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

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team reminisces about dealing with awful database technologies, which Ryan luckily managed to avoid. Plus all things cybersecurity as Linux gets hit with a huge security emergency, Google acquires Mandiant for $5.4 billion, and Orca Security catches a major Azure cross-tenant vulnerability. 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 Linux is on the backfoot as it’s hit by the most severe vulnerability in years. Google has acquired the cybersecurity giant Mandiant for a cool $5.4 billion. Orca Security catches a huge Azure cross-tenant vulnerability. Top Quotes ”But is Mandiant now going to be suddenly finding the vulnerabilities and publishing the vulnerabilities that they’re finding in Azure and AWS, and happen to maybe not mention the ones externally that are happening in GCP? They’re no longer an independent third party.” “Even with these things happening, you’re still safer running in the cloud. Even though there are outages, you’re still more highly available in the cloud. I hate to see these things in the news.” General News: Linux Is Feeling the Pain Knative is now officially a CNCF incubating project — any competitors in the market? As Linux is bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years, we take back everything we said about Windows vs Linux security. AWS: Solving Very Cloudy Problems Faster failover is the name of the game with AWS this week: its RDS for MySQL & PostgreSQL Multi-AZ deployment option comes with improved write performance. Jonathan is also very, very excited about their JDBC driver for MySQL. AWS customers can now request their CyberGRX report for due diligence on third-party suppliers. But who watches the watchmen? Ryan’s always suffered from slow performance, but now he can now get specific about how his bad code is affecting it, thanks to Amazon DevOps Guru’s extended support for Lambda with CodeGuru Profiler integration. GCP: Getting Out the Wallet Google pays $5.4 billion in hush money to Mandiant in a move that’s sure to massively boost their credibility in the cybersecurity arms race. Mandiant’s biggest customer? GCP itself. You can now leverage OpenTelemetry to democratize Cloud Spanner observability — which of course they want everyone using. Azure: Take Shelter From the

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team heads down a Cisco business model rabbithole. Plus cloud status pages struggle with reality, AWS is tracking carbon footprints, and Microsoft sees serious security business growth with Defender. 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 Cloud status pages aren’t reflecting reported issues, in what appears to be a cover-up by error-shy cloud providers. AWS introduces a new carbon footprint dashboard to help customers track their sustainability for cleaner, greener living. Following on the heels of AWS and Azure, Microsoft Defender now provides security on Google Cloud, and is also available for Azure Cosmos DB. Top Quotes “Understanding the thresholds would be nice, but it&#8217;s difficult, because if you have an instance up and running just fine, but you can&#8217;t launch a new instance, is EC2 down? Is the control plane being down the same as the service itself being down? The ability to launch a new instance would be fairly instrumental to using the service. There&#8217;re lots of very fine distinctions made between whether something&#8217;s working or not. I think a little more transparency is needed. But I don&#8217;t think they&#8217;re trying to mislead anybody.” “They&#8217;re so strong in other areas, I think it&#8217;s a mistake to try to compete everywhere with the two other companies that are roughly [their] size. Do the thing you&#8217;re really good at and just keep doing it better.” General News: Move Along, Everything’s Fine Here It seems like cloud providers are on a customer gaslighting mission, with cloud status pages not reflecting reported issues. AWS: Continuing Its Tradition of Silly Names In a badly timed announcement, AWS shows off its new unified Health Dashboard. It does make sense to keep it in one place, though. Amazon S3 showcases important, super valuable new additional checksum algorithms. If it’s computationally expensive, push it back onto the client. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Warm Pools has two new hibernation and scale-in features — a great solution for penny-pinchers who invested in Windows. The new AWS CloudSaga tool allows for security event simulation and testing. A great first step in what should prove to be cheaper than bringing in a whole team to do it. How many IPv6 workloads are you running? Now you can connect them to IPv4 Services. Six months too late for Jonathan, AWS’ new Customer Carbon Footprint Tool allows customers to track sustainability, helping to reach those clean and green goals. <li

On The Cloud Pod this week, order in the court! Plus tackling those notorious latency issues with AWS Local Zones, things get quick and rusty with AWS s2n-quic, and GCP flexes with Dataplex data mesh. 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 takes on network latency issues — its customers’ #1 complaint — with AWS Local Zones. AWS is getting quick and rusty this week with s2n-quic, its new open-source protocol for Rust implementation. GCP announces Dataplex in Google Cloud is now generally available, enabling the creation of the data mesh view. Top Quotes “We must be hitting some huge brick walls in web performance that are really hurting certain application workloads that require low latency, because if you look at both these announcements back-to-back, they&#8217;re really trying to improve performance.” “This is definitely a hard problem for companies to solve. Data is not going to be uniform, and you&#8217;re going to have many different sources of it, and you want it to all play nice together so it&#8217;s usable across a larger view than it used to be. I like these types of solutions, where they&#8217;re applying governance and a way of doing things that&#8217;s not just everyone reinventing these wheels — which is what we&#8217;ve been doing up until now.” General News: Order in the Court! Judge Ryan Presides Best Buy selects AWS as its strategic cloud provider, but Peter and Ryan argue that it may not be all that exclusive. VentureBeat reveals that Optimizely is partnering with Google Cloud. Justin thinks the reason the company chose GCP over AWS comes down to wanting to feel special. AWS: Goodbye Network Latency? With AWS’ announcement of the global expansion of AWS Local Zones, will its customers’ number one complaint (network latency) be finally addressed? No doubt a good move forward. AWS is also getting quick and rusty this week with the introduction of s2n-quic, the new open-source QUIC protocol for Rust implementation. For encryption nerds, this is it. The general availability of AWS Backup for Amazon S3 is sure to be a great enablement — not to mention a massive cost saving for those using the age-old solution of full data replication between buckets. Amazon comes to the rescue with auto-adjusting budgets — something to add to budgets, not a tool to replace them. Super valuable nonetheless! GCP: The Great Dataplex Data Mesh Flex You can now build a data mesh on Google Cloud with Dataplex — very f

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan’s got his detective hat on. Plus Akamai steps up to CloudFare with Linode acquisition, AWS’ CloudFormation Hooks lift us up, and EPYC instances are now available. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Akamai notes CloudFare’s aggressive pivot to edge computing and acquires AWS competitor Linode for $900m. AWS announces the general availability of AWS CloudFormation Hooks, which should prove very useful. Amazon provides EPYC-powered instances, with up to 15% improvement in price-performance. Top Quotes “When AWS announces general availability of an instance, I have never been unable to launch that instance to test it. … I can&#8217;t say the same thing for workloads on GCP.” “If you ever take a laptop that has no security patches on it and you put it on a network … it&#8217;ll be hacked within minutes. It&#8217;s crazy how bad it is, actually. This is what we always talk about: it’s when you get hacked, not if you get hacked. Because if you have vulnerabilities, there&#8217;s always a chance. It&#8217;s just a matter of time before someone figures it out.” General News: Akamai Steps Up Its Game Capitalizing on existing relationships, F5 unveils its new cloud platform with a huge advantage in security — but it might be a tough sell. Akamai acquires AWS competitor Linode for $900m. Clearly Akamai saw what CloudFare was doing and thought I gotta get me some of that. AWS: Getting Its CloudFormation Hooks In AWS announces the general availability of its CloudFormation Hooks. Very nice. We wish we’d had Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer’s new security features back in December — now it’s February and no one cares about Log4j anymore. A nice freebie comes in the form of improved performance for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). Epic new EC2 c6a instances are powered by EPYC processors, providing up to 15% price performance improvements next to c5a instances. And there was much rejoicing. Protect your login page against credential stuffing attacks with AWS WAF Fraud Control. We don’t completely hate the new Billing console home page experience. Actually, it’s pretty good. Ryan thinks AWS’ <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/02/aws-migration-hub-refa

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan grapples with life in the confusion matrix. Plus money money money with Q4 2021 earnings announcements, shiny new digital badges from AWS, and Google Serverless Spark lights the way on data processing and data science jobs. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Q4 2021 earnings: Amazon and Microsoft are killing it with impressive cloud revenues (the only part we care about), and Google is losing money but its cloud is still growing. Nothing much from AWS (again) as performance reviews continue over there; but there are some new digital badges to show off your AWS cloud storage knowledge. Serverless Spark is now available on Google Cloud to simplify data processing and data science jobs, allowing more focus on code and logic, and less on managing clusters and infrastructure. Top Quotes “There&#8217;s the rub: it&#8217;s in the details as usual. You do need to operate as a business and achieve that transformation together. No matter what, any kind of migration is going to have an impact on product delivery and feature roadmap, which will have an impact on the ability to sell. So it really does take everyone marching to the same tune in order to get that done, or it just causes infighting.” “The safest move is always to take a small [proof of concept], push that, and do your cloud landing zone with that… But then you&#8217;re left — at a certain point — with the thing that makes you the most amount of money [not fitting] your plans… It&#8217;s a huge risk: a lot of businesses get stuck trying to modernize. How do you justify the interruption to the revenue streams and the lack of feature delivery while you&#8217;re doing that transformation to the thing that pays all the bills?” General News: Q4 2021 Earnings Are In and It’s Looking Good Some serious cloud revenue growth reports from AWS, Microsoft, and Alphabet with growth at 40% or higher, despite Amazon losses. And if you ever want to own Google stock, now’s your chance. Meanwhile, VentureBeat reports on best practice for strategically maximizing the ROI of cloud migrations, although one or two of those metrics are questionable. AWS: Performance Reviews Keep Things Quiet Now you can demonstrate your cloud storage knowledge and skills with brand new shiny digital badges! Very pretty — and good to stick on the resumé. 52 AWS cloud services declare adherence to the CISPE Data Protection Code of Conduct in compliance with the GDPR. Trick

