The Cloud Pod | Weekly AI & Cloud News on AWS, Azure & GCP

This week on the podcast, Justin, Jonathan and Ryan are joined by Matt Kohn and can be found chatting about all things microservices and containers – including new Security Copilot features. In our cloud journeys, we discuss just what defines a microservice (spoiler: the guys actually agree for once) and whether or not those microservices require containers. Also on the agenda, IS Kubernetes the new Monolith? News this Week: @4:00 – HashiCorp has announced quite a few updates for Terraform, including a number of innovations for the cloud version. This includes: -A *new version of the UI (*not actually new if you use the cloud version) and a new cross organizational provider, which will allow users to share via a private registry across an organization. -They introduced Projects, which will give the ability to organize workspaces and ownership boundaries within Terraform. -An Auth update will give enhanced integration between Terraform and GitHub.com -But wait, there’s more from HashiCorp! Among the updates is a new and improved pipeline model called the TFE Taskworker. This will let Terraform offer features like OPA support, dynamic provider credentials, and drift detection. From Justin: “And OPA is exactly what you thought – they’re getting rid of Sentinel. No. They’re not. They’re giving you OPA AND Sentinel so you can use either/or or both of them.” Terraform Enterprise adds projects, drift detection, and more AWS @7:57 In AWS News – We discussed a few weeks ago the new app migration service from AWS; well, they’ve added three new features! -Import/Export: You can use the App Migration Service to import source environment inventory list from a CSV file (snazzy!) as well as exporting that same data for reporting purposes, offline reviews, and update integration. – New dashboard for server migration metrics and added 8 additional predefined actions, such as converting licenses to Amazon licensing. – ALB’s now support TLS 1.3 (Did anyone else realize they hadn’t already offered that update?) Matt: “I think what scares me more is the Windows update version; they have a runbook that will just do the upgrade for you. I feel like that **definitely** will never end well.” AWS Application Migration Service Major Updates: Import and Export Feature, Source Server Migration Metrics Dashboard, and Additional Post-Launch Actions GCP @14:04 – Nothing of interest from GCP this week. Still trying to get Bard to work, go figure. Google recently discussed their “shared agenda for sensible AI progress” which is essentially an “if you can’t beat ‘em – regulate ‘em” ideology. SIDENOTE: Weird Amazon returns policies SIDENOTE: AI Startup Replika – it goes where you think it does. (Hint: Where the internet ALWAYS goes.) Azure @ 20:19 – Moving on to Azure – Microsoft’s inaugural Security event says they are “bringing the power of AI to security” but *are* they? The announcement doesn’t tell us much, but it essentially marries GPT to Security Copilot. But is this really a product they need to be selling? The guys discuss what GOOD AI integration would look like for InfoSec. Ryan: “I can’t get the image out of my head of Clippy wearing a badge saying ‘Would you like to open a Sev1 incident’?” Justin: “Just because you have the big partnership with Open AI for billions of dollars doesn’t mean every one of your products has to get AI in a b

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the new Amazon Linux 2023, Google Bard, new features of Google Chronicle Security Operations, GPT-4 from Azure Open AI, and Oracle&#8217;s Kubernetes platform comparison. They also talk about cloud-native architecture as a way to adapt applications for a pivot to the cloud. 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 AWS: Amazon announces General Availability of Amazon Linux 2023. GCP: New capabilities available on Google Chronicle Security Operations Azure: Azure announces preview of GPT-4 in Azure Open AI Service. Oracle: Oracle compares its Kubernetes platform with that of Hyperscalers. Top Quotes &#8220;The goal of Cloud Native architecture is to develop scalable resilient ports of applications that you can easily deploy and manage in a modern Cloud environment&#8221; &#8220;You maximize the benefits of the platform you&#8217;re on and you minimize the weaknesses of it when you design for that platform&#8221; &#8220;There&#8217;s nothing that prevents you from going to the cloud if you&#8217;re not cloud-native, I just think you don&#8217;t get the advantages of the cloud native and what the cloud brings to you&#8221; AWS: Amazon announces General Availability of Amazon Linux 2023. Amazon Linux 2023, a Cloud-Optimized Linux Distribution with Long-Term Support This third generation of Amazon Linux Distributions includes security policies to apply the common industry guidelines. GCP: New capabilities available on Google Chronicle Security Operations. 0&#x20e3; Chronicle Security Operations Feature Roundup These New features enable a speedy response to threats. Azure: Azure announces preview of GPT-4 in Azure Open AI Service. 0&#x20e3; Introducing GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service As billing starts on the 1st of April, customers can begin harnessing Open AI&#8217;s most advanced model. Oracle: Oracle compares its Kubernetes platform with that of Hyperscalers. 0&#x20e3; Kubernetes cloud cost comparison: Who provides the best value? They highlight both serverless and managed K8 services and compare some specific services offered by both. The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Native Architecture. Cloud-Native architecture is an approach to building and running applications that use Cloud computing principles and technologies. Some benefits are scalability, reduced time to market, better utilization of resources, integrated management and monitoring as well as efficiency with large or small-scale work. While it is possible to move to the cloud without being cloud-native, the benefits may be reduced and there are no provisions for the typical challenges in the cloud space. <h

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team discusses Amazon Pi Day, Google&#8217;s upcoming I/O conference, the agricultural data manager by Microsoft, and the downturn in net profits of Oracle. They also round up cloud migrations by highlighting tools from different cloud service providers that are useful for the process. 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 AWS: Amazon celebrates Pi Day with live twitch streams. GCP: Google announces their I/O conference to take place near their headquarters in Mountain View. Azure:To increase global food production, Microsoft has created an agricultural data manager. Oracle: Net income for Oracle this quarter dropped to 1.9 billion. Top Quotes &#8220;It&#8217;s been the thorn in the side of every migration I&#8217;ve been a part of… &#8216;how are we going to operate FTP securely in the cloud?&#8221; &#8220;It is not about where you are in the future to Amazon, it&#8217;s about where you are today… that&#8217;s why Google and Azure have some success seen as Amazon because they come in and they realize the true long-term value of the customer not the immediate short-term value of the Amazon approach&#8221; AWS: Amazon celebrates Pi Day with live twitch streams. Celebrate Amazon S3’s 17th birthday at AWS Pi Day 2023 They also announced 7 new capabilities across their data services. GCP: Google announces their I/O conference to take place near their headquarters in Mountain View. 0&#x20e3; Google I/O 2023 developer conference to kick off on May 10 The full agenda will be published in the next few weeks. Azure: To increase global food production, Microsoft has created an agricultural data manager. 0&#x20e3; Announcing Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture: Accelerating innovation across the agriculture value chain With the rising rate of hunger, this manager will provide solutions by maximizing agricultural data. Oracle: Net income for Oracle this quarter dropped to 1.9 billion. 0&#x20e3; Oracle’s stock heads south on revenue shortfall Despite the drop, and the gap from other cloud providers, they only slightly missed Wall Street expectations. The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Migration Tools. The final part of Cloud Migrations Migrations; cloud tools to help with your migration. AWS has the highest amount of tools for cloud migrations; GCP and Azure also have some useful tools, but the least is OCI Foghorn Consulting can help clients with planning out their migration program. Oth

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team talks about the new AWS region in Malaysia, the launch of AWS App Composer, the expansion of spanner database capabilities, the release of a vision AI by Microsoft; Florence Foundation Model, and the three migration techniques to the cloud space. 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 AWS: AWS announces upcoming region in Malaysia. GCP: Google launches new capabilities to Spanners regional and multi-regional capabilities Azure: The Florence Foundation Model from Microsoft.. Top Quotes &#8220;I think that these migration projects end up getting sort of pigeonholed over time into things that they&#8217;re not&#8221; &#8220;The reality is like &#8216;What are you really trying to get out of your migration for the business?&#8221; &#8220;The hybrid migration model lets you realize the benefits of cloud incrementally as you go&#8221; AWS: AWS announces upcoming region in Malaysia. AWS Region in Malaysia This region is expected to have 3 AZ&#8217;s but there is no timeline for when it will come online GCP: Google launches new capabilities to Spanner’s regional and multi-regional capabilities. 0&#x20e3; Rapidly expand the reach of Spanner databases with read-only replicas and zero-downtime moves These include Configurable read-only replicas, Spanner&#8217;s zero-downtime instance, and the more affordable cost of multi-regional configurations. Azure: The Florence Foundation Model from Microsoft. 0&#x20e3; Announcing a renaissance in computer vision AI with Microsoft&#8217;s Florence foundation model This new vision AI helps customers connect their data to natural language interactions to gain insights from their image and video resources. The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Migration Techniques There are three Migration Techniques; Hybrid, Cloud Native, and VMWare Migrations. One common mistake people make is believing they won&#8217;t get value from the migration till it is completed. Generally, it may be hard to decide which is the most successful because this depends on the definition of success as applied to individual businesses. Other Headlines Mentioned: AWS Application Composer Now Generally Available – Visually Build Serverless Applications Quickly Subscribe to AWS Daily Feature Updates via Amazon SNS Azure WAF guide

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team talks about the possible replacement of CEO Sundar Pichai after Alphabet stock went up by just 1.9%, the new support feature of Amazon EKS for Kubernetes, three partner specializations just released by Google, and how clients have responded to the AI Powered Bing and Microsoft Edge. 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 AWS: The new Amazon EKS release: the &#8220;combiner&#8221;. GCP: Google rolls out new partner specializations Azure: Microsoft releases AI-Powered Bing and Microsoft Edge. Top Quotes &#8220;It&#8217;s always going to be a race for these cloud providers to manage every software, in general, to stay up to date because it&#8217;s challenging&#8221; AWS: The new Amazon EKS release: the &#8220;combiner&#8221;.. Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.25 The most notable change in version 1.25 is the removal of Pod Security Policies PSPs. GCP: Google rolls out new partner specializations. 0&#x20e3; Three new Specializations help partners digitally transform customers These new specializations are Datacenter modernization services, DevOps services and Contact Center AI services. Azure: Microsoft releases AI-Powered Bing and Microsoft Edge. 0&#x20e3; The new Bing preview experience arrives on Bing and Edge Mobile apps; introducing Bing now in Skype With positive feedback, they will be launching the Bing and Edge mobile apps. Other Headlines Mentioned: Alphabet Needs to Replace Sundar Pichai Announcing Amazon ECS Task Definition Deletion New – Amazon Lightsail for Research with All-in-One Research Environments Microsoft Azure innovation powers leading price-performance for SQL Server AWS Security Hub launches 7 new security best practice controls AWS App Runner introduces web application firewall (WAF) support for enhanced security <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/02/aws-sam-connectors-multiple-destinations/" target="

