phi 3.5 series to help developers with multilingual processing and video analysis, among other tasks. 
• AWS announced Parallel Computing Service, which lets customers set up and manage high-performance computing clusters. 

Professional pivots 

• Carolina Dybeck Happe has left GE to become Microsoft’s new executive VP and COO. The real question is: How legit is her LinkedIn picture? It does not disappoint. 
• Thierry Pellegrino has become the global head of advanced computing at AWS. 

Best friends forever 

• The NFL is using AWS to build a bunch of stuff for the most boring game outside of golf. Tackle Probability is an AI-powered tool that analyzes some boring game stuff. The game giant also developed Digital Athlete to improve player safety, but player safety seems like it starts with not having two 300-lb men slam into each other at top speed for the 100th time in their careers. But I’m no doctor. 
• Digital transformation solutions provider Trianz has integrated its Concierto platform with AWS. Concierto is a zero-code SaaS platform that enables “lightning fast migrations to the cloud.” I’ll forgive the hyperbole only because this had me imagine a company putting its computers in a DeLorean…then it drives really, really fast toward the clock tower…then it’s the future and it has migrated. 
• Cisco has started offering its AppDynamics application management suite as part of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.
• Polarin by Lightstorm, which for some reason sounds like the sequel to The Nightmare Before Christmas in my weird brain, is in Azure Marketplace. It’s a cloud network infrastructure platform, which is def not as fun as my sequel.
• Kong, which develops API technologies and isn’t that giant rubber toy you hide dog treats in, has made its Dedicated Cloud Gateways available for Azure.
• Australian biz-tech provider Brennan earned its Azure Data Warehouse Migration Specialization. 
• Our friends at Pinecone have made the company’s serverless vector database available on Azure. 
• Project-management tech provider LoadSpring Solutions now integrates with Microsoft Azure. 
• Belden has integrated its CloudRail software with AWS IoT SiteWise.
• AI development platform Kore.ai’s XO Automation and Contact Centre AI is now in AWS Marketplace.

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Reports of slowing Azure growth following Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report, plus “light sales guidance,” led the stock to dip 5%. Even though earnings grew 10% YoY and cloud sales grew 30% that growth is smaller compared to the previous quarter’s growth. In particular, Intelligent Cloud “missed expectations.” Capital expenditure in early AI is also detracting from profitability. 
  • In response, Microsoft is going to change how it reports numbers for its business segments, kind of like when I tell my husband I put money into savings this month but leave out the part where I bought a $50 concealer (IT GOT RAVE REVIEWS AND I NEED IT, OK?). 
• Regardless of how Microsoft structures its earnings, it should be fine as long as I keep overconsuming TikTok. As of March, the platform spent $20M per month on Azure OpenAI Service through Microsoft—a whopping 25% of the revenue Microsoft was generating through that business. Is an OpenAI rep on their way to Washington, DC to beg Congress not to ban TikTok as I type this? 
• Amazon earnings were bright, with AWS as the driving force behind a quarterly profit of $13.5B—a 19% increase YoY and above expectations. But all this demand isn’t necessarily a great thing, because AWS has “a titanic backlog” for its services. It’s unclear if that’s why AWS closed some of its services to new customers, such as Amazon S3 Select, or whether they plan on retiring those services down the road.  
• Meanwhile, The demand for AI is more than Microsoft can accommodate, so the cloud giant is spending billions to use third-party centers while it builds out more of its own.
• Like Microsoft, AWS is spending a significant amount on capital ($16.4B for Q2!), which includes building new data centers instead of refurbishing old ones. Next up: Hyderabad, India. 
  • Investments also include the race to create AI chips that are cheaper and faster than NVIDIA’s.
• In a leaked internal fireside chat, the AWS CEO told the company’s software developers that they need to find other skills because AI is going to start coding for them. “Upskill and learn new technologies” was the depth of the direction they received. Are you feeling left out? Don’t—the CEO said most white-collar jobs will look completely different in five to 10 years. Time to upskill and learn new technologies!!!!
• Microsoft wasn’t the only cloud provider to experience at outage at the end of July—AWS had connectivity issues for a day, preventing customers from accessing storage, databases, and other services. The guest contributor who wrote this article asked if this dependency on two clouds calls for a plan B, and lucky for him, he’s a man and doesn’t have to think about equitable access. OH YOU MEAN THE OTHER PLAN B…right right, yes, let’s get on that. 
• Where was Microsoft’s “the customer is not always right” mentality when I was a waitress? Delta’s CEO, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike exchanged some WORDS over July’s outage. Microsoft and CrowdtSrike are blaming Delta for its slow recovery, saying the airline refused Microsoft’s help. Delta is like “We don’t need your help, also, we hate you and this is your fault.” 
• Last year, Nokia and AWS decided to collaborate. Well, they collaborated a little too hard because now AWS is suing Nokia for stealing patented intellectual property. I almost never say this, but this article about the conflict is great from start to finish, and involves rowing teams beating each other with oars, a “criminal pivot” for a business strategy, and German indifference. Thanks Iain Morris.  