On The Cloud Pod this week, we’re back to a full house (at least for one episode.) Plus, introducing AWS open-source Cloud Map, GCP announces new Bigtable autoscale feature, and Oracle gives us a retro tour of a data center. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights In a move that shows it supports open source when convenient, AWS introduces new Cloud Map capabilities, and U-turns on proposed charges after 30 days. The new console still sucks, by the way. GCP introduces the very welcome Bigtable autoscaling feature, with new optimizing and manageability features and improvements. Oracle comes bearing over a hundred gifts from its blog, and gives us a look inside a data center. Top Quotes “I&#8217;m starting to wonder what&#8217;s going on over at AWS. We’ve talked about the Orca issues, the security rollout … And now we have this: We&#8217;re turning on things in your account that are going to cost you money. I saw the earnings… they look pretty good, so I&#8217;m not entirely sure why they&#8217;re turning on features that cost money — with no notice — and putting the onus on me to turn this stuff off.” “So isn&#8217;t that really just a rehashing of the same problem that most IT professionals have been doing for the last 20 years? On the other hand, I don&#8217;t want to manage my own legacy Oracle footprint, so the fact that they&#8217;re going to take that, move it to the cloud, and then run it for me — I&#8217;m all for that.” General News: Zero Trust ‘Hijacked’ by Network Security Firms 0&#x20e3; Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry gets us wise to network security firm marketing tactics, highlighting that practicing zero trust and investing in network security are incompatible with each other. AWS: Not Amazon’s Best Month… In a ridiculous move that completely violates the trust of its customers, AWS attempts to charge after a 30-day trial when no one is paying attention — but everyone noticed. First Orca, now this. Watch out you don’t make your CFO cry with the launch of the very nice but very expensive new Amazon X2iezn instances. AWS shows its open-source credentials — but only because it’s convenient — with the rollout of the new AWS Cloud Map MCS Controller for K8s. GCP: Coming for Crypto Cloud Bigtable’s new autoscaling feature promises cost optimization and improved manageabili

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan is still AWOL. Also Amazon is on GuardDuty with credential exfiltration, Google Cloud Deploy is generally available, and Azure is suffering from more serious DDoS attacks. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Amazon’s been on GuardDuty with enhanced detection of EC2 instance credential exfiltration. Google Cloud Deploy (GCD) is now generally available, making continuous delivery on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) easier. Azure reports that it spent the last half of 2021 dealing with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that are increasing in both severity and frequency. Top Quotes “The biggest risk to cloud infrastructure is that you’re one secret access key away from a big booboo.” “Last November, [Azure] had just mitigated a pretty large attack — at the time the largest in history, at least from ones that have been reported to the world. … Things have gotten worse in Q3 and Q4 — not only the levels [of attacks], but the complexity has gotten worse.” AWS: Beefing Up GuardDuty The threat detection service Amazon GuardDuty — which monitors your accounts for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior — is pretty great already. In the aftermath of the Superglue issue, however, AWS is ramping things up with enhanced detection of EC2 instance credential exfiltration. AWS Security Hub has been integrating with AWS Health and with AWS Trusted Advisor (TA). Does this mean everything annoying gets reflagged? Thanks, TA! In a move that makes a lot of sense, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports ECS Exec and Amazon Linux 2 for workloads running on-premises with Amazon ECS Anywhere. No more yum and Red Hat-based Fedora deployment sounds great, although it would be nice to have a few more implementation details ahead of rolling it out. Replication is now possible for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), but watch out for those pesky inter-region transfer fees — which do rack up — before enabling this. GCP: Google Cloud Deploy Makes Your Life Easier Google Cloud Deploy (GCD) is now generally available, making it easier to do continuous delivery to GKE. We’ve also done the math on this and it seems to be cheaper than Ryan: GCD customers get their first active delivery pipeline per account free, and pay a $15/month management fee for each additional pipeline. Whereas Ryan is, frankly, expensive. Azure: Azure Under Attack and It’s Getting Worse In an announcement that isn’t really an announcement, you can <a href="https://azure.microsof

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team decides 2022 is already a long, cursed year — bring on 2023. Plus nuggets of wisdom from Gartner, Orca discovers breaksformation and Glue vulnerabilities, and 10 questions to help boards (and others) maximize cloud opportunities. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights Gartner reveals six cloud trends for 2022: Take what you need for your organization and throw away the rest. Orca Security discovers vulnerabilities in AWS’ CloudFormation, and — more seriously — Glue. GCP releases 10 questions to help boards safely maximize cloud opportunities — which can also give you the opportunity to bag that promotion. Top Quotes “Look at the rate of growth of cloud over the past few years. The rate of training new people could not possibly keep up. … [Organizations] want to hire someone who&#8217;s got 20 years’ experience in something that&#8217;s only been around for five years. I can see it being a real problem in terms of quality of output.” “Because Orca published a blog post, we know about this — would AWS have disclosed it to us? If there are other people out there doing research against AWS and they&#8217;re not publishing these things, there could be other things that we don&#8217;t know about, that are not being addressed. Transparency is important.” General News: Get Out the Crystal Balls SiliconANGLE published a guest blog from Gartner’s Paul Delory on his six predictions for what is coming to the cloud in 2022. VentureBeat has five considerations for saving more and wasting less on cloud services. We didn’t learn much, but everyone’s mileage varies. AWS: CloudFormation’s Breaking Apart and the Glue Doesn’t Stick Orca Security Research Team’s been hunting in AWS waters, and found a vulnerability in CloudFormation. AWS responded that on further inspection, there was no threat to customers or resources. There’s something more troublesome afoot, though: The Orca team also discovered a vulnerability with Glue. AWS Principal Engineer Anthony Virtuoso thanked Orca for its findings: but a coordinated effort between AWS and Orca might have avoided all of this. AWS releases its new console which, overall, looks a lot like the old one with new lipstick — it still doesn’t appear to deliver. GCP: 10 Questions and Some Fire in the Works GCP helpfully published a

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter finally gets to share his top announcements of 2021. Plus, Google increases security with Siemplify, Azure updates Defender, and AWS comes into the new year with a lot of changes. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 confirms that applications can now be deployed on Amazon EKS using the IPv6 address space. Google looks to boost its security operations by acquiring SOAR provider Siemplify. Azure spent December updating Defender: was it worth it? Top Quotes “All the cloud providers are embracing containerization and the technologies that allow containerized workloads to work well on their platform. But the side effect is that they also run equally well on everybody else&#8217;s platform.” “[As Vice President of Google Cloud Phil Venables wrote in a blog post,] ‘The race by deep-pocketed cloud providers to create and implement leading secure technologies is the tip of the spear of innovation.’ Which is interesting, because I think this is an area where Google&#8217;s really crushed it, and I think Amazon has failed. Not failed, but not invested as much as they should have.” General News: Google Acquires Siemplify Google acquired Siemplify, a security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) provider. The hope appears to be that it will help security teams using GCP better manage their threat responses. AWS: Plenty of Non-Outage News IPv6 applications are now deployable through Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). This prevents IP exhaustion, minimizes latency, and simplifies routing configurations. On the downside, IPv6 can’t be added retroactively, and this EKS add-on only supports Linux — a dealbreaker for the team. The AWS compute optimizer has been enhanced to allow users to specify both x86 and ARM as their preferred architecture for their EC2 instance type recommendations. This is a big blow to other tools that perform the same operations. AWS announced the general availability of the EC2 Hpc6a Instance. It’s built for HPC workloads to leverage AMD EPYC 3rd-generation processors. This release expands AWS’ portfolio of HPC compute options. Plus, according to Justin, the instance name reminds him of the song “abcdefu” by GAYLE. According to a recent job posting, AWS plans to completely re-imagine how its network is managed. It allegedly has two secret projects that could mitigate the risk of cloud outages — like the one that impacted the company in December of 2021. GCP: Phil Venables on the Keyboard Phil Venables, the venerable Google VP and Chief Information Security Officer, <a href="https://cloud.goog