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the AWS systems manager default enablement option for all EC2 instances in an account, different ideas from leveraging innovators plus subscription using $500 Google credits, the Azure Open Source Day, the new theme for the Oracle OCI Console, and lastly, different ways to migrate to a cloud provider. 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 AWS: AWS systems manager has a new default enablement option for all EC2 instances. GCP: Leveraging the innovators plus subscription to create ideas on how to use Google cloud credits. Azure: About Azure Open Source Day Oracle: Oracle redesigns OCI Console UI Top Quotes &#8220;There&#8217;s a lot to understand about your product and the way it works before you can even think about a cloud migration&#8221; &#8220;In the cloud, we always tell to plan for failure&#8221; &#8220;If you&#8217;re selling to your business the need to innovate… and you&#8217;re going to move on a cloud journey, then you need to actually deliver on those things&#8221; AWS: AWS systems manager has a new default enablement option for all EC2 instances Announcing the ability to enable AWS Systems Manager by default across all EC2 instances in an account Using DHMC, core system manager capabilities are now available to all EC2 instances in an account. GCP: Leveraging the innovators plus subscription to create ideas on how to use Google cloud credits 0&#x20e3; What would you build with $500 in Google Cloud credits included with Innovators Plus The innovators plus subscription offers $500 in credits and vouchers for certification. Azure: About Azure Open Source Day 0&#x20e3; 7 reasons to join us at Azure Open Source Day This virtual event will take place on the 7th of March from 9 to 10:30. Join the Azure Collective on Stack Overflow Oracle: Oracle redesigns OCI Console UI 0&#x20e3; Introducing Redwood Theming for Oracle Cloud Although the changes are cosmetic, usability enhancements are expected. . The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Migrations Cloud migration means moving your workload to a cloud provider, and the first part of this journey is the discovery phase. After inventory and assessment, the next step is to decide exactly how to move to the cloud which can be any one of five methods. It is imperative to consider your products and existing operational processes when migrating to a cloud provider.. Other Headlines Mentioned: <a href="https://awsteele.com/blog/2

EKS on Snow Devices On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team highlights the new Graviton3-based images for users of AWS, new ways provided by Google to pay for its cloud services, the new partnership between Azure and the Finops Foundation, as well as Oracle&#8217;s new cloud banking, and the automation of CCOE. 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 AWS: Users now have access to the new Graviton3-based images. GCP: Google provides new ways to pay for Google Cloud Service. Azure: Microsoft becomes a premier member of the Governing board at the Finops Foundation. Oracle: Oracle introduces Oracle Banking Cloud Services Top Quotes &#8220;It&#8217;s important to sort of have that structure; even if you&#8217;re starting with a single account or project, you want to make sure you&#8217;re building something that can grow to multiples as you keep it&#8221; &#8220;There&#8217;s lots of things that you want to probably be automating; all the policies, all the governance, how you validate membership… that should all be really thought about from an automation perspective from day one&#8221; AWS: Users now have access to the new Graviton3-based images. New Graviton3-Based General Purpose (m7g) and Memory-Optimized (r7g) Amazon EC2 Instances The new M7g and R7g come in medium to 16xlarge. GCP: Google provides new ways to pay for Google Cloud Service. 0&#x20e3; Introducing new cloud services and pricing for ultimate flexibility Flex Agreements and Flexible Cuds were also announced in relation to this. Azure: Microsoft becomes a premier member of the Governing board at the Finops Foundation. 0&#x20e3; Microsoft joins the FinOps Foundation Azure hopes to define specifications and help evolve best practices globally Oracle: Oracle introduces Oracle Banking Cloud Services. 0&#x20e3; Redefining Banking SaaS—Introducing Oracle Banking Cloud Services Their approach is defined by 9 core elements related to security, resilience, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and others. . The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) This final installment of CCOE focuses on automating the CCOE and tracking CCOE metrics for adoption. Tagging is a crucial part of the security, access, or cost management strategy, which should be developed early, and as such cloud resources should be retrofitted for it and older ones should be tagged. One of the ways for a CCOE to demonstrate its value through automation is the metrics of adoption. Other Headlines Mentioned: <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/announcing-general-availability-of-amaz

AI Products &amp; Earnings On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team talks about the announcement of Amazon VPC resource map, Google&#8217;s new AI product, the new Bing AI-powered search engine, and why multiple accounts are necessary for data centers to carry out work seamlessly in the cloud. 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 AWS: AWS announces Amazon VPC resource map GCP: Sundar introduces Google&#8217;s new AI product, Google Bard. Azure: Microsoft announces the resurgence of Bing now powered by Open AI and Edge browser. Top Quotes &#8220;How was Google the first one to start looking into AI and still be late to the market?&#8221; &#8220;That&#8217;s why you have a center of excellence; they&#8217;re positioned centrally to be able to orchestrate all the different moving parts and be able to facilitate the communication between all the different projects and parts of not only your business but also your cloud provider&#8217;s business as well&#8221; &#8220;I think it&#8217;s important to not try to answer the next ten years of problems but also to try to build in circuit breakers or flexibility into your designs so that you can quickly adapt&#8221; AWS: AWS announces Amazon VPC resource map. New – Visualize Your VPC Resources from Amazon VPC Creation Experience This feature shows users their existing VPC resources and routing on a single page in order to simplify VPC creation on AWS. GCP: Sundar introduces Google&#8217;s new AI product, Google Bard. 0&#x20e3; An important next step on our AI journey It is a conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, being made available to trusted testers before the public. Azure: Microsoft announces the resurgence of Bing now powered by Open AI and Edge browser. 0&#x20e3; Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge, your copilot for the web The new Bing search engine will include a new chat experience and better search with complete answers, as well as other features. The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) The complexity of the workload being managed at data centers makes multiple accounts imperative for ease of processing. Despite the evolution in projects and accounts, there are some poorly thought out aspects, for example, shared VPC. The onus is on cloud users to identify what they need to communicate intrasystem and what they can have in complete isolation. Other Headlines Mentioned: Google suffered ‘pullback’ in ad spending over holidays, Alphabet stock falls after earnings <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-stock-falls-after-earnings-miss-shows-worst-annual-loss-on-record-least-profitable-hol

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the upcoming 2023 in-person Google Cloud conference, the accessibility of AWS CloudTrail Lake for non-AWS activity events, the new updates from Azure Chaos studio, and the comparison between Oracle Cloud service and other Cloud providers. They also highlight the application and importance of VPCs in CCOE. 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 AWS: AWS CloudTrail Lake now allows users to consolidate, immutably store, and analyze activity events from non-AWS sources. GCP: Google Cloud 2023 Next conference will be in-person. Azure: New updates are available in the Azure Chaos studio. Oracle: Oracle creates a page comparing its cloud services with AWS and others. Top Quotes &#8220;A transit gateway effectively is saying we&#8217;re going to let you make multiple VPCs into one VPC, which is awesome&#8221; &#8220;When you&#8217;re designing VPC networking, make sure you&#8217;re aware of the cost involved in cross-zone communication because it&#8217;s not free and it can be quite significant&#8221; AWS: AWS CloudTrail Lake now allows users to analyze activity events from non-AWS sources. New – AWS CloudTrail Lake Supports Ingesting Activity Events From Non-AWS Sources Initially, AWS cloud lake was a service to access, analyze and store user and API activity from AWS as a source, but now users can set up custom events or integrate with other providers. GCP: Google Cloud 2023 Next conference will be in-person. 0&#x20e3; Google Cloud Next This will be the first in-person Next conference since 2019. Azure: New updates are available in the Azure Chaos studio. 0&#x20e3; Chaos studio &#8211; Public preview updates for January 2023 These updates include the availability of dynamic targeting, enabling service tags, VMSS SHutdown 2.0, and others. Oracle: Oracle creates a page comparing its cloud services with AWS and others. 0&#x20e3; Compare cloud services across OCI and other cloud providers, highlighting its equivalents to AWS, Azure and GCP The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) VPC means Virtual Private Cloud and is a service tied to almost every aspect of the cloud, especially in AWS. Security requirements are crucial to consider with VPCs which would include ACLs and VPC Flow Logs. Another consideration for VPCs is connectivity back to your private data center which may be through a VPN connection or a direct connect point-to-point from a third party or your data center into the cloud provider itself. Other Headlines Mentioned: Native OP

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team sits to talk about AWS&#8217;s new patching policies, the general availability of Azure OpenAI, and the role of addressing IM or access management challenges in ensuring the seamless transition to the Cloud. 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 AWS announces new patching policies, Azure OpenAI service is now generally available. IM/Access Management in CCOE&#8230; Top Quotes &#8220;I think it(access management) should be the first challenge that&#8217;s tackled, and I usually try to approach it as such but it&#8217;s also sort of hard to do when it starts off as an experiment…and you have to retrofit it in” AWS: Announcement of new patching policies AWS Systems Manager announces Patch Policies, enabling cross account and cross Region patching This allows users to deploy policies to enforce patch compliance across their AWS accounts and regions&#8230; Azure: Azure OPN AI service is now generally available. 0&#x20e3; General availability of Azure OpenAI Service expands access to large, advanced AI models with added enterprise benefits 0&#x20e3; This is Close to Jonathan&#8217;s prediction that Azure will launch a ChatGPT service, and more businesses can now access the most advanced AI models with pricing based on the mode of use.. The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) IM or Access management should be the first area people look at and the first challenge to be tackled, while also defining data protection boundaries. CCOE also provides the opportunity to identify activities in production that are unnecessary and should be changed. Permissions are the least important part of your IM journey; permissions change and would need to be evaluated continually. Other Headlines Mentioned: Announcing the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Perth and Santiago AWS Clean Rooms is now available in preview AWS announces changes to AWS Billing, Cost Management, and Account consoles permissions AWS CloudTrail vulnerability: Undocumented API allows CloudTrail bypass EC2 Image Builder adds Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks for security hardening of Amazon Machine Images <a href="https://aws.amazon.com

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon announces massive corporate and tech lay offs and S3 Encrypts New Objects By Default, BigQuery multi-statement transactions are now generally available, and Microsoft announces acquisition of Fungible to accelerate datacenter innovation. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News: Amazon to lay off 18,000 corporate and tech workers. [1:11] Episode Highlights Amazon S3 Encrypts New Objects By Default. [3:09] Announcing the GA of BigQuery multi-statement transactions. [13:04] Microsoft announces acquisition of Fungible to accelerate datacenter innovation. [17:14] Top Quote “And it&#8217;s interesting that, you know, the way they&#8217;re phrasing this where it&#8217;s, you know, it&#8217;s it&#8217;s moving these traditional things that have been in relational databases for a long time, but it&#8217;s the it&#8217;s the, the analytical, sort of big data sort of offerings, and it&#8217;s interesting to see how that transforms over time.” [15:16] AWS Amazon S3 Encrypts New Objects By Default. [3:09] AWS App Runner now integrates with AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. [8:26] GCP Announcing the GA of BigQuery multi-statement transactions. [13:04] Azure Azure Confidential Computing on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors with Intel TDX. [15:38] Microsoft announces acquisition of Fungible to