World domination 

• The US government is doing its darndest to keep advanced chips and other AI capabilities out of the hands of China, but as Jeff Goldblum’s character states in Jurassic Park, nature finds a way—and that way is AWS. They are exploiting a loophole in which Chinese companies can access technology like NVIDIA A100 chips through cloud providers who are fully allowed to operate in the country (or, through intermediary companies). But this velociraptor has figured out how to have babies y’all. 
• Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service achieved FedRAMP certification, which means some federal agencies now have permission to use it for sensitive datasets. The IRS started with the prompt, “Show me everyone who is not paying their taxes,” which yielded a list of extremely wealthy individuals. So, they adjusted the prompt to say “Compile a list of poor souls who make under $30k a year and were late filing by two days so we can rain hellfire upon them without fear of them being able to afford an accountant.” 
  • That FedRAMP certification came just in time for Microsoft and Palantir to sell cloud-enabled AI and data analytics to US defense and intelligence agencies. 
• AWS is talking to UK regulators like they lied about doing their homework. The cloud provider is “disappointed in [the investigation]” of the AWS-Anthropic relationship, claiming it is in no way anti-competitive, along with calls to “end the probe” like it’s being abducted by a UFO or something. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• A hacker group is exploiting vulnerabilities in Azure subdomains to spread disinformation on Android phones via push alerts that lead users to fake news sites. My favorite part about this story is that the fake news was about—wait for it—Harry Connick Jr. Don’t they want people to actually click on the links? No offense to HCJ, but WGAF? 
• Just two weeks after the famed CrowdStrike update outage, Microsoft experienced another global outage due to a cyberattack that affected Outlook, Azure, and Minecraft. Office workers and middle school nerds everywhere were distraught. The 10-hour downtime was the result of a DDoS attack and Microsoft’s “failure to properly defend against it.” Does everybody remember the recent Microsoft announcement that executive bonuses would be tied to security performance? Looks like you’re not getting that boat this year, David. 
• At its annual conference in Vegas, Black Hat discovered six critical vulnerabilities (they didn’t get the memo that that should have stayed in Vegas). Is AWS trying to be like Microsoft with all these security headlines? AWS, just be yourself. You don’t need to Single White Female your competitor, it’s OK, we like you for YOU. 
  • But then, attackers were able to grab AWS keys and access tokens in a data extortion campaign, as uncovered by Networks’ Unit 42 arm. 
• Is there anything more ironic (or, iconic) than an infected health bot? Privilege escalation flaws in Azure’s cloud-based AI Health Bot Service allowed unauthorized access to customers’ resources via a malicious attack. When users asked what they should do about a health problem, such as a rash, the health bot responded “Put a bird on it” 100% of the time (that was for my fellow Portlandia lovers only). A research engineer at cybersecurity firm Tenable says this is what happens when AI development is rushed. 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• AWS is going to power GE HealthCare’s generative AI models via Amazon Bedrock, with the aim of improving patient care. Honestly, the bar for good healthcare is so low in this country that you could put an extra garbage can in the exam room and I’d call that improving patient care. 
• I guess Leeds Teaching Hospital in England wants to put a bird on everything now that it has moved entirely to Azure.
• Telecoms company Lumen Technologies is using Azure to drive AI adoption and innovation. In return, Microsoft will use Lumen’s Private Connectivity Fabric to strengthen connectivity capabilities among Microsoft data centers. 
• More than half of Y Combinator startups are accepting Microsoft’s cloud credits initiative, which aims to get promising young companies to build on Azure. 