EDITORIAL NOTE: Your Cloud Pod hosts are on vacation until early January!! Enjoy our 2021 wrapup and look ahead to 2022 and we&#8217;ll be back in your Podcast feed mid January! Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan are minus Peter in this episode as they review the year in cloud computing. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 It’s the last podcast of 2021. The next one premieres in the third week of January. Log4j came back with a vengeance during the holiday season. The team looks back at its 2021 predictions and forecast for 2022. Log4jackass Using AWS security services to protect against, detect, and respond to the log4j vulnerability is still an issue. Suggestions to upgrade to version 2.16 for Apache log4j security issue for EKS, ECS, and Fargate customers wasn’t enough. Customers are asked to upgrade to 2.17. By the end of 2021, it will probably be 2.22 just to get into the spirit. Did The Team’s 2021 Predictions Come True? The hosts reviewed their 2021 predictions to see if they came true. Johnathan’s prediction about bracket computing and other quantum technology didn’t come true to break TLS. It’s still a long way off but there are now more classes in quantum programming to prepare for the cutover. Jonathan takes half a point on his merit. Peter believed The biggest blocker to cloud adoption would be costs, with individuals spending too much on poor cloud migrations. Justin believes he’s way off on this prediction. Though cost is a big consideration it’s definitely not the blocker. However, Jonathan believes more controls are needed to prevent overspending. Justin’s prediction on the verticalization of the cloud in fintech, health, retail, etc. came true. Ryan says it makes a lot of sense for industries to go this route instead of building everything out. Ryan said work from home (WFH) would be a permanent trend, further breaking traditional security. Justin agreed on the first part but not the second on security issues. Though plenty of workers still log in through their companies’ VPNs, there is a big move to implement zero-trust security. Favorite Announcements Of 2021 The hosts reviewed their favorite announcements of 2021. Justin is happy that Amazon released its Redshift Serverless program to compete with Snowflake Jonathan’s most favorite announcement was the introduction of OpenSearch. Especially how it went from notification to general release in a short period. Justin is impressed at the community working to improve OpenSearch. He hears more about this product now than elasticsearch. <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-l

On The Cloud Pod this week, Oracle finally has some news to share. Plus Log4j is ruining everyone’s lives, AWS suffers a massive outage post re:Invent, and Google CAT releases its first threat report. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights A critical vulnerability in Apache Log4j wrought havoc over the weekend. Cloud platforms and developers alike are racing to fix the bug, which gives hackers an opportunity to take control of systems remotely. On the heels of re:Invent, AWS suffered a major outage last Tuesday in its US-EAST-1 region, which had staggering repercussions across the cloud. Google Cybersecurity Action Team (CAT) releases its first Threat Horizons report, revealing its top three concerns threatening cloud users today. Top Quotes “It’s amazing how much of our infrastructure and applications live on these open source contributions of one or two people, and how critical they are to the entire ecosystem. And when they break or they&#8217;re vulnerable, it becomes a huge issue for us very quickly.” “Think about what Microsoft did: They started signing device drivers and signing applications that run in Windows, and everyone thought Oh, they’re just exerting control, what a terrible idea. They&#8217;re just trying to corner the market. And now, of course, 15 years later, binding authorization is probably the most critical next step in securing the cloud.” General News: The Log4j Vulnerability is COVID for Tech In light of the critical Apache Log4j 2.0 vulnerability that gives attackers the ability to to execute arbitrary code on other systems, AWS has released a hotpatch for the logging platform. The aim is to help developers mitigate risk as they work to update their systems to 2.15 or newer. VentureBeat reminds us that while the Log4j debacle is bad, at least organizations now have tools and processes in place to respond quickly to zero-day bugs. GCP has released a set of recommendations for those who are investigating and responding to the Log4j 2.0 vulnerability. To help customers detect whether their systems have been compromised by the Log4j bug, Google has updated its IDS signature to automatically scan for any Log4j exploit attempts. Google creates a new Web Application Firewall (WAF) rule to detect and block Log4j exploit attempts by attackers. AWS: What Better Way to Follow Up re:Invent Than With a Giant Outage? On the Tuesday after re:Invent, <a href="https://www.g

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team finds out whose re:Invent 2021 crystal ball was most accurate. Also Graviton3 is announced, and Adam Selipsky gives his first re:Invent keynote. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights Amazon’s re:Invent 2021 featured a ton of new updates, including AWS CloudWatch Evidently, AWS Private 5G, and a new AWS Sustainability Pillar. Justin’s prediction pick — Graviton 3 — was announced on Day Two of re:Invent, along with serverless options for data analytics, and a free machine learning (ML) database for existing AWS customers. Amazon CEO Adam Selipsky missed the mark at his re:Invent debut, announcing fewer new releases than expected to a low-energy crowd. Top Quotes “This is Adam’s [Selipsky] first keynote as CEO of AWS… I do feel it was a missed opportunity. Number one, he didn&#8217;t drive out a ton of announcements, which everyone expected. There was a miss across the entire audience — people were expecting something they didn&#8217;t get. And then number two, OK, maybe you&#8217;re not the best public speaker: maybe you should go with a different model.” “In the keynote, the message was really clear: They&#8217;re trying to democratize access to machine learning, they&#8217;re trying to give this access to more than just the elite data scientists and programmers. And that made me think that if you expand that out to no-code in general, that’s a really powerful thing” AWS: re:Invent 2021 feat. a Mechanical Cat Amazon highlights its top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2021 and gives details of new releases and updates across the platform. Pre:Invent: Because Every Good re:Invent needs a Warmup In support of its mission to educate 29 million people by 2025, AWS expands access to its free cloud skills training to empower learners to pursue careers in technology. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is now generally available to provide fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications for its enterprise customers. This scalable solution enables customers to use AWS as an elastic recovery site rather than relying on an on-premise disaster recovery infrastructure. AWS Control Tower users can now created nested organizational units within the platform. Huzzah! AWS Audit Manager users can now simplify their audit preparations with the new dashboard

The Cloud Pod: Oh the Places You’ll Go at re:Invent 2021 — Episode 144 On The Cloud Pod this week, as a birthday present to Ryan, the team didn&#8217;t discuss his advanced age, and focused instead on their AWS re:Invent predictions. Also, the Google Cybersecurity Action Team launches a product, and Microsoft announces a new VM series in Azure. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights AWS releases new G5 instances, which feature up to eight NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs. That’s super, super fast. Google’s Cybersecurity Action Team adds Risk and Compliance as Code (rCaC) Solution. Microsoft announces the NDm A100 v4 Series, and claims another spot on the TOP500 supercomputers list. Top Quotes “[AWS Resilience Hub] is already building on top of the FIS, which is interesting, but at some level I just want you to execute Lambda functions that validate things for me, and then tell me that I&#8217;m resilient because I validated it with Lambda.” “Anything that empowers more dynamic and interactive web development I&#8217;m all for.” Amazon Web Services: Give Us Your Car AWS is releasing new G5 instances, which feature up to eight NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs. For the cost of a small car every month, you too can get up to 40% better value on inferencing and graphics-intensive operations. AWS is releasing the Resilience Hub, a service designed to help you define, track and manage the resilience of your applications. Unified Search in the AWS Management Console now sources results from blogs, knowledge articles, events and tutorials. Buyer beware with this one: It will pull outdated information that is still available on AWS, and you could end up with a giant albatross that costs you a fortune. Amazon ECS is improving ECS Capacity Providers to deliver faster cluster auto scaling. When you&#8217;re using a capacity provider, it&#8217;s painfully slow to get the underlying hosting infrastructure to scale fast enough, so we’re presuming AWS has addressed this in the back end. Manage access centrally for JumpCloud users with AWS Single Sign-On. We’re super happy to see this: Take notes, Azure AD. Amazon ECS adds container instance health information. This is nice to see and will help improve your application resiliency. AWS re:Inve

On The Cloud Pod this week, the pod squad is down to the OG three while Ryan is away. Also AWS announces serverless pipelines, GCP releases Spot Pods, and Azure introduces Chaos Studio. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights AWS releases Serverless Application Model (SAM) pipelines to save development teams time. These pipelines streamline CI/CD configurations for AWS applications. In the spirit of savings, new GCP Spot Pods help GKE Autopilot users run fault-tolerant workloads while spending less money. Hooray! Azure Chaos Studio helps development teams wreak controlled havoc with a managed experimentation service, allowing them to safely build, break and optimize their apps with reckless abandon. Top Quotes “I think for some people when they&#8217;re looking at, OK, we&#8217;re gonna make this commitment to a different architecture, at that point in time, they&#8217;ve looked at serverless versus containerized apps, and most companies went the containerized apps route, but that might change in the next wave.” “Python 3.10 looks really interesting. It&#8217;s got a bunch of new features … around data handling specifically, which is really what people have been using Python for for years: bioinformatics and data science. But it has really neat features around matching different schemas of data and things like that.” AWS: Finally, a Pipeline We Can Get Behind AWS releases Serverless Application Model (SAM) pipelines, a new feature of the AWS SAM CLI, to help users simplify CI/CD configurations for AWS serverless applications. The new feature will help development teams minimize the amount of time spent creating pipelines, while also ensuring safe deployments. With AWS Fault Injection Simulator, users can now create and run FIS experiments that check the state of Amazon CloudWatch alarms and run SSM automations. We hope the only fault injections you have are in your EC2 instances, not in your Thanksgiving turkey. AWS customers running Windows containers rejoice: New Amazon ECS Exec allows you to execute commands or get information directly from your Windows container shell. Magic! Amazon is doubling down on Canada. AWS announced plans to open a second Canadian region, in Calgary, bringing the company’s total region count to nine. The Calgary region is set to open in late 2023 or early 2024, and AWS has committed to using renewable energy to help build it out. </li