For our New Years Resolution, we decided to change some of our show. First, we have cut the lightning round in favor of our new Cloud Journey series, where we will talk about core cloud concepts over several episodes. We are also covering only the larger stories from the cloud providers, we still want to provide you with all of the news, so you&#8217;ll find it in the show notes; if you enjoy the aggregation, subscribe to our newsletter to get the show notes to get your mailbox weekly. Share your feedback through our website or join our slack team. On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team follows up on the news from Salesforce&#8217;s last episode, as workforce cuts ensue as a fallout of the noted decline in productivity, with more on 2023 predictions from Peter, including general expectations in the tech space, while also highlighting the new Graph-explorer tool by Amazon Neptune, GCP security trends for the coming year, the CES Conference and CCOE from the new Cloud Journey Series. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions focused 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 AWS: Amazon Neptune announces a new open-source low-code visual exploration tool, the Graph-explorer. GCP releases an article on security trends to expect in 2023. The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) Top Quotes &#8220;A lot of traditional security operations has been at the infrastructure level; tracking packets and using the header information of those packets for identification, and none of that really works on cloud anymore&#8221; &#8220;It&#8217;s not just how to use cloud technology, which is what the IT teams were focused on, it&#8217;s how do you provide the value of cloud into your business and succeed?&#8221; &#8220;Understanding the advantages of why you want to adopt Cloud is really important for a business, even before they start the CCOE&#8221; Follow up: After discussing Salesforce and their &#8220;less productive&#8221; employees a few weeks ago, Salesforce has followed up by laying off 10% of their workforce. After missing last week’s episode, Peter shares his 2023 prediction; The recession will be more severe than expected, resulting in significant layoffs as companies are forced to get more competitive with automated solutions. Peter’s favorite announcement for 2022; Aurora Serverless V2 5 things to look out for in tech Five Things to Watch in Tech 2023 Big Changes ahead in 2023 for big tech with poor valuations, justifying their software against slashing budgets and the next big thing; is it AI, AR, VR? AWS: Amazon Neptune announces Graph-explorer <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/01/neptune-graph-exp

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team wraps up 2022 so far, comparing predictions made with the events so far while projecting into 2023 as the year comes to a close. They discuss the S3 security changes coming from Amazon, the new control plane connectivity options with GCP, and Microsoft&#8217;s achievement, finally topping a list within the cloud space. 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 Starting in April, Amazon will change defaults around S3 security. The new control plane connectivity and isolation options are coming to GKE clusters Finally, Microsoft is Number #1 In a Cloud Thing. Salesforce Founder, Marc Benioff says employees hired during the pandemic are facing much lower productivity. Open AI&#8217;s new chat AI and AI playground create much buzz but with high compute costs, it will be monetized soon. A lookback at 2022 predictions by our hosts, none of which came true. The team gives 2023 predictions surrounding Microsoft, data Sovereignty and AI and No-code solution convergence Top Quotes &#8220;The problem with low-code No-code… is that the gap between those solutions and the bespoke development that you typically would meet is mountains of distance but with this [Open AI&#8217;s new chat AI] ..now I just have to tell the computer what I&#8217;m trying to do…and then the computer can determine what type of code to write for that&#8221; 2023 Predictions Jonathan: Microsoft will release in preview of an Azure branded Chat GPT Justin: Data Sovereignty will drive single panes of glass against multi-cloud Ryan: An influx of all of the AI and No-Code solution convergence Favorite Announcements Ryan Announcing Amazon CodeCatalyst, a Unified Software Development Service (Preview) Announcing new workflow observability features for AWS Step Functions Source Protect for Cloud Code gives developers real-time security feedback as they work in their IDEs #46 Justin Accelerate Your Lambda Functions with Lambda SnapStart Microsoft announces new collaboration with Red Button for attack simulation testing Google + Mandiant: Transforming Security Operations and Incident Response Raising the bar in Security Operations: Google Acquires Siemplify Jonathan <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-vpc-lat

On The Cloud Pod the team reviews the multi-billion-dollar DOD contract formerly known as Jedi awarded to big tech companies; Microsoft buys a stake in LSE, raising questions; Werner shares his 2023 tech predictions and posts the Distributed Computing manifesto to his blog; and lastly, at Azure, Bell hits bumps while trying to make Microsoft safer. 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 The Pentagon awards a cloud-computing contract that can reach up to $9 billion in total through 2028 to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. Microsoft buys 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange AWS: Werner posts the Distributed Computing Manifesto to his blog All Things Distributed and shares his 2023 tech predictions. GCP: Break down data silos with the new cross-cloud transfer feature of BigQuery Omni Azure: Bell hits obstacles in his push to make Microsoft more secure as feedback suggests the bar is being set too high. Top Quotes &#8220;The long and the short of it is that slowly over time, the ship date when buying something on Amazon or anywhere else gets closer to real-time and the cost to get it to you gets lower&#8221; “All software has defects since it’s created and configured by humans, [But] the pattern of security incidents [and] defects in Azure reported by third parties and the related severity suggests that even Microsoft is challenged in adopting proper security controls in cloud-native development pipelines, like many enterprises.” AWS: ALL THINGS DISTRIBUTED – WERNER VOGELS’ BLOG Werner posted the Distributed Computing Manifesto to his blog “All Things Distributed”. The manifesto highlights the challenges Amazon was facing at the end of the 20th century, and hints at where it was headed. He also shared his 2023 tech predictions on the blog involving cloud technology, simulated worlds, silicone chips supply chain transformation, and smart energy.. GCP: Break down data silos with the new cross-cloud transfer feature of BigQuery Omni 0&#x20e3; GCP launched big query Omni in 2021 to help customers break down data silos. They have now added support for SQL-supported Load Statements that allowed AWS/Azure Blob data to be brought into big query as a managed table for advanced analysis. Feedback confirms improvements in usability, security, latency, and cost audibility. Azure: Bell hits obstacles in his push to make Microsoft more secure. After spending 23 years at Amazon, Charlie Bell, the most senior cybersecurity executive now at Microsoft, faces resistance to preventing and responding to software vulnerabilities believing that he was setting the bar too high. If there are flaws in the software they write that leads to vulnerabilities for downtime, developers in bell’s unit can expect to be paged and asked to fix it. This is long-standing practice at AWS but a new concept at Micr

The Cloud Pod recaps all of the positives and negatives of Amazon ReInvent 2022, the annual conference in Las Vegas, bringing together 50,000 cloud computing professionals. This year&#8217;s keynote speakers include Adam Selpisky, CEO of Amazon Web Services, Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Data and Machine Learning at AWS and Werner Vogels, Amazon&#8217;s CTO. Attendees and web viewers were treated to new features and products, such as AWS Lambda Snapstart for Java Functions, New Quicksight capabilities and quality-of-life improvements to hundreds of services. Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, Peter and Special guest Joe Daly from the Finops foundation talk about the show and the announcements. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights AWS Pricing Calculator now supports modernization cost estimates for Microsoft workloads. AWS Re:Invent 2022 announcements and keynote updates. Top Quote “But if I&#8217;m putting my business data into another data lake, and I want to use the business data to inform my security data, I now have to cross the lakes to even make this connection to get that data set. So I agree with you on a pure security basis in the open schema for security data is really great. My issue is that you&#8217;re putting borders around these lakes, when you really want to bring the data together and be able to hydrate across. That&#8217;s why we have enterprise data, we analyze data warehouses, where we have all these things to bring this data together, add context to data. And I feel like this is just more removing context.” [37:20] AWS: Amazon Goes to India AWS Pricing Calculator now supports modernization cost estimates for Microsoft workloads. [1:39] Introducing Finch: An open source client for container development. [3:19] AWS opens its 30th region in India. [4:51] New for AWS backup: Protect and restore CloudFormation stacks. [5:57] Amazon ECS Service Connect enabling easy communication between microservices. [7:31] REINVENT RECAP DAY 1 KEYNOTE: Peter DeSantis [19:11] Compute [19:42] Announcing AWS Lambda SnapStart for Java functions. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/11/announcing-amazon-ec2-c7gn-instances-preview/" target="_blank" rel="noo

RE:INVENT NOTICE Jonathan, Ryan and Justin will be live streaming the major keynotes starting Monday Night, followed by Adam&#8217;s keynote on Tuesday, Swami&#8217;s keynote on Wednesday and Wrap up our Re:Invent coverage with Werner&#8217;s keynote on Thursday. Tune into our live stream here on the site or via Twitch/Twitter, etc. On The Cloud Pod this week, a new AWS region is open in Spain and NBA and Microsoft team up to transform fan experiences with cloud application modernization. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News [0:04] CDK for Terraform 0.14 Makes it Easier to Use Providers Episode Highlights New AWS region open in Spain. NBA and Microsoft team up to transform fan experiences with cloud application modernization. Top Quote “When we set this up, they still called you by voice and you had to validate when it took up to an hour to support case. And yeah, it would take forever. Like, not only did it take you to an hour, there&#8217;s like 10 things you needed to do with a root account that you couldn&#8217;t do with an im account. Yeah, it was brutal back then.” [9:27] AWS: Amazon Goes to Spain New AWS region open in Spain. [2:00] You can now assign multiple MFA devices in IAM. [2:32] Announcing AWS CDK Support and CodeBuild Provisioning for AWS Proton. [6:16] Introducing the AWS Proton dashboard. [6:16] Incident Manager from AWS Systems Manager launches incident coordination capabilities for Incident Response. [7:00] Announcing enhanced operational incident response capabilities with AWS Systems Manager and PagerDuty. [7:21] AWS announces Amazon WorkSpaces Multi-Region Resilience. [7:56] <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/11/amazon-workspaces-certificate-based-authent

RE:INVENT NOTICE Jonathan, Ryan and Justin will be live streaming the major keynotes starting Monday Night, followed by Adam&#8217;s keynote on Tuesday, Swami&#8217;s keynote on Wednesday and Wrap up our Re:Invent coverage with Werner&#8217;s keynote on Thursday. Tune into our live stream here on the site or via Twitch/Twitter, etc. On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon Time Sync is now available over the internet as a public NTP service, Amazon announces ECS Task Scale-in protection, and Private Marketplace is now in preview. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights Amazon Time Sync is now available over the internet as a public NTP service. Amazon announces ECS Task Scale-in protection. Private Marketplace is now in preview. Top Quote “And then those companies say, ‘Well, I don&#8217;t have time to performance tests and regression tests and load tests.’ Or, or, ‘It&#8217;s not broken, I don&#8217;t want to fix it.’ You know, and so they just sit there paying more money because it&#8217;s not worth the risk.” [10:37] AWS: Time for Amazon Amazon announces ECS Task Scale-in protection. [2:05] Amazon Time Sync is now available over the internet as a public NTP service. [4:54] Amazon EC2 Mac instances now support Apple macOS Ventura. [6:14] Amazon RDS now supports General Purpose gp3 storage volumes. [7:49] Amazon EKS supports Kubernetes version 1.24. [10:53] New centralized Logging for Windows Containers on Amazon EKS using Fluent Bit. [15:50] Amazon EC2 announces new price and capacity-optimized allocation strategy for provisioning Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. [16:28] <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/11/aws-backup-restore-vmware-workloads-