New stuff  

• As AWS wins new clients in the public sector, it has decided to expand its cohort of government tech suppliers. The AWS Champions Program highlights vendors and public agencies who use AWS for civic advancement.  
• Microsoft Teams has a new app that unifies your personal and work accounts. Sounds…like…a great…idea… 
• Mithra, which sounds like some angry Greek goddess, is the newest platform from AWS. The CIO went on to explain what it does “in simplest terms” but it was not, in fact, the simplest terms, so figure it out for yourself. 
• Oracle has an official partnership with Microsoft but doesn’t yet offer its MySQL Heatwave for Azure. However, Oracle just announced it has made the database service available on AWS despite no official partnership with the cloud provider. MySQL Heatwave itself runs on AWS. 

Professional Pivots 

• Microsoft welcomed its new AI Transformation Officer, Pamela Maynard, formerly CEO of Avanade. 

Best Friends Forever 

New to Azure Marketplace: 

• Ivanti, which sounds like a cheap clothing brand that’s trying to pass for Italian high fashion, will help Microsoft customers break down barriers between IT and security. 
• iiDENTIFii, a company that apparently never wants to be Googled properly, is bringing its biometric identity authentication to Azure Marketplace. 
• Lumifi has added its managed detection and response services 
• Pathlock Cloud, which offers identity governance solutions, is on Azure Marketplace 
• Mobile device management company Jamf became a Microsoft Partner and will enter Azure Marketplace later this year.’

New to AWS Marketplace:  

• MicroStrategy ONE for Government, a managed SaaS solution for data security and governance 
• Versium’ REACH APIs (dang, y’all don’t have to yell), a data enrichment and cleansing tool 
• Veritone’s enterprise AI solutions for media and entertainment companies 
• LastPass, a password and identity management solution 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Julianne Medenblik

Years ago, Mollie was perusing the selection at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company when she noticed an interesting neon sign logo across the street. She’d never heard of this elusive “2A” before, so she pulled out her phone to look it up. 

It was love at first Google, so she applied for a job. But it wasn’t to be—the position had just been filled. She left an impression though, and when a job opened up later, 2A reached out to her. But it was not to be (again)—she had already accepted another job. Eventually, the stars aligned, and Mollie took on freelance work with us until moving to a full-time position as one of our newest storytellers.  

Rewind 15 years and the scene is a bit different. After graduating from college with a degree that focused on creative writing and marketing (dream combo!), Mollie felt an unexpected calling that she couldn’t deny: to run a funeral home. “Growing up, I was always the morbid kid,” Mollie said. “And this was a way for me to pair my curiosity about death with my desire to help others.” While she was determined to get into the business, she soon discovered that the male-dominated industry wouldn’t afford a young woman any apprenticeships. Shut out, she put it in her back pocket and moved on to her next adventure.  

Cut to a short stint in nursing school (hey, it’s good to know what you don’t want), and then a move to California, where Mollie found herself copywriting for a school library. Running promotions for the library’s events helped her discover an interest in—and talent for—marketing. This led to positions at marketing agencies where she wrote for many industries, including healthcare.  

Did we mention that Mollie was freelancing as a journalist on the side? The woman has hustle.  

It was only after earning her Master of Fine Arts degree at Bennington College (for which she still writes articles and social media posts) that she landed in Seattle. Which brings us back to Elliott Bay books. 

Mollie describes her path to 2A as zigzagged, which is so much more interesting than a straight line. And at every step, she’s brought the depths of her creativity with her. When she isn’t telling our clients’ stories by day, she’s writing her own by night. An author of both fiction and nonfiction, she recently completed an object lessons book about the saxophone and is refining a collection of personal essays. In addition to writing, Mollie enjoys cross-stitching. But not in a zigzag.