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team wishes for time-traveling data. Also, GCP announces Data Lakehouse, Azure hosts Ignite 2021, and Microsoft is out for the metaverse. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights GCP releases its data lakehouse, a new architecture that offers low-cost storage in an open format. The real question is, can we book it on Airbnb? Microsoft kicks off Azure Ignite 2021, announcing new capabilities for its hybrid, multicloud and edge computing platforms. Microsoft also unveils plans for its own metaverse, including upgrades to Teams, Dynamic 365 Connected Spaces and more. Top Quotes “I&#8217;m a big fan of IDE for coding and that integrated environment to reduce context shifting, but when you&#8217;re talking about access to data, Jupyter is something that&#8217;s hosted, that you can protect and grant access to, versus an IDE like RStudio. It becomes a much trickier scenario to maintain any kind of data sovereignty, or protect that in any way, just because, by its true nature, you have to open it up.” “Between the Facebook Metaverse and Microsoft, who&#8217;s going to win the race? Everyone wants to build “Ready Player One.” And Facebook owns Oculus and they have all my data, then they can get my brain as well: They can just monetize the crap out of my profile. And then Microsoft has their augmented reality things… . But I think the power of the Azure cloud actually gives them the advantage versus Facebook, in my opinion. “ General News: ‘Tis Earnings Season ​​ Microsoft was the first to announce its quarterly revenue, boasting a $45 billion increase. This jump of 22% beats Wall Street expectations, and includes Microsoft Azure, LinkedIn commercial revenue, Office 365, and Xbox. Google also posted impressive results, rounding out the quarter at $18.9 billion, up a whopping 68% from one year ago. Much of this success came from Google Ads and GCP, where revenue was up 45% or about $5 billion. Due to ongoing supply chain issues and labor shortages, Amazon missed the mark on its earnings forecast, posting a profit of $3.2 billion, a 49% decrease from last year. AWS, however, outperformed (as usual), with a 39% rise in revenue to $16.1 billion. AWS: The Official Cloud Storage Provider of MI6 <a href="https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news

On The Cloud Pod this week, half the team misses Rob and Ben. Also, AWS Gaudi Accelerators speed up deep learning, GCP announces that its Tau VMs are an independently verified delight, and Azure gets the chance to be Number One for once (with industrial IoT platforms.) A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights AWS is using Gaudi Accelerators to speed up deep learning models — for nearly $10,000 a month. Google announces that Tau T2D VMs are now available in preview, and takes the opportunity to report that Phoronix has identified these Tau instances as the best price-performing ones yet. Azure bags the Number One spot in the Gartner Magic Quadrant category of Industrial IoT Platforms. We’re wondering how much schmoozing Microsoft had to do to pull this off. Top Quotes “I guess [AWS Gaudi Accelerators] solve the problem of lack of availability of NVIDIA CPUs. It&#8217;s almost impossible to buy a decent graphics card, and I&#8217;m sure the cloud providers are suffering horrendously with not being able to scale their machine-learning instances the way they wanted to, because of the chip shortage.” “We&#8217;ve said it for a long time now that with Google coming to the market when they did, it was very easy to take all the major gripes of AWS and Azure and improve on them. And they banged it out of the park. So kudos to them, because it is a much better user experience than [what you get with] the other two cloud providers.” General News: HashiCorp Increases Access to its Service Mesh HashiCorp introduces its new Consul API Gateway to help route traffic to applications running on the Hashicorp Consul Service Mesh. This seems like an early release, given its fairly basic capabilities. AWS: Rolling Out Gaudi Accelerators — Not Architecture AWS announces AWS Panorama, which is an appliance and SDK that allows users to process video data at the edge of their locations. AWS Panorama was first introduced at the last re:Invent, and is now generally available. Amazon joins Microsoft, Google, IBM, Honeywell and more in the race to build a quantum computer, partnering with Caltech to open a new center in Pasadena. 4&#x20e3; To save Peter some time in the lightning round, we combined four Amazon DocumentDB updates into one announcement: Users can now enjoy additional support for access control; support for $literal, $map and $$ROOT; capabili

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team’s collective brain power got a boost from guest hosts Rob Martin of the FinOps Foundation and Ben Garrison of JumpCloud. Also, AWS releases Data Exchange, Google automates Cloud DLP, and Azure Synapse Analytics is available for pre-purchase. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights AWS announces Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift, which will allow users access to and management of third-party data. Watch out, Snowflake. Google is making its Cloud Data Loss Protection (DLP) automatic so users no longer have to worry about manually monitoring their data. Azure has made Azure Synapse Analytics available for pre-purchase for customers looking to manage their analytics workloads. Top Quotes “There&#8217;s always that line: If you build a module that is very effective for users across the board, regardless of what they&#8217;re doing, at some point it just becomes a resource. It’s pretty tough to build complex modules that everybody&#8217;s going to use as-is, and not want to end up making their own.” “I do not envy security people in this current climate. The proliferation of cloud computing, edge computing, has really had to get a lot of creative minds working together to try and secure data outside your four walls of sanctity. … And so it&#8217;s good to see big companies starting to chime in and address that, because I think it&#8217;s just going to continue to keep growing.” General News: Hashicorp + AWS = A Match Made in Heaven At .conf21, Splunk announces a new workload-based pricing model for its smaller customers that will help drive retention. Clearly Splunk has been listening to TCP complaining about its insanely expensive model. HashiCorp releases the public beta of HCP Packer, which allows teams to track and automate build updates across their packer and terraform workflows. AWS and HashiCorp are partnering to make developers’ lives easier with new terraform modules for AWS, as well as an API path that will enable users to quickly deploy AWS resources while keeping modules lightweight and composable. Justin is stoked for this! AWS: AWS Data Exchange is Coming for Snowflake AWS releases its Security at the Edge: Core Principles whitepaper to help business and technology leaders ensure their cloud network security extends to workloads running on the edge. The paper points out three strategic areas to address: AWS Services at the edge location, AWS security best practices, and additional edge services. AWS Glue Crawlers now support Amazon S3 event not

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan reveals his love for “Twilight.” Plus GCP kicks off Google Cloud Next and announces Google Distributed Cloud, and Azure admits to a major DDoS attack. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights After a few awkward keynotes, Google Cloud Next kicks off days one and two, highlighting new features and announcing Google’s $10 billion investment in cybersecurity advancements. At Google Cloud Next, GCP announced the Google Distributed Cloud: A network of hardware and software to help organizations improve cloud strategies. After tooting its horn for reduced DDoS attacks in 2021, Azure reveals details about the largest DDoS attack in its history. This 2.4 terabits/second attack was launched in late August against an Azure customer in Europe. Top Quotes “It is kind of crazy, because [Google Distributed Cloud] is an open source project that&#8217;s basically how to run Google Cloud in your own data center. It&#8217;s probably a smart risk, because I do believe workloads will just eventually end up on Google Cloud.” “The tools have the functionality built in, but unless you&#8217;re offering that as a service to your end users … and thinking about the holistic management of the settings, the deployment and the full lifecycle of those things, it&#8217;s the difference between enabling your business to be secure and just shooting it in the foot.” AWS: Keeping Quiet This Week for Google Cloud Next Amazon Fraud Detector can now store event datasets and use this historical data to boost performance for ML models — all at a 56% reduction in price. AWS Console Mobile Application has (finally) added ECS, which will allow users to view and manage a select set of resources to support incident responses from their devices. Clearly someone at AWS listens to TCP and has heard Justin’s many complaints about this. CDK8s (say that five times fast) is now generally available and supports the Go programming language. Using CDK8s, you can define your K8 applications and apply K8 YAML to any cluster. Tired of accidentally deleting your backup with your cloud formation stack? The newly released AWS Backup Vault Lock solves this problem by using safeguards to ensure users store their backups using a Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) model. GCP: Thank U Google Cloud Next Ahead of Google Cloud Next, <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/node-python-and-javarepos-are-generally

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team is running at half-duplex without Peter and Ryan. Plus Cloudflare R2 is here, Facebook died for a day, and AWS releases Cloud Control Plane. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights Cloudflare’s new R2 service is making waves in the cloud object storage space, offering incentives like no egress fees and lower rates than its competitors. Influencers, boomers and bored teenagers collectively screamed on October 4th as Facebook and its associated apps experienced an unprecedented six-hour outage. AWS Cloud Control Plane offers developers an easier way to manage their third-party and AWS services with a new set of common APIs. Top Quotes “The bigger impact is actually WhatsApp, because for a large portion of the world, Whatsapp is the primary method of communication. If you go … to different countries overseas … everyone&#8217;s on WhatsApp. Everybody. So to not have that communication is a huge loss. And you have to wonder, does Facebook need to think about diversifying their backend in some way? Should all of their DNS be inside Facebook?” “[AWS Cloud Control API] is probably going to be a requirement for any new services that launch in AWS … which means that we will no longer be waiting weeks or months for new services to be available in CloudFormation.” General News: The day that Facebook died (for six hours) Cloudflare is getting into the cloud object storage market with its new, competitively-priced R2 Service. Unlike other storage services, Cloudflare is nixing the dreaded egress cost, and will charge 10% less than AWS, its largest competitor. Facebook is having a rough week. On October 4th — the day before a former employee testified to Congress about the social media giant’s negative impacts — Facebook accidentally unpublished itself and its affiliated apps for around six hours. A seemingly routine update caused issues with its BGP routes: Read the company’s account of events here. AWS: On a mission to control the cloud In a rush to release before the next AWS summit, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is now generally available. With Prometheus, users can easily monitor their containerized apps at scale, and new features like alert manager and ruler let users integrate SNS with various destinations. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-a