On a slow news week, we talk about the new AWS Switzerland region, Googles 2022 State of Devops report and GCP gets those flexible committed use discounts! Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News [4:02] Announcing the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report: A deep dive into security. Episode Highlights Announcing the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report: A deep dive into security. AWS opens a new region–its 28th– in Switzerland GCP unveils flexible committed use discounts. Top Quote “Back when you only had the option of on demand or reserved instances, and you do the math… And if you run the thing, basically more than 40 hours a week, you might as well buy the Ri. You&#8217;re not getting any benefit of scaling anyway, at that point. So this is this is so much better, you get the benefit of committing to an aggregate use and the discount to that with the benefit of turning stuff off when you&#8217;re not using it.” [32:24] AWS: Amazon Isn’t Neutral About Switzerland AWS opens a new region–its 28th– in Switzerland. [19:29] Quickly find resources in your AWS account with new Resource Explorer. [21:55] GCP: Google Is Committed To Their Flexibility Announcing MongoDB connector for Apigee Integration. [24:40] GCP unveils flexible committed use discounts. [28:15] Azure: Azure Needs No Downtime 0&#x20e3; Zero downtime migration for Azure Front Door—now in preview. [33:57] TCP Lightning Round (Justin 8, Ryan 7, Jonathan 4, Peter 0) [35:09] AWS Certificate Manager now supports Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm TLS certificates Amazon ElastiCache adds support for Redis 7 AWS Private 5G service now includes support for multiple radio-units <a href="ht

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon announces Neptune Serverless, Google introduces Google Blockchain Node Engine, and we get some cost management updates from Microsoft. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. General News [1:24] Microsoft surprises with first quarter results Microsoft drops 6% after revealing weak guidance on its earnings call 3&#x20e3; Alphabet announces Q3 results YouTube shrinks Alphabet; company will cut headcount growth by half in Q4 Amazon stock sinks 16% on weak Q4 guidance 3&#x20e3; Amazon announces Q3 results Amazon CFO says tech giant is preparing for ‘what could be a slower growth period’ AWS just recorded its weakest growth to date AWS named as a leader in the 2022 Gartner CIPS Magic Quadrant for the 12th consecutive year Episode Highlights Amazon announces Neptune Serverless. Google introduces Blockchain Node Engine Cost management updates from Microsoft. Top Quote “Google Cloud is an important partner to HashiCorp, and our enterprise customers use HashiCorp Terraform and Google Cloud to deploy mission critical infrastructure at scale. With 70 million downloads of the Terraform Google Provider this year and growing, we’re excited to collaborate closely with Google Cloud to offer our joint customers a seamless experience which we believe will significantly enhance their experience on Google Cloud.” &#8211; Burzin Patel, HashiCorp VP, Global Partner Alliances. [39:38] AWS: Amazon Goes to Neptune Announcing Amazon Neptune Serverless – A fully managed graph database that adjusts capacity for your workloads. [13:15]</l

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances for high-performance model training are now available, 123 new things were announced at Google Cloud Next ‘22, Several new Azure capabilities were announced at Microsoft Ignite, and many new announcements were made at Oracle CloudWorld. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances for high-performance model training are now available. 123 new things were announced at Google Cloud Next ‘22. Several new Azure capabilities were announced at Microsoft Ignite. Many new announcements from Oracle CloudWorld. Top Quote “We are pleased to have co-designed the first ASIC Infrastructure Processing Unit with Google Cloud, which has now launched in the new C3 machine series. A first of its kind in any public cloud, C3 VMs will run workloads on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors while they free up programmable packet processing to the IPUs securely at line rates of 200Gb/s. This Intel and Google collaboration enables customers through infrastructure that is more secure, flexible, and performant.” – Nick McKeown, Senior Vice President, Intel Fellow and General Manager of Network and Edge Group. [35:26] AWS: Increasing Your Large-Scale Distribution Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances for high-performance model training are now available. [1:55] AWS launches new local zones in Taipei and Delhi. [3:29] A new cost explorer console experience was just announced, and it’s Justin approved. [4:26] Amazon Connect Cases is now generally available. [6:40] GCP: What Will They Announce Next? You can now manage storage costs by automatically deleting expired data using Firestore Time-To-Live (TTL). [9:23] 123 new things were ann

Episode 185: The Cloud Pod is flush with Cache! On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon introduces their new file cache for on premises systems, Google introduces GKE Autopilot, and Azure helps you strengthen your security even more. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. &nbsp; Episode Highlights Introducing Amazon File Cache, the new AWS cache for on-premises file systems. Google introduces support for GPU workloads and more in GKE Autopilot. Strengthen your security with Policy Analytics for Azure Firewall. Top Quote “I get the feeling that the multiple tenancy, in a way is probably the selling point here. That as you acquire new companies, or as you bring on new partners dynamically, it&#8217;s easier to integrate those IDPs. Whereas previously, it&#8217;s been pretty difficult to to have multiple sources of identity, I guess it sort of abstracts those and provides a single layer to the Google identity service.” [22:07” General News: We will not be recording during the week of Google Cloud Next, so our episodes will be slightly delayed–fear not, we’re recording an episode immediately after Next so we can deliver your weekly dose of cloud news ASAP. AWS: All About the Cache &nbsp; Introducing Amazon File Cache, the new AWS cache for on-premises file systems. [1:28] Amazon WorkSpaces introduces Ubuntu Desktops, with per month or per hour pricing. [5:35] AWS announces Amazon WorkSpaces Core, their new fully managed VDI service. [11:00] &nbsp; GCP: Put Your Work on Autopilot? &nbsp; Google introduces support for GPU workloads and more in GKE Autopilot. [16:04] You can now easily manage Google Cloud workforce access with Workforce Identity Federation.. [20:37] Azure: Budget Updates on the Go! Strengthen your security with Polic

On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS announces an update to IAM role trust policy behavior, Easily Collect Vehicle Data and Send to the Cloud with new AWS IoT FleetWise, now generally available, Get a head start with no-cost learning challenges before Google Next ‘22. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. &nbsp; Episode Highlights AWS announces an update to IAM role trust policy behavior. Easily Collect Vehicle Data and Send to the Cloud with new AWS IoT FleetWise, now generally available. Get a head start with no-cost learning challenges before Google Next ‘22. &nbsp; General News: Google Next is coming up in two weeks. [0:56] Next week’s show will be sans Justin. [1:02] AWS: More like “Announcement” Web Services &nbsp; Easily Collect Vehicle Data and Send to the Cloud with new AWS IoT FleetWise, now generally available. [1:48] AWS announces an update to IAM role trust policy behavior. [7:00] Sticking with the theme of granularity, Amazon Route 53 announces support for DNS resource record set permissions. [16:29] Amazon announces AWS DataSync Discovery in preview. [18:30] Cloudwatch container insights now provides lifecycle events for ECS. [21:38] &nbsp; GCP: Google Next Is Almost Here! &nbsp; <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/training-certifications/no-cost-google-cloud-learning-cha

On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS Enterprise Support adds incident detection and response, the announcement of Google Cloud Spanner, and Oracle expands to Spain. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights AWS Enterprise Support adds incident detection and response You can now get a 90-day free trial of Google Cloud Spanner Oracle opens its newest cloud infrastructure region in Spain Top Quote “A very large percentage of MySQL HeatWave customers are AWS users who are migrating off Aurora. However, there are still some AWS customers who are not able to migrate to OCI. This is a service where the data plane, control plane and console are natively running on AWS. We have taken the MySQL HeatWave code and optimized it for AWS infrastructure.” &#8211;Nipun Agarwal, senior vice president of MySQL, Database and HeatWave at Oracle. General News: Moving from Ruby to Go, Vagrant 2.3 Introduces Go Runtime. [0:58] AWS: New Proactive Monitoring from AWS AWS Enterprise Support adds incident detection and response. [2:01] Helping to vastly reduce failover times, Amazon RDS Proxy adds support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server. [3:59] Beginning October 11th, ACM public certificates will be issued by one of the Intermediate CA’s that AWS manages. [7:46] AWS has announced direct VPC routing for AWS outposts. [10:23] You can now deploy your Amazon EKS Clusters Locally on AWS Outposts. [12:12] GCP: Free Trial Here! Get Your Free Trial Here! You can now get a 90-day free trial of Google Cloud Spanner. [14:04] If you need a new way to protect your data, try Google introduced fine-grained access control for Cloud Spanner. [14:58] <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/database-migration-service-supports-migration-to-alloydb-for-postgres

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon SWF launches a new console experience, Google acquires Mandiant, and Azure Space has some new products coming your way soon. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights Amazon SWF just launched a new console experience for building distributed applications. The Google acquisition of Mandiant (Mandoogle!) is finished. Azure Space announced their next wave of products. Top Quote “The new certification is sort of interesting, because it&#8217;s a little bit more like the, the content isn&#8217;t new, right? But the certification is new. And so it&#8217;s an interesting metric. Like how do you, how do you ensure people are reviewing the content? You have these certifications that you measure on the completion of that? So like, it&#8217;s, I can see how it&#8217;s a little bit of like, weaponizing, you know, those metrics in order to like drive culture change, maybe within an org where there&#8217;s division over private cloud or public cloud? Or, you know, it just depends on what you want to do. But very interesting.” [17:04] General News: Hashi Corp announced that Consul Terraform Sync is generally available at the 0.7 release. [1:12] AWS: More Like Amazon SWTF? You’ve never heard of it, but Amazon SWF just launched a new console experience for building distributed applications. [4:20] Amazon SNS launches a public preview of message data protection. [6:53] Your containers will now be launching faster, thanks to Seekable OCI for lazy loading container images. [10:00] GCP: Hey Siri, What Is a Mandoogle? Google Cloud Next is less than one month away. Have you registered yet? [12:16] The Cloud Digital Leader certification is bringing Cloud training to those of us who aren’t technically inclined. [14:56] BeyondCorp Enterprise is giving you more ways to protect your corporate applications. [18:45] The <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/google-completes-acquisition-of-mandiant

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon announces Amazon Inspector’s new support of Windows OS for continual software vulnerability scanning of EC2 workloads, Google has several exciting announcements regarding Chronicle, Azure is announcing pretty much everything under the sun, and Oracle announces OCI Lake in beta. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights Amazon Inspector now supports Windows operating system (OS) for continual software vulnerability scanning of EC2 workloads. Google makes 3 announcements about Chronicle. Azure has three–yes, three–new releases this week. Oracle announces OCI Lake in beta. Top Quote “The picture is still opaque of what the real value of this is going to be. But the fact that it&#8217;s out there is good or, you know… it&#8217;s the classic. “I&#8217;m leaving Amazon and I have worked on this code for five years and I like doing open source. So I can keep using it. It can be that classic move.” General News: Gartner published an article indicating that SaaS vendors will be using sustainability as a basis to raise their prices. [0:34] The news out of VMWare this week can basically be summed up as: Tanzu, Tanzu, and more Tanzu. [2:38] AWS: Scanning, scanning, scanning…. Amazon Event Ruler is becoming open source. [10:50] Amazon Inspector now supports Windows operating system (OS) for continual software vulnerability scanning of EC2 workloads. [14:12] GCP: Dear Diary, today I… A Chronicle blog post diary, Google made several announcements [17:09]: There are new ingestion metrics coming to Chronicle. New YARA-L functionalities are coming that will allow you to apply more fine grained time based criteria into your detections. The Chronicle native-VirusTotal augment widget is now available. Azure: New Releases, New Releases Everywhere… Azure Managed Grafana is now generally available. [19:39] Enterprise-ready Azure Monitor change analysis capability released–say that five times fast. [22:03]

