177: The Cloud Pod Hopes That Amazon Knows the Three Laws of iRobots

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team gets judicial on the Microsoft-Unity partnership. Plus: Amazon acquires iRobot, BigQuery boasts Zero-ETL for Bigtable data, and Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks is in public preview. 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

• iRobot signs an agreement with Amazon for its acquisition. To what end remains known to Amazon and Amazon alone.
• Google offers a Zero-ETL approach for Bigtable data analytics using BigQuery.
• Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks is now in public preview.

Top Quotes  

• “Almost all of Amazon’s big acquisitions have always been about something indirect. The Whole Foods acquisition was really about the logistics supply chain behind the scenes of moving that around — they kept the brand … and they have the same footprint for stores … but now they have a lot more infrastructure for AmazonFresh. And I suspect for iRobot it’s the same thing.”
• “This is super handy for huge datasets where you want to track trends over a long time. It’s always really difficult and you always end up compromising somewhere — by not loading or querying your full dataset, because you can’t get it from A to B, or trying to run the query against two separate data sets and combining the results. So this is a nice thing to have for those users who have data across these multiple places.”

AWS: We, Robots

• Those who hate working in Amazon warehouses might not have to have anything to complain about anymore, as Amazon agrees to acquire iRobot.
• If you need to get up to speed with Graviton, you’ve now got Graviton Fast Start, which helps move workloads over to AWS.
• VMware’s interesting cloud workload protection feels like a continued diversification away from virtualization as your main revenue stream.
• CloudWatch Evidently, Amazon’s second product to help with feature flagging, adds support for creating target customer segments for feature launches and experiments. Neat!
• In what seems like a cost-saving announcement, Lambda gets tiered pricing (but most enterprise customers already have this pricing experience).

GCP: It’s A Big World Out There

• You can now benefit from a Zero-ETL approach for Bigtable data analytics using BigQuery.
• An on-premises Windows workload nice-to-have offers support with Certificate Authority Service.
• Second generation