On The Cloud Pod this week, Justin may be out but the cloud stops for no one. Also, AWS announces a New Zealand region, GCP releases GKE Backup, and Azure Functions 4.0 is now in public preview. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights Grab your togs and sunnies! AWS is opening a New Zealand region to serve Asia Pacific. The move is expected to create more than 1,000 jobs in the next 15 years. GCP users can now protect their GKE workloads with GKE Backup, which helps automate recovery tasks and shows reporting for compliance and audit purposes. Azure Functions 4.0 has arrived — in public preview, that is. It’s expected to be generally available by November 2021, just in time for the .NET 6.0 release. Top Quotes “Microsoft Excel is still the most powerful tool for making business decisions. And [Amazon QuickSight] is the same thing: It&#8217;s a way to visualize the raw data you have. Being able to ask a service a question in normal words is gonna be super powerful.” “It’s funny because for at least the last 18 months, this has been my daily life: Thinking hard about how software makes it from environment to environment and into production. And no matter where you&#8217;re hosting this workload — what cloud provider, what technology — there are trials and tribulations and hurdles that have to be overcome … So I’d like to see more of these bespoke deployment technologies that are really focused on doing one thing really well, rather than doing all things.” AWS: AWS says ‘Kia Ora’ to its Newest Region: New Zealand With the newly available Amazon QuickSight, business users can use natural language (read: normal words) to quickly create interactive BI dashboards and receive accurate insights and data visualizations. Look out, Kiwis and hobbits: Amazon is set to open new data centers in New Zealand by 2024, adding the AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region to its 81 existing availability zones. It’s estimated that the new region will create 1,000 jobs in the next 15 years, but we believe it will have an even bigger impact. Tracing support is now generally available in AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. Users can now send telemetry data to various AWS applications as well as partner destinations. Telemetry, dear Watson. AWS releases AQ UA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift RA3.xlplus nodes. This new distributed and hardware-accelerated cache enables Redshift to run up to 10X faster than AWS competitors by boosting certain query types. Magic! AWS users can now <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/09/amazon-macie-managed-data

On The Cloud Pod this week, the whole team definitely isn’t completely exhausted. Meanwhile, Amazon releases MSK Connect, Google offers the Google Cloud Digital Leader certification, and DORA&#8217;s 2021 State of DevOps report has arrived. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights Users of AWS’s fully managed Apache Kafka service can now use MSK Connect to easily set up and deploy Kafka Connect clusters. GCP releases the new Google Cloud Digital Leader training and certificate program, which trains users on all things Google in just four classes. Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team publishes the 2021 State of DevOps, identifying key trends. Top Quotes “From a least-privileged perspective, it&#8217;d be better to have a purpose-built tool that does one thing really well — what you need it to do — versus building out this huge AWS CLI you have to install on every server and expose attack vectors if it has the wrong permissions.” “Digital transformation is such a broad thing for so many industries … and giving them this cloud knowledge helps them drive outcomes from a technical perspective, and map the business need to the technical need … It&#8217;s helpful for [business users] to get a little bit of language, but also for the technical person to actually learn how to translate technical ideas into business ideas that have value.” General News: F5 Absorbs Threat Stack F5 sets its sights on Threat Stack, paying $68 million to add this Boston-based cloud monitoring company to its growing list of cloud and security software acquisitions. This recent buy brings F5’s investment in cloud monitoring capabilities to over $2 billion. AWS: MSK Connect – the New Easy Button for Managed Kafka Service users AWS is eliminating undifferentiated heavy lifting for users of its fully managed Apache Kafka service, by introducing MSK Connect, which allows users to configure and deploy a connector using Kafka Connect with a few clicks. Amazon Redshift users can now use RSQL, a fully-featured command-line client, to interact with their clusters and databases. Working as a complement to the PostgreSQL psql command line tool, RSQL is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS X. GCP: Anointing Future Digital Leaders Google introduces the new Cloud Storage trigger in Eventarc, which eliminates the need for audit logs and supports bucket filtering. Now you can do what you’ve always done in Eventarc, only better. Google has answered its customers’ prayers

On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS releases OpenSearch and EKS Anywhere, Google Cloud is now available in the Toronto region, and Microsoft deals with two critical security issues. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights AWS releases OpenSearch (previously Elasticsearch) and makes EKS Anywhere generally available — to those who run VMware. Google Cloud opens a Toronto region, expanding its core Google portfolio into three new zones. How aboot that? Security issues continue to plague Microsoft, with critical vulnerabilities exposed in both its ACI and OMI features. Hopefully new hire, Charlie Bell, can help them out. Top Quotes “I hope that the reason [AWS is] integrating with VMware only is because they&#8217;re deeply integrating with that platform and they can spin up new VMs, deploy new infrastructure, and provide the scaling you need to make EKS Anywhere work the way it works in the cloud.” “Everything now is driven by the cloud in a big way, where you pay by the drip. So now I need to make the drip as efficient as possible. And if I can give you dedicated silicon to do that, that&#8217;s the best thing for me. And so it&#8217;s quite interesting.” General News: Jump On It The Cloud Pod sponsor, JumpCloud, raises $159 million in its Series F round, bringing its total funding to $350 million. Remote working has catalyzed growth for this cloud directory service, now valued at $2.56 billion. Take that, AD. Amazon Web Services: New Features, Who Dis? Amazon Elasticsearch is now OpenSearch. In addition to the new name, AWS has also added a host of new features like advanced security, SQL query syntax, updated reporting capabilities, and more. Overall, we are super happy with this first release! Amazon EKS Anywhere is now generally available… as long as you use it on top of VMware. EKS (almost) Anywhere helps users manage any Kubernetes cluster, and offers automation tooling for cluster lifecycle support. This comes two weeks late for Justin, who included it in his predictions draft. Bummer. Livestreamers rejoice! AWS is launching EC2 T1 instances for live multi-stream video transcoding, which will provide resolution up to 4K Ultra HD. Using GPUs for graphics processing — what an idea! Google Cloud Platform: Google Welcomes Toronto to the Family In addition to giving users dedicated CPUs, GCP is now offering CPU allocation controls which will allow

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team wishes there was something else on tap, not just NetApp. Also, AWS Storage Day has come and gone again, and Azure is springing into the enterprise cloud. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights The third annual AWS Storage Day brought a few presents, including new features for files and transfers. One announcement was the general availability of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Hell has frozen over, and you can now get Netapp Filers on top of AWS. Azure announces the launch of Spring Cloud Enterprise, a managed service for Spring optimized for enterprise developers. Top Quotes “I assume this is all built natively on top of AWS, and they are managing the service for you on EC2. If that&#8217;s the case, I believe this is the first of this type that AWS has offered. We&#8217;ve talked about Google partnering with people to operate appliances on your own VPCs, same as Azure. So this is probably the first of many partner integrations.” “I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s [Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points] they wanted, but I think at these prices, they definitely didn&#8217;t want it. If the price was more attractive or if it was simpler to process and calculate — more predictable — I think people would potentially be excited about this.” General News: Whisk It DigitalOcean acquired three-year-old startup Nimbella, which develops multi-cloud serverless software. It’s an interesting alternative to, say, building its own serverless stack with OpenWhisk. Amazon Web Services: Hell Has Frozen Over Here’s what happened at AWS Storage Day 2021. We recommend you check out the recordings, because it actually wasn’t a snooze fest. AWS announces general availability of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. If you want to import data into a data lake, this would be one way to do it. AWS announces Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering to optimize costs for workloads with changing access patterns.This gives you some flexibility that you didn&#8217;t

On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS releases new features including Managed Grafana, GCP Serverless solves the cold start problem, and Wiz hacks into CosmosDB. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights AWS shows no sign of slowing down after the Summit, making Managed Grafana generally available and releasing new features for VPC, CloudFormation, and CloudWatch. Google introduces new capabilities to minimize cold starts, giving serverless customers the option of using — gasp! — servers. Wiz finds a critical security flaw in CosmosDB which allowed it to hack into thousands of Azure customers’ databases. Looks like Microsoft needs to make some calls. Top Quotes “I just think about all the companies who were … trying to build their own ML models for document recognition and how far they are versus how far Amazon and Google are and Azure. … this is the reason why using your cloud vendor might be the better choice. Because they&#8217;re not even getting this kind of scale and or price reduction for anything they&#8217;re doing on top of ML.” “I think the main benefit for this change is going to be shared tenancy systems because, with virtualization, everytime there’s a context switch between different tenants on the CPU, you have to throw away that entire cache. The smaller that cache is, the faster that&#8217;s going to be, and the better overall performance you&#8217;ll get from the system.” ”There&#8217;s servers behind everything. So nothing’s serverless just how exposed are you to it? And to me, I think that level of exposure where it&#8217;s no longer serverless is if I have to patch it.” General News: Docker goes “Full Oracle” Docker announces it will begin charging enterprise customers to use it’s desktop app. Enterprise companies with over $10 million in revenue or greater than 250 employees have until January 31st, 2022 to buy the subscription. In Justin’s words, “that’s just dirty.” Amazon Web Services: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop To enable East-West traffic, Amazon has removed some VPC routing restrictions, allowing users to inspect, analyze or filter all traffic flowing between two subnets. AWS CloudFormation users are sharing a collective sigh of relief as they can now disable the automatic rollback when a cloud formation fails and retry stack operations from the point of failure. Peter is jumping for joy. AWS announces a 32% price reduction for Amazon Textract users in 8 regions as well as a 50% reduction in processing times for asynchronous jobs. Fast or cheap? We