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon adds the ability to embed fine-grained visualizations directly onto web pages, Google offers pay-as-you-go pricing for Apigee customers, and Microsoft launches Arm-based Azure VMs that are powered by ampere chips. Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week. Episode Highlights Fine-grained visualizations can now be embedded directly into your webpages and applications Google is now offering pay-as-you-go pricing for its Apigee API customers Microsoft launches Arm-based Azure VMs powered by ampere chips Top Quote “I think I feel like SimCity 2000 lied to me. By now we should have had satellites in space collecting solar power and beaming microwave energy down to us.” General News: Due to concerns about power shortages and availability of supplies, ​​Microsoft and Amazon cancel several new planned data centers in Ireland. [1:18] AWS: Adding Visuals to Your Apps Is Getting Even Easier… Fine-grained visualizations can now be embedded directly into your webpages and applications thanks to Amazon QuickSight. [4:44] Amazon’s announcement of the new AWS Support App for Slack is going to streamline management of technical, billing, and account support cases. [6:24] AWS Security Hub is now publish announcements through Amazon SNS, and anyone can submit via the console or CLI. [8:37] Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports email subscription for SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). [10:37] Amazon CloudFront launches Origin Access Control (OAC), which helps more easily secure S3 origins. [11:08] Your account login pages are becoming even more secure, thanks to AWS WAF Fraud Control. [12:38] Amazon EKS Anywhere Curated Packages now generally available. [13:20] <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-and-vmware-announce-vmware-cloud-on-aws-integration-with-amazon-fsx-for-neta

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team weighs the merits of bitcoin mining versus hacking. Plus: AWS Trusted Advisor prioritizes Support customers, Google provides impenetrable protection from a major DDoS attack, and Oracle Linux 9 is truly unbreakable. 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 AWS Trusted Advisor offers a new Priority capability for Enterprise Support, offering a prioritized view of critical risks. Nothing’s touching Google, as it blocks the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack to date, with a whopping 46 million requests per second (RPS). The new Oracle Linux 9 comes with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7 (UEK R7) and Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK). Top Quotes “This is really just institutionalizing the knowledge that the Enterprise customers are already getting from their account team. And it probably really helps — in the event that the AWS account team experiences churn for those customers — not to be negatively impacted. It probably makes it really easy for new people on that AWS account team to come in and know where the other team left off. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s really a new feature — just a new way to access data that customers are already getting.” “Ignoring those Tor nodes — which didn&#8217;t make a whole lot of traffic — that&#8217;s 12,000 requests a second per source IP, on average. That&#8217;s enormous.” AWS: A Trusty Advisor’s Priorities Finally, AWS has found a use for Mechanical Turk, with its new Priority capability for Trust Advisor. If you&#8217;ve been curious about what&#8217;s happening during domain updates of the OpenSearch Service, you now get more visibility into validation errors during blue/green deployments. Great news for license-holders and clearly by popular demand: RDS for Oracle now supports managed Oracle Data Guard Switchover and Automated Backups for read replicas. GCP: Heavily Armored Cloud Google Cloud is saying goodbye to its IoT Core service in 2023. How about instead of turning it off, just stop selling it? You can benefit from operating system Committed Use Discounts (CUD) with workload predictability. Now, get some cuts on your SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) — with savings of up to 79%. There’s much fanfare at Google, as it blocks the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack to date. It didn’t last long though, because the attackers gave up — probably deciding there was no value in continuing. <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/introducing-curated-detections-in-chronicle-secops-suite" target="_blank" rel="noope

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team chats cloud region wars to establish the true victor. Plus: AWS Storage Day offers a blockhead badge, all the fun of the Microsoft Dev Box, and Google sends people back to sleep with its Cloud Monitoring snooze alert policy. 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 AWS Storage Day 2022 marks the fourth annual event streamed live on Twitch, with its File Cache service announcement and five new available learning badges. Google now offers alert policy snoozing in Cloud Monitoring for maintenance or non-business hours. Microsoft previews its Dev Box, a managed service enabling developers to create cloud workstations. Top Quotes “I found it completely shocking that this didn&#8217;t exist in AWS — that you only had enable/disable — when first moving over there. So this is a fantastic feature for Google Monitoring. I love it.” “This seems like one of those things I&#8217;d like, but half the fun of starting a new project is installing a new version of Python or something that completely hoses my local laptop. And I spend the next three or four days frantically trying to undo what I&#8217;ve done that breaks six other things.” AWS: It’s Storage Day! AWS livestreamed its fourth annual Storage Day on Twitch, and Ryan is rather excited about getting his hands on that blockhead badge for core storage competency. Plus, the new File Cache service promises to accelerate and simplify hybrid cloud workloads. Continue to be blown away by the theory of HTTP/3 (and if you’re like Ryan, dread the day you have to troubleshoot it), as Amazon CloudFront now supports it. Now available in US regions (with a likely quick extension with increased adoption and understanding of the service): AWS Private 5G. Amazon and Splunk co-announce the release of the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) project with a lot of partners… but (interestingly) no Elastic. If you&#8217;ve been holding off on that move from Dockershim to the new launcher, now’s the time to do it before it’s too late: Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.23. Apparently Amazon Cognito enables native support for AWS WAF, but we’re not entirely sure what they&#8217;re enabling here — it feels like something they should have already been doing. GCP: Hitting the Snooze Button Query Library offers new tools for increasing developer productivity. You should eventually be able to actually save your queries into a custom Query Library, but we’re still waiting on this. A snooze, not a pause

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&#8217;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&#8217;s the same thing.” “This is super handy for huge datasets where you want to track trends over a long time. It&#8217;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&#8217;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 <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/cloud-functions-2nd-generation-now-generally-available" target="_bl

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses why Ryan’s yelling all day (hint: he’s learning). Plus: Peter misses the all-important cloud earnings, AWS Skill Builder subscriptions are now available, and Google Eventarc connects SaaS platforms. 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 Earnings time is upon us once again, and it’s apparently doom and gloom all around as tears of loss are wiped away with $100 bills. AWS makes its Skill Builder subscriptions available with more than 500 courses and four new learning experiences. (The Cloud Pod is now registering signups for a virtual proctor while you take the test.) Google Eventarc for events enthusiasts unifies and integrates supported SaaS platforms. Top Quotes “Teams is a huge focus. The last two years have been companies figuring out how to remote work for the first time ever. That&#8217;s not a sustainable thing — those two years’ growth is all just pandemic.” “I do like the way that they&#8217;re presenting a lot of this training. I don&#8217;t learn well in the classroom setting — I learn by doing, so any kind of hands-on labs or the jams which I&#8217;ve done in person at re:Invent are better for me to learn the internet intricacies of different services. So I love this.” General News: Earnings, Damned Earnings, and Negative Analysts First up for reported earnings is Microsoft, where no one’s really hurting. (Wait until you see the other guys.) Sadly, Google still hasn’t figured out how to make money on GCP. Ad revenue is down. Amazon suffers slower demand amid another net loss. Rivian takes a big hit, so if you were hoping to see it turn around, it hasn’t. Of course, all of this bad news means Google and Microsoft have scaled back hiring efforts. Coupled with high inflation and bad interest rates, an economic bloodbath in the next 12 months looms. Oracle axes U.S. staff as part of a plan to lay off thousands — mainly in marketing and customer experience. This could signal a step back from opening so many new data centers. AWS: Building Skills One Course at a Time Handy new IPv6 support appears for AWS Global Accelerator. Already five years too late, CDK for Terraform is now (finally) generally available. Amazon OpenSearch Service gets a trifecta of boosts in the form of advanced log and application analytics, <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/07/amazon-opensearch-service-support

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team gets skeptical on Prime Day numbers. Plus: AWS re:Inforce brings GuardDuty, Detective and Identity Center updates and announcements; Google Cloud says hola to Mexico with a new Latin American region; and Azure introduces its new cost API for EC and MCA customers. 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 AWS re:Inforce brings us Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Detective and IAM Identity Center releases, updates and name-changes for additional protection and headache. Google Cloud adds a third Latin American data region to its collection — this time, in Mexico. EA and MCA customers now benefit from Azure’s new Cost Details API for better HR and finance management. Top Quotes “This must always have been their plan. Amazon did not build that block Inspection Service just so that Orca could serve their own customers. They must have had an eye on the huge customer base of people using EBS Volumes to do this exact same thing. So it&#8217;s no surprise [as they’ve] had almost two years of sole ownership of the service to deliver this to customers. I&#8217;m not surprised at all to see an enhancement like this. And it&#8217;s awesome. Really.” “Microsoft is in a lucky position, because the Windows ecosystem has been very services heavy for a long time. … They&#8217;ve got this unique position where they can deprecate … they can pivot to new APIs more quickly than AWS, who are stuck with so many customers [and it’s] very painful for them to deprecate … It’s lucky that [Microsoft] don&#8217;t have customers that would push back against this, because they&#8217;re used to constant change.” AWS: re:Inforcing Prime Numbers #&#x20e3; There may well be some spin in Jeff Barr’s latest brag on behalf of Amazon for its Prime Day 2022. Impressive numbers nonetheless! New malware detection for EBS Volumes with GuardDuty is the first of three announcements hot out of AWS re:Inforce — very similar to Orca Security malware snapshot and restore functions. The second offering is Amazon Detective’s support for Kubernetes Workloads on EKS, for improved security investigations. There’s nothing not to like here, and it shows exactly why we use managed services. Finally, the terribly named AWS IAM Identity Center — which you may remember was previously called AWS SSO — promises to scale your workforce access management. They could’ve called it “AWS Centaur,” but instead opted for two words that mean absolutely nothing. GCP: Making US Automakers Happy One Latin American Region at a Time Google Cloud says hola to Mexico, as it adds a third Latin American data region following Santiago, Chile, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. If there are further updates within the next three to four years, Ryan has kindly volunteered to be The Cloud Po

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses facial recognition avoidance tactics. Plus: Waving farewell to CentOS 7 with the rise of Rocky Linux, Amazon traverses the new Cloudscape, and the U.K. heatwave spells disaster for Oracle and Google data centers. 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 As CentOS is put out to pasture, say hello to Rocky Linux, named in honor of CentOS late co-founder Rocky McGaugh. Cloudscape Design System is the latest AWS open source wonder for web application building. The great British heatwave of 2022 burns Oracle and Google data centers to a crisp. Top Quotes “It answers the question of who we shout at if there&#8217;s a bug at zero day and the community doesn’t get around to fixing it. Now we can shout at Google.” “It&#8217;s probably a sign of further issues to come unless they do some productive work. Because it&#8217;s one thing to … build a data center in Utah [where] it gets up to 45 degrees C and the sun&#8217;s heating the air under some land. And that&#8217;s a completely different situation than heating up Europe, which is … much less expected to have those kinds of temperatures so far north. … So it&#8217;s going to be time to invest in HVAC business.” General News: The Best Data Lake Is the One With Your Boat on It VentureBeat offers up its top 10 data lake solution vendors this year. If you also don’t know what a data lake is, fear not (it tells you). AWS: Open Source Because They Can’t Sell It? AWS suits up for battle against Microsoft and Google with its server chip. Fire up the Graviton! Cost-saving automated and easily modifiable EBS Elastic Volumes are here. (Just watch out for a pesky potential price increase.) The very cool VPC Flow Logs for Transit Gateway will make things much more efficient. AWS announces neat new AppConfig Extensions. Step one: Enable feature. Step two: Figure it out yourself. Step three: Profit, profit, profit. AWS goes open source with Cloudscape Design System for building web applications. More epic work from Amazon as EC2 R6a Instances join the M6a and C6a club, now rolled out across all three primary node types. You&#8217;re welcome! GCP: The Rise of Rocky Stunned reactions all around here at The Cloud Pod: <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/introducing-co-hosting-models-on-the-vertex-ai-prediction-service" target="_blank