On The Cloud Pod this week, the results of the AWS Summit prediction draft are in. It was probably worth getting up early for — especially if you’re Jonathan. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights At the Summit, AWS announces AWS Backup Audit Manager, sealing the prediction draft winner: Congratulations, Jonathan. Outside the Summit, AWS announces MemoryDB for Redis, new split charge rules, and cybersecurity updates. Former AWS leader Charlie Bell is joining Microsoft. What his role will be is unclear, but we speculate that he’ll play some part in improving Azure availability. Top Quotes “I suspect that certificate-based access to the console is going to be more prevalent. I don&#8217;t know of this in Microsoft Azure or Amazon, but I also know that this is one of the things popping up in custom security audits or in documentation that I&#8217;ve started to see more and more, which is, how do you control access to this publicly available API?” “This could be an additional $5 billion boost in revenue for Microsoft Office 365, which is important to us because Microsoft 365 is included in the Azure number and reported as one line item. So a $5 billion increase could be a pretty big increase in revenue and growth that Azure could then tout and say, We are finally the biggest, fastest-growing cloud.” General News: Later Days GitHub is saying goodbye to password authorization, but you can still create a personal access token to log in. Amazon Web Services: We’ve Reached the Summit Redis users in select regions can now use Amazon MemoryDB to boost their application performance with data durability, microsecond read, and single-digit millisecond writes. Unlike ElastiCache, MemoryDB does not require adding a cache from your database to achieve low latency. Amazon EC2 turns 15 this year. Launched with a single instance in 2006, there are now over 400 variations of instances. Happy birthday, EC2 — next year we’ll buy you a car. Good news for finance pros: AWS Cost Categories will now allow you to create split charge rules to allocate shared costs to different categories. Time to bust out the corporate card. IAM Access Analyzer users can (finally) get rid of localized cloud trails and consolidate them into a single account. This makes us super happy, except for Justin, who lost a

On The Cloud Pod this week, everyone’s favorite guessing game is back, with the team making their predictions for AWS Summit and re:Inforce — which were not canceled, as they led us to believe last week. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights AWS CTO talks about continuous configuration (CC) at Amazon in his latest blog post. CC has made it possible for the company to keep services running while it also adapts and reacts in real-time. Google launches monitoring and troubleshooting for virtual machines (VMs). Developers will be able to access visual guides talking them through various scenarios. Microsoft launches a lawsuit in response to AWS winning a $10 billion NSA contract, the content of which is reportedly related to the organization’s attempts to modernize the way it stores classified data. Top Quotes “When it comes to streaming VR, you can be very smart about what you send to a consumer and what you don&#8217;t. I mean, there&#8217;s still enough compute power locally that it has a good idea of what most of the scenes can look like. So potentially, local computers do the background or the bits that are complex, and you just stream the complexity with the bits that do need to be latency sensitive.” “I feel like all the monitoring tools out there have been missing this [monitoring and troubleshooting for VMs] for a long time, in that they seem to have all the features you need, but then getting the things you want is so difficult.” General News: Here We Go Again Amazon has won a secret $10 billion cloud computing contract from the NSA. This is JEDI all over again: Microsoft is not happy and has already launched a lawsuit. AWS CTO Dr. Werner Vogels talks about continuous configuration at Amazon. There are a lot of helpful tips in this article, particularly if you’re in Dev, DevOps or Ops. Amazon Web Services: A Good Brew AWS Codebuild allows project owners to make build logs and artifacts publicly accessible to anyone outside of AWS Console. This is a great way to build trust in your product: thumbs up from us. AWS continues to muddy the waters of Glue DataBrew with announcements about logica

On The Cloud Pod this week, it’s been an interesting few days in the cloud, so the team members have made themselves comfortable with plenty of adult beverages to keep them going. Also, Elastic has forked everyone with its latest Elasticsearch move. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights Elastic has modified the Elasticsearch Python client so it won’t work with forked versions, including the relatively recently released OpenSearch 1.0. AWS CloudWatch Synthetics now supports visual monitoring. Customers with web apps can see defects that can’t be scripted but would be visible to end users. Google introduces the Unattended Project Recommender. ​​It uses machine learning to identify projects that have likely been abandoned and forgotten about, so you can cull them from the cloud. Top Quotes “People were originally attracted to Elasticsearch because it was an open source project. So this [amending the Elasticsearch Python client] is taking away one of the main reasons they were able to acquire the users they did. I don&#8217;t get the strategy, unless they&#8217;re pulling a ripcord right now, because they&#8217;re bleeding.” “I know a lot of companies are moving their services into the cloud, and a lot of security engineers are restricting outbound access, or tightly controlling egress. These things [Google’s Private Service Connect] have to happen — these things are absolutely needed — to keep them secure, and allow those companies to sell their services. Good catch-up feature.” General News: We’re Not Angry Just Disappointed Elastic amends Elasticsearch Python client so it won&#8217;t work with forked versions — and proves it knows how unpopular this is by blocking GitHub comments. This is forcing people to choose sides, and is a really disappointing move. AWS details its commitment to keeping OpenSearch and Elasticsearch compatible with open source. Elastic has managed the impossible: it’s made AWS look like the good guys. Amazon Web Services: Unbreaking The Rules Amazon’s senior cloud leader Charlie Bell is leaving the company after more than 23 years. Knowing how fast AWS moves, we feel tired just thinking about working there that long. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling enhances Instance Refresh <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/08/amazon-ec2-auto-scaling-enh

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team is back in full force and some are sporting fresh tan lines. Also, it’s earnings season, so get ready for some big numbers — as well as some losses. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights AWS is finally killing off EC2-Classic. EC2 was launched in 2006, with one instance type (m1.small), security groups, and the US-EAST-1 Region. The 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services is out, and AWS, Google, Microsoft and Oracle have all made it. Although some scraped in by the skin of their teeth. Get consistent Kubernetes definitions with the new Anthos Config Management feature. The Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) helps users define and update resources with minimal effort on their part. Top Quotes “I would say Google&#8217;s getting market share because they are able to leapfrog everyone else on Kubernetes, big data, and machine learning.” “Considering all the different vendors that are involved in a hospital, just being able to have a standard data format with FHIR is huge. And they also now power that with the cloud. There are lots of really interesting use cases that get unlocked with this [Azure Healthcare APIs] solution.” General News: Earn Baby Earn Google’s parent company, Alphabet, crushed earnings expectations. It still lost a lot, though. Increasing the price of YouTube TV could have limited the damage. Microsoft&#8217;s revenue is up 21% overall. Azure’s revenue doubled, which is nuts. Amazon’s revenue is up 27% overall — but that’s down from the 41% year-on-year increase the company saw in Q2 of 2020. It’s starting to see post-COVID-19 corrections. Amazon Web Services: Not Fit for Consumption AWS named as a Leader for the 11th consecutive year in the <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-named-as-a-leader-for-the-11th-consecutive-year-in-2021-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-cloud-infrastructure-platform-services-cips/" target

On The Cloud Pod this week, it’s a merry-go-round of vacations, with Jonathan returning and Ryan escaping while Peter tunes in from Hawaii. Also, there is some big news in an otherwise quiet week. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights AWS announces that Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) users can now assign IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes to EC2 instances. It should help simplify the process of using container and networking applications that require multiple IP addresses. AWS releases a new feature for SAM CLI, SAM Pipelines. It provides quick and easy access to the benefits of CI/CD, making it easier to get out new products faster and check for errors. Microsoft has acquired security platform CloudKnox, which was designed to work across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Top Quotes “I hope to see more of these [SAM Pipelines-style features]. It’s been one of my mental blocks. I&#8217;ve been using serverless ever since Lambda was announced, but building into a pipeline is such a chore. And Jenkins is such a chore in itself. So if you have a canned way to deploy a pipeline, it&#8217;s great.” “I think it [CloudKnox] had a potential to be really interesting and really valuable. But Azure was actually building a lot of these capabilities into their cloud natively, including least privilege access. And Google&#8217;s building that kind of stuff too. So I don&#8217;t know if there&#8217;s a long runway left for them to get a lot of adoption and a lot of new customers, or if they’re going to be replaced by the cloud providers over time, and ultimately not be needed.” General News: Don’t Off Slack Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Slack for $27.7 billion. Hopefully they don’t kill slack because we do not want to use Teams. Amazon Web Services: Winning Amazon Virtual Private Cloud customers can now assign IP prefixes to their EC2 instances. Being able to assign multiple IPs is super helpful, so there are some great use cases for this. AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) Pipelines is a new feature of the AWS SAM CLI. We hope to see more of these types of announcements, this out-of-the-box function is so good. AWS is