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses shorting Jim Chanos amid the great cloud giant vs. colo standoff. Plus: Google prepares for a post-quantum world, Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are now generally available, and master of marketing Oracle introduces sovereign cloud regions for the European Union. 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 Future forward Google prepares for a post-quantum world, while most corporations won’t catch up for a long time. Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are now generally available (so the hidden Mac Mini under that developer’s desk can finally be replaced). Master of marketing Oracle introduces sovereign cloud regions for the European Union. Top Quotes “Quantum computing has been taken very seriously from a security perspective. Conservative estimates [are] 10 to 20 years before we have quantum computers large enough and reliable enough to run short algorithms to factor these large primes. But we&#8217;re starting &#8230; It’s going to take a long time for businesses to actually catch on and realize and modernize and adopt this before the bad things start to happen. If they ever do.” “The big issue is from a federal government perspective: In a world where quantum computing can actually go through those primes fast enough and decrypt all this data … it&#8217;s a huge national security risk [and] a huge problem for the world. … Does it follow into the corporate world as quickly? No. Will it become a big issue when it happens? Hell yeah. There&#8217;ll be a Y2K-level disaster that we&#8217;ll have to be dealing with.” General News: Walmart Muscles In Will cloud giants really drive colos off a financial cliff? Big leagues short-seller and Enron prophesier Jim Chanos seems to think so… or maybe that’s all part of his plan. Walmart saw that and said, Well, we&#8217;re doing it too: Their CTO claims they’re now the largest hybrid cloud in existence. Having 10,000 massive buildings at their disposal must be convenient. AWS: New York, New York EC2 M1 Mac instances are now generally available. Thanks to Apple’s licensing agreement, they have to be turned on for 24 hours minimum. Identity and Access Management gets IAM Roles Anywhere for workloads outside of AWS, removing a huge and clunky obstacle to adoption. Awesome. EC2 Auto Scaling customers can monitor their predictive scaling policy with Amazon CloudWatch, but we’re left wondering how to close the loop on having to monitor the monitoring service to make sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing. If you&#8217;re a .NET developer leveraging AWS for all your compute needs, you’re in luck — there’s a streamlined deployment exp

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses data sovereignty for future space-customers. Plus: There’s a global cloud shortage, Google announces Apigee advanced API security, and GKE Autopilot gets new networking features. 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 Microsoft is the latest victim in a global cloud shortage, spinning it as a temporary issue fueled by surging Teams demand and rapid Azure growth. Google announces Apigee Advanced API Security in a bid to defend against increased attacks and traffic volumes. GKE Autopilot gets new network features in the form of IP masquerading and eBPF, now generally available. Top Quotes “The supply chain has been huge on a lot of people. You don&#8217;t hear so much from Amazon, and I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s related to the commerce site Amazon.com and the overprovisioning they did … If AWS went the same route and has a bunch of stock, cluster manufacturing their own chips, maybe they have a little bit more control. But everyone else is screwed.” “In the article, it just says what you can do to detect bots. But some bots are the use case [you’re] selling to the world. &#8230; On the surface, it sounds logical, but there are some ‘gotchas’ that you need to be careful of if you&#8217;re doing B2B or doing things that look bot-ish.” General News: All the Joy of the Crypto Crash Apparently the tech talent crunch (not because we suck at running Kafka) is to blame for a 68% reliance on AWS managed services. Come on, VentureBeat, you can do better than this! Microsoft is in the yellow zone because of a global cloud shortage, which it’s attributing to rapid Azure growth and increased Teams demand. GCP: The Very Apigee of Security Google announces Apigee Advanced API Security to help protect against increased attacks and traffic volumes. Seems more like a WAF function than a misconfiguration issue, though. Go go go, Google: get more support for structured logs in the latest version of Go logging library. Monitor your cloud metrics now in Managed Service for Prometheus. Allegedly, Cloud Native community members have an 86% chance of using Prometheus (we’re not so sure about that number.) Say bonjour to the new Paris region, as the French government aims to make the nation cloud native. GKE Autopilot’s new IP masquerading and eBPF network features are now generally available. <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/pro

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter finally returns with some beer-based bets about Amazon extending its TLS deadline. Plus: Terraform drift detection for managing infrastructure, chilling tales of Amazon’s CodeWhisperer ML advances, and Anthos on-premise options finally arrive for your platform of choice. Plus the cloud talks about AWS SNOWCONES in SPACE!!!!!! 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 Terraform Cloud finally adds drift detection to help manage infrastructure, now generally available after its 2020 preview. Amazon’s crazy “ML-powered coding companion,” CodeWhisperer, is here for our jobs. Google expands its Distributed Cloud platform with Anthos on-premises options. Top Quotes “I&#8217;m surprised it&#8217;s taken so long. Because I mean, the reality is if you&#8217;re in a plan, and the plan doesn&#8217;t require any changes, then there&#8217;s been no drift. So what was the obstacle in delivering this as a feature sooner?” “Not only they&#8217;re training their own machine learning models, but they&#8217;re also generating code. Not concerned at all.” General News: Drifting in the Right Direction While everyone’s been a little afraid to pull the trigger, HashiCorp announced drift detection in Terraform cloud, which is in a public beta. Pretty exciting! HashiCorp also announced the launch and free public beta of HCP Boundary, but what&#8217;s their long-term vision? AWS: Whispering Sweet Somethings to the Machine SageMaker Ground Truth now supports synthetic data generation, promising to reduce time and training costs for model operations. Getting enough data to actually train a model could be hard… (fake it til you make it?) Your new “ML-powered coding companion” CodeWhisperer now writes code for you. We’ve joked about it before, but Alexa really is one step away from upskilling to coding. Peter’s betting two beers at his local pub on Amazon extending the deadline on this one: TLS 1.2 is to become the minimum TLS protocol level for all AWS API endpoints. There’s currently just under a year to get yourself sorted. Good luck! Apparently, even space has (AWS) Snowcones: Amazon sends one to the International Space Station As EKS improves control plane scaling and update speed by up to 4x, get ready for a lot of step function workload. Imagine waiting 10 years for private IP VPNs… well, we did, and <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/06/aws-site-vpn-introduces-private-ip-security-privacy/" target="_bla

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses Jonathan’s penance for his failures. Plus: Microsoft makes moves on non-competes, NDAs, salary disclosures, and a civil rights audit; AWS modernizes mainframe applications for cloud deployment; and AWS CEO Adam Selipsky chooses to be intentionally paranoid. 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 The Balmer era is officially dead: Microsoft curbs non-competes, drops NDAs from worker settlements, disclose salary ranges, and even launches a civil rights audit. AWS launches their new modernization service for mainframe applications, now deployable in fully managed AWS runtime environments. AWS CEO Adam Selipsky “choose[s] to be intentionally paranoid,” as he leads the company through turbulence. Top Quotes “We&#8217;ve talked about how garbage those [noncompetes] are, the problems they&#8217;ve had with them, executives leaving, Amazon going to Microsoft, then getting sued and all the mess of that. So I&#8217;m super glad they&#8217;re finally starting to see a tide swell change in technology where that&#8217;s no longer a thing.” “I always felt like Amazon was going to just create a mainframe as a service offering — buy a bunch of IBM mainframes that they sell out to you — because that&#8217;s been a model of mainframe for a long time: CPU slicing, rentals and that kind of thing. But it seems like now they&#8217;re going to go down this other path where the answer is [that] you convert to a more modern architecture, which is interesting.” General News: It’s a New Era The times they are a-changin’, as Microsoft revises its position on non-competes, NDAs, and salary range disclosure, while launching a civil rights audit. Take that, Amazon! Target CIO Mike McNamara jumps away from AWS with a scaled move toward multicloud architecture. Target allegedly has 4,000 engineers, which seems like a lot. Archera vents via Venturebeat about the unmanageability of cloud costs, calling for standardized billing. While it might be helpful and even valuable, this seems a road too far traveled. AWS: Modernized Mainframes and Intentional Paranoia You can now take advantage of AWS’ new modernization service for mainframe applications, deployable in fully managed AWS runtime environments. There are some nice enhancements for MGN, including DR configuration and Linux to Rocky Linux and SUSE Linux Subscription conversions. AWS CEO Adam Selipsky admits, “I choose to be intentionally paranoid,” as he leads the company into a turbulent world. A nice feature so

On The Cloud Pod this week, half the team whizzes through the news in record time. Plus: AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, Google Distributed Cloud adds AI, ML and Database Solutions, and there’s another win for NetApp with Azure VMware Solution. 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 AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery now supports up to 300 staging and target accounts, which seems like a small number for some enterprises with thousands. With the power of Anthos, Google Distributed Cloud adds AI, ML and Database Solutions — continuing the trend of service monetization regardless of host location. Another win for NetApp, the home of choice for Azure VMware solutions optimization. Top Quotes “If you&#8217;re really doing auto scaling [and] traditional cloud native, you don&#8217;t use the service because you’ve already built it into your app. So this is for legacy IT operations like SAP, Oracle, and others. Three hundred or 3,000 covers small and medium business, but large enterprise has way more than that.” “When Anthos first was announced, and Outpost for AWS, we talked about how likely it was that more and more cloud-native services were going to be made available anywhere, on any cloud, in any data center. It&#8217;s definitely a pattern of monetizing the services regardless of where they&#8217;re hosted.” AWS: Bouncing Back From Disaster Amazon EMR Serverless is now generally available, a cool feature running big data applications (and Outpost too). But it’s interesting that it’s been branded “serverless” when it’s clearly a managed service. Elastic Disaster Recovery now supports 300 staging and target accounts, but we can’t help wondering how this helps the largest enterprises. Step Functions launches a workflow-based interactive application workshop, and it looks like a golden age for developer experience is close at hand. Amazon Route 53 announces IP-based routing for DNS queries, which is going to make things complicated. So preoccupied with whether or not they could integrate, they didn&#8217;t stop to think if they should. GCP: Complexity on Top of Complexity Google Chronicle offers context-aware detections, alert prioritization and risk scoring for its Security Operations. But wouldn&#8217;t you want to protect everybody from everything? A boon for customer choice and flexibility: Google Distributed Cloud adds AI, ML and database solutions. On prem, running Kubernetes and Anthos? Justin loves this. Yeehaw! Time to grab that 10-gallon hat and run you