On The Cloud Pod this week, if you were impressed by Matthew Kohn’s ability to wing it last time, then you’re in luck because he’s back. Also, the team hopes AWS is listening to the show and reading these notes, so it can get on with creating its own unified agent for CloudWatch. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights AWS has launches HIPAA eligible Amazon HealthLake. The service enables information exchange across healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, patients, and others parties. Google previews new Cloud IDS for network security. The system makes it easier to manage threat detection from the cloud. Microsoft announces the evolution of the Azure Migration Program (AMP). The new Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) will help enterprises improve their apps while moving them to Azure. Top Quotes “I have a couple of customers that I sent this [HealthLake] press release over to, and they&#8217;re very excited. They have no idea how they want to use it yet, but they&#8217;re very excited to figure out how to do something interesting with it. So I&#8217;m really curious to see how people actually start to play with this, and figure out how to use it to be beneficial for their companies.” “I was surprised that they limited the open-source UDP proxy to just gaming. I get that there&#8217;s some undifferentiated heavy lifting that is provided with session management security. But a UDP proxy that scales is something valuable to most companies that are using some legacy protocols. I wouldn&#8217;t be surprised to see this expand a little bit to enable some other UDP use cases in the future.” Amazon Web Services: Swimming Upstream AWS has launched a HIPAA eligible service for customers in healthcare and life sciences, called Amazon HealthLake. We recommend checking out the pricing before getting excited, as it seems expensive to us. AWS EBS io2 Block Express volumes are now <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ebs-io2-block-express-volumes-with-amazon-ec2-r5b-instances-are-now-generally-available/" target="_blank" re

On The Cloud Pod this week, with a couple of no-shows, Justin and Ryan’s Happy Hour includes returning guests Matthew Kohn and Sara Tumberella. Also, the team is curious to see what’s going to change at AWS with its new CEO. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights Amazon has finally launched OpenSearch 1.0. They’re hoping to make the transition to as simple as possible for open-source Elasticsearch users. AWS customers can now pre-pay for their usage. This will allow customers to pay future invoices automatically. Google announced the general availability of its new Google Cloud Certificate Authority Service (CAS). It hopes the service will help address the increased need for digital certificates. Top Quotes “I&#8217;m curious to see if you can do things like optimization, where you can reference a security group rule many times across multiple security groups. [You could] simplify a lot of your ecosystem by having maybe a catalog of rules that you apply selectively.” “I still haven&#8217;t seen much talk about what they&#8217;re doing with Beats, and if they&#8217;re going to fork Beats as well. Initially, they weren’t going to, but then it sounded like Elasticsearch basically pulled the rug out from under them on that too. I wouldn&#8217;t be surprised to see that also get forked at some point in the future as well.” General News: Red Tape New AWS CEO Adam Selipsky faces bureaucracy challenges. It will be interesting to see what he keeps and what he changes. Security: Ryan’s Going to Space Research suggests security tools are fighting for attention, and there’s a rise in false-positive alerts. When companies want the latest and greatest security applications, they often end up competing with each other, and it makes troubleshooting difficult. Amazon Web Services: Setting Fire to Dumpsters AWS announces new VPC security group rule IDs. We’re curious to dig into the details: for example, will it allow users to reference one security group rule across multiple security groups? AWS launches OpenSearch 1.0. We get the impression AWS is handling this project differently, by really investing in the community. AWS now allows customers

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan was busy buying stuff on Amazon Prime Day and didn’t want to talk about JEDI, so he arrived late to the recording. Also, long-time sponsor of The Cloud Pod, Foghorn Consulting, has been acquired by Evoque, so the team grilled Peter for the juicy details. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights The $10 billion JEDI cloud contract has been canceled by the Pentagon. In its place, the DOD announced a new multi-vendor contract known as the “Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability.” Evoque Data Center Solutions has acquired cloud engineering experts Foghorn Consulting. This is a key part of the company’s Multi-Generational Infrastructure (MGI) strategy, which it announced the same day as the acquisition. AWS released some incredible numbers from Amazon Prime Day. Jeff Barr gives his annual take on how AWS performed and the record-setting event. Top Quotes “The Pentagon has called off the $10 billion cloud contract [JEDI]. It was being dragged through the courts by Amazon and Microsoft, and this is sort of an admission that the Pentagon didn&#8217;t want Donald Trump to get subpoenaed and testify on what his involvement was in the whole contract.” “This is a big problem that almost every business has: how do you stop a deployment, especially a large deployment? Typically, we throw people at it, and we have them watch millions of dashboards, and hopefully, they catch it. But usually, it&#8217;s a problem somewhere that&#8217;s exposed to the customer that triggers that. So if we can have more tools like Gandalf that detect problems earlier, it’s great.” General News: Some People Can’t Take a Joke Evoque Data Center Solutions acquires Foghorn Consulting. Congratulations to Peter on this exciting news! The AWS Infinidash story has taken on a life of its own. What started as a joke has led to backlash from the community complaining about it being a form of technology gatekeeping. JEDI: We’re Not Talking About This Anymore The Pentagon has canceled the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract. It’s not really dead, they&#8217;ve just turned it into a joint multi-cloud offering, which is what we said they should do six months ago. Amazon Web Services: A Little Gooey Andy Jassy thanks AWS employees as he <a href="https://newsnationusa.com/news/finance/banking/internal-email-andy-jassy-thanks-his-missionary-insurgent-aws-cloud-team-as

On The Cloud Pod this week, with the first half of the year full of less-than-ideal events, the team is looking forward to another next six months of less-than-ideal events. Also, everyone is excited to see how they can manipulate the AWS BugBust Challenge for a free ticket to re:Invent. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights AWS launches the BugBust Challenge in the hopes of finding and fixing 1 million bugs. The challenge aims to help developers improve code quality, eliminate bugs and boost application performance while saving millions of dollars in application resource costs. Google has announced new features for Cloud Monitoring Grafana plugins. The new features include popular dashboard samples, more effective troubleshooting with deep links, better visualizations through precalculated metrics and more powerful analysis capabilities. Azure VM Image Builder service is now generally available. Image Builder will make it easier to build custom Linux or Windows virtual machine images. Amazon Web Services: Does Not Have Bugs AWS announces the world’s first global competition to find and fix 1 million software bugs. We don’t think they’re referring to Amazon bugs, just software bugs in general. AWS launches customized images for Amazon EMR on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. If you’re looking to reduce the time it takes to build images, that’s a good thing: otherwise it’s a fully managed service, so we’re not sure that users will care. Amazon announces new Java Detectors and CI/CD Integration with GitHub Actions for CodeGuru Reviewer. We’re amazed by how quickly GitHub Actions is being adopted. AWS acquires communication technology company Wickr. We want to know why Amazon is buying this: maybe they’re trying to enhance their enterprise and public sector application suites. AWS now supports container images to simplify <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/new-tools-to-simplify-continuous-integration-systems/"

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan pulls a classic move from 2020 and doesn’t realize he’s on mute. Also, the team completely destroys an article about the cloud being too expensive for what you get. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights VC firm a16z calls the cloud a “trillion-dollar paradox” in a blog post, noting the pressure cloud computing puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits. We think there are quite a few holes in their analysis and the Dropbox example doesn’t work. AWS releases Step Functions Workflow Studio. Developers new to Step Functions will enjoy being able to build workflows faster. Google announces that Quantum computers from IonQ are now on its marketplace. Developers, researchers and enterprises alike can now access IonQ’s high-fidelity, 11-qubit system via Google Cloud. General News: A Trillion-Dollar Paradox Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, known as &#8220;a16z,&#8221; thinks the cost of cloud computing outweighs its benefits. Dropbox is a terrible example to use in this case. Splunk launches Splunk Security Cloud and announces a billion-dollar investment by a private equity firm. We think it’s having some integration problems in the background — it’s something to keep an eye on. Amazon Web Services: Jonathan, You’re On Mute AWS launches Step Functions Workflow Studio. This is great for developers new to Step Functions as it reduces the time it takes to build their first workflow. AWS invites individual developers and small teams to take the Graviton Challenge. They’re obviously trying to drive adoption. AWS Key Management Service is introducing multi-region keys. A nuisance that has plagued Justin for years has finally been solved. AWS announces a public registry for CloudFormation, providing a searchable collection of textensions. People have

On The Cloud Pod this week, Matthew Kohn joins the team as a substitute for Jonathan and Peter, who have gone AWOL. Also, Google demonstrates again why its network is superior to the other cloud providers. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located. This week’s highlights AWS now allows crash-consistent AMIs without requiring a reboot. No more manual processes needed. Google is building a subsea cable named Firmina. The cable, to be comprised of 12 fiber pairs, will carry traffic quickly and securely between North and South America. Oracle announces improvements to its block volumes. Its Ultra-High-Performance (UHP) block volume comes with up to 300,000 IOPS and 2,680 MB/s throughput per volume and is generally available across all OCI commercial regions and on all interfaces. General News: Not Dead Yet Hashicorp Vagrant 3.0 will maintain its Ruby-based features while being ported to Go. We thought this was on a path to death but apparently not. Amazon Web Services: Proceed With Caution AWS announces a new region in Tel Aviv, Israel. AWS clearly realized it was behind the other cloud providers on building new regions. Amazon launches AWS Proton in general availability. There are some super cool improvements that have been done to this. Amazon EC2 now allows you to create crash-consistent Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). This is one of our EC2 wish list items — it’s great to tick it off the list. AWS announces per second billing for EC2 Windows Server and SQL Server Instances. It’s nice to only be billed for what you actually use. AWS removes NAT Gateway’s dependence on Internet Gateway for private communications. This has been a big annoyance for a while so nice to see it sorted! Google Cloud Platform: Just Figure It Out Google is