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the new Madrid region’s midday siesta shutdown. Plus: Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 billion, Azure gets paradigmatic with 5G, and you can now take the 2022 Google-DORA DevOps survey. 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 Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 billion, in one of the largest-ever acquisitions. Google Cloud and DORA team up to bring us the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Survey. Azure calls 5G a “paradigm,” but is it just hype? Top Quotes “This is an interesting reverse on the large cloud providers getting into the silicon business, which makes sense to me — that they want to control their supply chain and optimize. … Is Broadcom going to start becoming like a cloud provider? That&#8217;s interesting. I wouldn&#8217;t suspect that.” “What [is Azure] trying to do? Are they trying to sell us on [5G]? Are they trying to change the way we develop? Because we&#8217;re just going to waste our time developing stuff that requires some of these things, and then the infrastructure is not going to be there to support it.” General News: Diversifying the Portfolio In one of the largest acquisitions ever (just shy of Dell’s EMC takeover at $67 billion and Microsoft’s Blizzard acquisition at $69 billion), Broadcom acquires VMware for $61 billion. This could have big implications for enterprise. AWS: Need for Speed If you need a lot of disk space to log transactions, you’re in luck: Amazon EC2 M6id and C6id instances buff up their storage by up to 7.6TB. Ryan’s usually doing whatever he can to avoid this, but if you need Elastic Volumes and Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) support for io2 Block Express, you’ve now got it. GCP: the State of DevOps in 2022 Why do IT leaders choose Google Cloud certification for their teams? In case you were wondering, here’s a puff piece with the answer. If you need to change streams with Cloud Spanner, you can now do so. A cool feature, but it does need to be by email (there’s no homing pigeon option… yet). If you want to learn a whole bunch of irrelevant HPC jargon, this is the blog post for you. You can now take the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Survey, launched by Google and DORA. <a

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team talks tactics for infiltrating the new Google Cloud center in Ohio. Plus: AWS goes sci-fi with the new Graviton3 processors, the new GKE cost estimator calculates the value of your soul, and Microsoft builds the metaverse. 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 AWS fires up the Graviton3 processors for some big energy savings. Google develops the new GKE cost estimator for people who aren’t curious about cost. Microsoft Build comes out of nowhere to deliver awesome, scary AI-driven tools with much mention of metaverse (yuck). Top Quotes “This feature isn&#8217;t developed for you because you&#8217;re curious about the cost. This is developed specifically for the people who are not curious about the cost. It&#8217;s a big red number. When they&#8217;re doing the deployment, it’s like, oh, I should probably not do that.” “I cannot wait for the robot overlords to completely school me at code. This is gonna be hilarious… and frightening.” General News: HashiCorp Extends Its Reach Ryan is slightly embarrassed by how much he’s excited about the new HCL Extension for Visual Studio Code 0.1 announcement. AWS: Abiding by the Laws of Graviton3 Storage company NetApp continues to buck industry trends with Backup and FSx support for ONTAP. Don’t forget to check out the TCP Talks interview with Anthony Lye, Executive VP and General Manager of NetApp. New AWS-designed Graviton3 Processors power Amazon EC2 C7g Instances, now generally available. Control Tower now supports concurrent operations for preventive guardrails. Awesome if you’re just starting, tougher if you’ve been at it for a while. If you’ve been waiting for Kendra to give you something you actually cared about in dev, here you go: Jira connector enables document search on Jira repository. Great news: Incident Manager expands support for runbook automation. We love announcements like these. Ryan now has even less excuse for not trying Resilience Hub, after it adds support for Terraform, Amazon ECS and more. Once again, AWS admits that multicloud is a real thing, with <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-datasync-move-data-between-aws-and-google-cloud-storage-or-aws-and-mic

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team struggles with scheduling to get everyone in the same room for just one week. Plus, Microsoft increases pay for talent retention while changing licensing for European Cloud Providers, Google Cloud introduces AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, and AWS announces EC2 support for NitroTPM. 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 Big changes are afoot with Microsoft on both pay and European licensing fronts. A very busy Google finds time to release AlloyDB for PostgreSQL. NitroTPM gets Amazon EC2 support. Top Quotes “I hope that it&#8217;s the exact opposite of TK and Google Cloud — that they’re really focused on the values and the culture and providing meaningful work. Especially during the last year in the pandemic, a lot of people have realized there&#8217;s a lot of different priorities; that money is good — it doesn&#8217;t buy happiness, but it buys a lot of things that can make me happy — but it&#8217;s getting that fulfillment, and enrichment is also super important. Not just a slog.” “The problem is they&#8217;re not building power plants fast enough to support all of the power demand they have in this country. So there&#8217;s a possibility that these cloud providers may get pushback on building data centers in the region, which can have a huge detrimental impact. So keep an eye on that.” AWS: Some Dynamite Announcements AWS teams up with IBM in a SaaS-based partnership. Interesting that it’s IBM, but money talks, and there’s no better time to do it. EC2 now supports NitroTPM and UEFI Secure Boot, which is an interesting pivot for the security-minded. Open source supply chain security gets a nice big $10 million investment from AWS. If you need the functionality, you’ve got some nice EKS Anywhere curated software packages to choose from, which are now in public preview. CloudWatch improves the console experience, which no one really wants. There’s a lot more Amazon can be doing. GCP: Busy Little Bees AlloyDB for PostgreSQL promises freedom from expensive legacy databases. Here’s to hoping it works. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kurian-strategy-alienates-

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses wholesome local Oakland toast for breakfast. Plus: Hybrid infrastructure is unsustainable, the AWS Proton template library expands, and Amazon angers the team by describing Step Functions as “low-code.” 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 Against the trend of popular opinion, it turns out that hybrid infrastructure is a bad idea in the long term, with a few significant drawbacks. The AWS Proton template library just got bigger, so now people can find something else to complain about. Amazon annoyingly describes Step Functions as low-code, which is definitely not true. Top Quotes “Proton was only developed as an answer for, how should we deploy onto Amazon? It&#8217;s setting yourself up just so someone can armchair-quarterback and poke holes in it. Now they&#8217;re saying, well, how would you do this? [Answer:] You have the templates. And then they&#8217;re gonna be like, the templates are cool, except it doesn&#8217;t meet my pretty edge case, so they&#8217;ll complain about that. We&#8217;ll see templates for the templates next.” “I just love the assumption that you could low-code a solution with Step Functions, just because I&#8217;ve created many a step function and state machine flow. And all it is is coding and then figuring out why the code isn&#8217;t doing what I want — because I&#8217;m not passing things correctly between the different functions. The ability for someone who can&#8217;t write code to be able to to accomplish anything is a little far fetched.” General News: Don’t Plan on Hybrid for Long&#8230; In the cloud court of public opinion, dissent is infrequent. Yet here’s Michael Bathon of Rimini Street claiming that hybrid is actually bad in the long-term. AWS: What Is Low-Code, Anyway? The AWS Proton template library expands — as does people’s list of things to complain about. Amazon very irritatingly calls Step Functions low-code, with new workflow observability features. Can the annoying customer with the single use case please stand up? Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports a lot more read replicas. Driven by the business side, perhaps? GCP: Something’s Got To Give With BigQuery Cloud TPU VMs are now generally available, with faster speeds and lower costs for training. BigQuery BI Engine now supports more tools and custom applications. All we heard is that the analysts want to learn BigQuery, so they made it work for them. It’s one thing to provide a good service and another thing to develop an open source tool that <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure-modernization/cis-compliance-support-

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter’s been suspended without pay for two weeks for not filing his vacation requests in triplicate. Plus it’s earnings season once again, there’s a major Google and SWIFT collaboration afoot, and MSK Serverless is now generally available, making Kafka management fairly hassle-free. 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 Earnings season is upon us once again, with billions earned and lost. Who are the winners? MSK Serverless is now generally available as a boon for Kafka management. Google and SWIFT uproot the financial world in announcing a huge cloud-based collaboration. Top Quotes “It&#8217;s hard to call a 32% increase for Azure earnings a slowdown, but it is definitely slower than what they saw in 2021 and the boom of the pandemic. But the overall trend is everyone&#8217;s gonna keep adopting cloud hyperscalers to host their infrastructure.” “The important thing about this is that it&#8217;s signaling a change in compliance controls; all these financial organizations with very traditionally physical hardware in Iraq in the data center [had] no way to move to the cloud. So whether it&#8217;s through advocacy or proof of process, being able to virtualize all these things is going to be huge and will open up a massive market for new customers.” General News: Earnings Are In, and It’s Looking&#8230; Good? Imagine earning $116.4 billion and then still losing money. But fear not after such a rough quarter, Amazon: AWS revenue is here to save the day at 37%. Meanwhile, Google revenue increased slightly below expectations, and GCP is still losing money — but $43 million less than last year. Finally, Microsoft has Azure to thank for its 32% growth. AWS: A Truly Kafkaesque Affair MSK Serverless is now generally available, offering a reduction in the overhead of managing Kafka. Amazon EC2 instances get some storage-optimizing icy processing power. (You just know there&#8217;s still a whole team of DBAs that doesn&#8217;t think this is good enough.) Last on the AWS front: There are new management features for EC2 key pairs. We’re ecstatic! GCP: Last Chance to Register for the Google Cloud Security Summit GCP offers some CISO perspectives on security updates, as well as a reminder to register for the upcoming summit. No-code solutions provide some nightmare fuel, as <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/sap-google-cloud/sap-btp-on-google-cloud-announces-5

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team establishes that Justin may be immune to COVID. Plus all the latest from the AWS Summit, Azure Red Button team up on DDOS defense, and engines are revving in the great VMware showdown. 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 The AWS San Francisco Summit kicks off with a ton of new generally available stuff, but not-so-impressive attendance (looking at you, COVID). Microsoft and Red Button buddy up on DDOS defense testing initiative. AWS, Google and Oracle rev their engines for the VMware top spot. Top Quotes “Really shows you the power of partnership … There’s finally some easy button for testing these things. Because you always dream: Maybe I could create my own DDoS situation, which seemingly I do occasionally by accident, but intentionally would be nice this time.” “I don&#8217;t necessarily trust their math, but assuming that it’s reasonably correct, it seems like a good market for Oracle to go after if you&#8217;re gonna try to compete with those three platforms — I don&#8217;t see a ton of people moving straight to the cloud on VMware. But that&#8217;s a pretty compelling argument and potentially a way of getting VMware customers to the cloud quicker: let&#8217;s just do it now if we don&#8217;t have to get off of VMware.” General News: Great Expectations Gartner anticipates big growth (20.4%) in public cloud spending for 2022! AWS: Everything Generally Available Finally, you can use IAM to control access to a resource based on the account, OU or organization that contains the resource — just how it used to be, and makes a whole lot more sense. You might be excited for the confusingly named Amazon CloudWatch for Ray — if you can work out what it is (we couldn’t). Something to do with machine learning? One for the data scientists: Announcing the Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference, which should prove a boon for infrastructure management. Now the guru can tell you your code sucks, too: Introducing the power of operational issue automatic detection in Lambda Functions with Amazon DevOps Guru for Serverless. IoT TwinMaker is now generally available, and while your host doesn’t understand, luckily Ryan is on hand to talk about its uses. AWS Amplify Studio is also now <a href="https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/aws-announces

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team rediscovers who Ryan is after an eternity (a secret agent). Plus AWS Fargate now delivers faster scaling of applications; new features for Oracle Support Rewards; and Google Cloud Optimization AI: Cloud Fleet Routing API from GCP. 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 Witness the magic of AWS Fargate scaling of applications — harder, faster, better, stronger. Ooooh! Unveiling brand new shiny features for Oracle Support Rewards. Better planning with more routes: GCP unleashes Optimization AI, API for Cloud Fleet Routing (CFR). Top Quotes “Because of that Fargate-specific limitation, [with] the first three services you&#8217;re concurrently updating, you&#8217;ll actually get a much faster rate through ECS test launches, but that fourth service will be slower. At that point, if the math works out where you&#8217;re better off hosting it on EC2 … it&#8217;s a lot more complex. I&#8217;ve worked with a lot of teams on trying to get ECS services to scale faster, and usually I look at them a little skeptically — do you really need this fast?” “In terms of looking at lists of interview questions from Google algorithm questions and the traveling salesman problem and optimizing journeys through multiple locations, multiple cities, everything else, it&#8217;s a really hard problem. It only gets exponentially more difficult. And then the more efficient you are with that, the more it costs the environment, the more it costs in time or it costs money. So yeah, it&#8217;s actually a worthy problem to solve.” General News: Microsoft Feels the Heat We’re feeling the pain of Microsoft’s licensing, as its tactics to win the cloud battle lead to new antitrust scrutiny. AWS: A Very Fargate Indeed NetApp’s ONTAP, so line up your glasses for a very fine update indeed. Check out the podcast where we interviewed their very own Anthony Lye. #ShamelessPodcastSalesmanship AWS Fargate now delivers faster scaling of applications, and you can see it in action with ECS. Understand token buckets and how AWS uses them, and if you need a hero, Vlad Ioenscu is here. Microsoft Active Directory geeks rejoice: a favored topic of the masses with configurable synchronization launched via Single Sign-On. The Log4j saga simply won’t die: Apache hotpatch issues get <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/

On The Cloud Pod this week and with half the team gone fishin’, Justin and Peter hash it out short and sweet. Plus Google Cloud SQL Insights, Atlassian suffers an outage, and AWS finally offers accessible Lambda Function URLs. 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 Atlassian suffers an outage, sparking fears of data loss. AWS offers some very welcome accessibility for Lambda Functions. Google announces Cloud SQL Insights for MySQL. Top Quotes “When Lambda first came out, before I even used it, this is how I thought it would work … then it didn&#8217;t. So it&#8217;s cool that it&#8217;s now available. I&#8217;m surprised it wasn&#8217;t the default — the starting point — before getting more complex, like API gateways.” “It&#8217;s almost required: These tools are so important when it&#8217;s a managed service and you can&#8217;t get under the covers yourself. So it&#8217;s cool, for sure. Especially when you get into how these things work with your cloud and how they interact with each other, it becomes even more important.” General News: Atlassian Made a DevOops While only 0.25% of their customer base was affected, Atlassian’s outage is not a good look. The company continues to be haunted by it, with data loss fears. Sungard is doomed. A Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing confines them to history’s unmarked grave of discarded cloud victims. AWS: Lambda Finally Does What It Was Always Meant To Accessible Lambda Function URLs are now yours — something that would’ve been nice when it first came out. Security Hub launches five controls and one new integration partner, in a move that seems to open the door to start using it for all sorts of non-security checks. Amazon ECS now allows you to run commands in a Windows container running on AWS Fargate. Peter doesn’t want to do this at all, but maybe someone does. Something you always thought would have been there but didn’t know actually existed: Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Agent job replication. Ooooooh: PrivateLink, Transit Gateway and Client VPN services all get a data transfer price reduction — a good first step! In case you’re looking (Peter’s not), there are two new Amazon EC2 bare metal instances.<

Google Biglake takes the feature of the week with the ability to federate data from multiple data lakes. On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the most expensive way to run a VM (Oracle wins). Plus some exciting developments, an AWS OpenSearch 1.2 update with several new features, and Azure’s having a party, so bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP). 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 The Cloud Pod goes fishing on Google BigLake with a new tackle box and a whole lot of data. AWS opens up the market with its OpenSearch 1.2 update boasting several new features and which could attract more customers. Azure implements a fancy new bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) policy. Top Quotes “Are they saving BigOcean for the next layer of unification above when we need to aggregate multiple BigLakes?” “It is good to be able to do it, and I still pity the poor companies who need to migrate IP addresses and anchor their IPs to a provider in order to get their DVR functionality. So this now makes that possible, however bad a pattern that is in the cloud.” General News: Decisions, Decisions VentureBeat discusses how to choose the right AWS region for your business, but they seem to be missing a few considerations (sovereignty, anyone?). Also, picking a region isn’t a great idea for a business (like an e-commerce site) that needs to be multiregional to survive if things go sideways. AWS: Opening up the Search Nice and Wide Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes 1.22 — maybe AWS bribed the Kubernetes governance board because they were tired of trying to keep up with Kubernetes’ quarterly patch releases. Good news for console users who no longer have to click through five separate pages of configurations, with the new and improved Amazon EC2 console launch experience. Cue applause track: AWS Organizations now provides central AWS account closure. We’ve been waiting for this for years. Amazon EC2 now performs automatic recovery of instances by default — a no-brainer, really. Killing the need for all those expensive backup software solutions, AWS Backup now allows you to restore virtual disks from protected copies of your VMware virtual machines. You can use it for decades. Could there be a more expensive way to run a VM than VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts? Yes, as it happens: Oracle. But this is a not-so-distant second place. Not ideal, but there should be a workaround, as <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/03/amazon-machine-images-public-visibility-two-y

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan is in the doghouse and he’s been suspended (with full pay). Plus, we’re comfortably numb with AWS Cloud NGFW, GCP suspends hosts for big savings, and Azure is once again shutting the Front Door on us. 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 AWS Cloud NGFW cost calculations leaves us comfortably numb. GCP boasts big savings by temporarily suspending unneeded hosts. Azure is once again shutting the Front Door with a new, modern cloud service. Top Quotes “I&#8217;m ready to make my [AWS] re:Invent next year&#8217;s first prediction, which will be an AmazonBasics version of that for 1/10th of the cost.” “I’m very curious to actually see the comparison … in cost because, assuming performance is relatively similar, cost is what this always comes down to.” AWS: Pay Less, More Often! Helping you bleed cash by the hour instead of writing one big annual check, AWS presents the new Cloud NGFW. Ouch. Knock yourself out with up to 10 GB ephemeral storage supported with AWS Lambda. It’s cheap (at $0.0000000309 for every GB-second), but they’re not giving it to you — they’re selling it to you. We’re slightly concerned about the general availability of AWS Proton support for Terraform Open Source and its effects on potential future innovation. Amazon hops on Google’s gamification bandwagon with Amazon GameSparks now in preview. GCP: GCP Equalizes With a Quiet Week Nice job, Google: a feature with an edge over other cloud providers that offers big savings by temporarily suspending unneeded Compute Engine VMs. Awesome! Azure: It All Comes Down to Costs Azure shutting the front door on us once again with the now generally available modern cloud CDN service, Azure Front Door. This probably gives them a competitive advantage over AWS for at least a week or two. In a surprising turn of events, Microsoft announces its intent to establish an India datacenter region in Hyderabad. As that’s where most of their employees are, how was there not one there already? It’s like UPnP for cloud, so do not use lightly: Azure Load Balancer now allows you to manage port forwarding for a backend pool. We seriously recommend discussing this with your security team in advance. TCP Lightning Round Peter finally levels up, making the scores: Justin (4), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (1). Other Headlines Mentioned: <li style="font-weight:

On The Cloud Pod this week, it’s a brave new world for Ryan, who learns all kinds of things. Plus the Okta breach leads to customer outrage over not telling them for months, AWS announces its new Billing Conductor, and Google expands Contact Center AI for a reimagined customer experience. 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 Okta is in big trouble with furious customers after it fails to disclose a security breach… for months. AWS announces the brand new and very welcome AWS Billing Conductor to much fanfare and great rejoicing. Google expands end-to-end with Contact Center AI for a touted “reimagining” of the customer experience. Top Quotes “The breach is bad enough, but then the handling of the communications of it is really what seals the deal and where you really do all the damage. It&#8217;s one thing if someone attacks you and gets in through something unintended … that&#8217;s not going to shake my confidence in using a company. But someone who&#8217;s hiding it, someone who&#8217;s clearly dancing around it, makes me think that they&#8217;re not well organized.” “Google is notoriously bad for customer support … and it&#8217;s very difficult to be a satisfied customer of Google when you have to deal with their support channels. So anything they can do for anybody to make the customer experience less frustrating is good. Let&#8217;s hope that this doesn&#8217;t just turn into another agent, please situation where all you want to do is break out of the system and just speak to a real person who can apply some logic.” General News: Okta Breach Shenanigans Change your credentials immediately. Customers are raging at Okta, which manages 100 million logins but failed to disclose a security breach for months. Just who is running things over there? AWS: Money Money Money Donald Trump’s golf courses are going to be very unhappy to learn that AWS is investing $2.3 billion in UK data centers over the next two years, taking advantage of the Moray West Wind Farm off the coast of Scotland — creating 1000 jobs and injecting £500,000 into the Scottish economy. Billing and accounting departments across the land rejoice as AWS announces its very welcome and much improved AWS Billing Conductor. Sharing is caring: AWS Lambda console now supports the option to share test events between developers. GCP: ReAImagining Customer Experiences “Agent, please.” Let’s hope Google’s Contact Center AI expa

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses Peter’s concept of fun. Plus digital adventures with AWS Cloud Quest game, much-wanted Google price increases, and a labyrinthine run-through of the details of Azure Health Data Services. 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 AWS gamifies cloud training with the release of Cloud Quest, along with two new initiatives in a bid to build foundational cloud skills for younger people. Google announces price changes while framing it as “choice”: Some services will decrease in price while others will increase. Microsoft launches Azure Health Data Services, the details of which turn out to be super fun trying to get your head around. Top Quotes “If you&#8217;ve ever wanted the job of living in a 3D world where a construction worker runs up to you and tells you that the server running in this weather app is failing and helping them figure this out, this game is for you. And you can earn gems and build and it feels very much like Roblox…. I give it an A for effort and an F for execution.” “One of the arguments that people have made against the cloud forever is that once you&#8217;re locked in, they&#8217;re gonna jack the rates up, and then you&#8217;re screwed because you&#8217;re stuck there. It&#8217;s that exact thing. This is now giving credence to those naysayers who traditionally will say that&#8217;s not really true. … Now we have an exact use-case: Google did it. So what’s to stop Azure and AWS from doing it?” AWS: Slay the Dragon and Rescue the Cloud New bigger and badder EC2 X2idn and X2iedn Instances for you to throw your money away on are now here — supporting memory-intensive workloads with higher network bandwidth. If you’re excited about Pi Day, Jeff Barr helps celebrate with a bragging blog post on the number of objects Amazon S3 now boasts (with some fun galaxial anecdotes to boot). A feature we can finally appreciate: Amazon ECS Update Service API now supports updating Elastic Load Balancers, Service Registries, Tag Propagation, and ECS Managed Tags. And moving onto an AWS feature we don&#8217;t care about, Amazon ECS now supports on-premises workload orchestration on Windows OS. More Windows support arrives, this time for containerd runtime on EKS starting with Kubernetes 1.21. We don’t know about you, but we’re starting to get releases mixed up here. Don&#8217;t get fooled by the marketing folks: There’s still work for the dev team to do with the general availability of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. We’re not sure who wants to use this, but Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/0