Is sending the former CEO of one of the biggest technology companies in the world to space a good idea? On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the potential economic catastrophe that could follow if Jeff Bezos becomes space junk. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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. Jumpcloud, which provides cloud directory services, enables remote access, eases onboarding and offboarding of users and enables zero trust access models. This week’s highlights Amazon is sending the old junk it found in the attic into space. Google is now fully qualified to direct traffic. Azure turned its out-of-office message on and hoped no one would notice. General News: Frenemies Snowflake had its annual user conference and announced some new tools and features. Pretty good! Jeff Bezos is joining the first human flight to space with his company Blue Origin. This is super risky, even if he’s no longer CEO. Fastly blames global internet outage on a software bug. This is the right way to address outages — nice one, Fastly! Amazon Web Services: Watch This Space Amazon announces auditing feature for FSx for Windows File Server. This needs an acronym. AWS has added a third availability zone to the China (Beijing) region operated by Sinnet. Nice to see. AWS Sagemaker Data Wrangler now supports Snowflake as a data source. Smart move. Google Cloud Platform: Sneaky Sales Tactics Google announces the release of container-native Cloud DNS for Kubernetes. Powerful building block or Achilles heel? Google announces new capabilities for Cloud Asset Inventory. Makes so much sense to come from the provider because they know what you have. Google releases new Microsoft and Windows demos on <a href="https://cloud.google.co

This week on The Cloud Pod, apparently there was a machine learning conference because there is A LOT of machine learning news. For the listeners (and hosts of The Cloud Pod) who don’t understand machine learning, buckle up because this will be a long episode for you. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Amazon is acting like it’s helping but really it’s lying with numbers. Google is pretending the 1991 Ford Fiesta it’s selling is a 2021 Mustang. Azure got a little overexcited with the use of its naming bot. General News: Fake It Until You Make It Amazon data shows more diversity among senior leaders after the definition of “executive” loosened. Well, that’s one way to do it. Amazon’s Andy Jassy is warming up for the CEO role. We hope competitors don’t expect him to tread softly when he starts. Pluralsight will acquire A Cloud Guru to address growing cloud skills gap. This is earth-shattering. Amazon Web Services: Busy As Usual Amazon Redshift Machine Learning is now generally available. There’s a helpful table to explain the different machine learning products. Amazon ECS Anywhere is now generally available. A bit disappointed that they haven’t addressed the networking issue more. Introducing Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics Studio for analyzing streaming data. They’re really into studios at the moment. Amazon SQS now supports a high throughput mode for FIFO Queues. This is nice. Amazon Location Service is now generally available with new routing and satellite imagery capabilities. Ju

This week on The Cloud Pod, Ryan is stuck somewhere in a tent under a broken-down motorcycle but is apparently still having fun. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Amazon went back to school to become a detective. Google was voted prom queen at the virtual homecoming. Oracle shocks everyone with its new look. General News: Great Partners Hashicorp has partnered with AWS to launch support for predictive scaling policy in the Terraform AWS provider. This will be hugely popular for people new to the cloud. Amazon Web Services: Dropping Stories For No Reason AWS Lambda Extensions are now generally available with new performance improvements. This has pretty limited regional availability, though. Amazon releases the AWS Shield threat landscape 2020 year in review. One of our favourite blogs. AWS EKS Add-Ons now supports CoreDNS and kube-proxy. This is neat! Introducing the AWS Application Cost Profiler — there have been a few complaints about this on Twitter. AWS Compute Optimizer launches updates to its EC2 instance type recommendations. This is awesome. AWS Outposts launches support for EC2 Capacity Reservations. Being able to use the same tool regardless of where you are is a good thing! An AWS Region in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is in the works. Great! Google Cloud Platform: Prom Queen 2021 Google VM Manager with OS configuration management is now in Preview. This is basically patch and agent management. Forrester names Google Cloud a leader in <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/google-a-leader-in-unstructured-data-security-platforms"

This week on The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the fine art of writing the podcast show notes so there are bullet points for when Peter shows up without doing the homework. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Amazon is catering to the unimaginative with its version of a vanilla milkshake. Google now performs commitment ceremonies but they come at a cost. Azure did an online pastry course and can now make croissants. General News: La France Est Méconnaître Amazon (France Is Ignoring Amazon) VMware picks longtime executive Raghuram as its new CEO. So many people were overlooked for this position. France says Google and Microsoft Cloud Services are OK for storing sensitive data. Bit of a snub for Amazon. Amazon Web Services: Busy Little Bees AWS SaaS Boost released as open source. Sounds more like a product than it actually is. AWS announces general availability of AWS Application Migration Service. If play is to lift and shift, with no thought of transformation at all, this is for you. AWS CloudFormation Guard 2.0 is now generally available. It’s great that this supports more than just cloud transformation. AWS Premium Support launches Support Automation Workflows (SAW). This will make the exchange of data so much easier. Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces a new lower-cost storage tier. This is great news for everybody. Amazon announces the release of EKS 1.20 — the raddest release ever. AWS launches another way to run containers with App Runner. Just in case you don’t want to use one of the other billion container services. Google Cloud Platform: Here To Confuse You Google will bring Starlink s

This week on The Cloud Pod, Justin is away so the rest of the team has taken the opportunity to throw him under the bus. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 has had enough of the kids fighting so no one gets the toy. Amazon has given developers the happy ending they’ve always wanted. Google is playing with fire and hopes no one gets burnt. JEDI: Play Nice Pentagon officials are considering pulling the plug on the star-crossed JEDI cloud-computing project. Reminds us of when we were kids and our parents took toys away when we couldn’t play nice together. Amazon Web Services: We’ve Made All the Money AWS announces a price reduction for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. That’s an awful lot of samples. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) announces pricing change for VPC Peering. Just get rid of the ridiculous data transfer fees! AWS Organizations launches a new console experience. We’re excited to try this out! AWS announces IAM Access Control for Apache Kafka on Amazon MSK. This is great. AWS Systems Manager now includes Incident Manager to resolve IT incidents faster. This might initially fall short of some of the other offerings on the market. AWS Local Zones are now open in Boston, Miami and Houston. They’re continuing on the Oracle model of racks in random garages. Amazon now lets you create Microsoft SQL Server Instances of Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts. A big hooray for people using Outposts. Google Cloud Platform: Smells A Bit Google announces Agent Assist for Chat is now in Preview. Hopefully this is better than predictive

This week on The Cloud Pod, Yahoo is back and cheaper than ever. Just kidding, it’s Ryan who is back and the team is curious as to how he managed to extricate himself out from under that kitten. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Amazon has been doing yoga and the results are paying off. Google bought a hard hat and is getting into the construction business. If you need to get your kid to sleep, let them read this from Azure. General News: Yahoo’s Renaissance Verizon dumps Yahoo-AOL for rock-bottom price. But they’re not dead yet! Amazon posts record profits as AWS hits $54B annual run rate. That’s pretty good! Microsoft beats Q3 revenue expectations, spurred by strong cloud sales. Get on the bandwagon, Azure. Alphabet announces first quarter results for 2021. It does include GCP and G-Suite revenue. Cloud infrastructure spending grew 35% to $41.8B in Q1 2021. These numbers boggle our minds. JEDI: Just Keeps Getting Better Court snubs Microsoft and the U.S. government’s request to throw out Amazon&#8217;s complaint against JEDI cloud contract decision. We can’t wait to hear what Trump says under oath. Amazon Web Services: Bring Your Own Talent AWS is launching Amazon FinSpace, a data management and analytics solution. Step one, invent the universe. AWS Proton introduces customer-managed environments. We had to look up what Proton actually is. AWS Proton allows adding and removing instances from an existing service. We’re looking forward to some re:Invent sessions on this. Amazon launches CloudFront Functions for the lowest

Justin and Jonathan kick off this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod by themselves, Peter joins the party late because he’s been fighting dinosaurs and Ryan is unable to attend as he can’t move from under the weight of the kitten on his lap. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Amazon will find any excuse to use GIFs just like the rest of us. Google has given Cardi B a headstart on a theme song for its new product. Azure sent the wedding invites out late but still expects you to show up. Amazon Web Services: Cheaper Than Healthcare Amazon RDS on VMWare no longer requires the use of a VPN tunnel back to AWS. Still cheaper than paying for healthcare. Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces support for Asynchronous Search. This is really cool! Amazon EC2 now allows you to replace the root volume for a running instance. There are some great use cases for this. Red Hat Enterprise Linux with High Availability is now available on Amazon EC2. Good to see IBM isn’t throwing up barriers. AWS is releasing the new Amazon FSx File Gateway. Hopefully this is easy to implement. AWS announces moving graphs for CloudWatch Dashboards. Also known as GIFs for CloudWatch. Google Cloud Platform: Closet Fans of Cardi B Google announces PHP, a general purpose programming language, is now on Cloud Functions. Visit thecloudpod.net to see a live example of PHP, also known as the WordPress platform we built our website on. GCP is launching Web App and API Protection (WAAP), which provides comprehensive threat protection for web apps and APIs. Do not confuse this with the Cardi B song. Google has made the Doc AI <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/get-mor

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team admits to using the podcast as a way to figure out what day it is. Justin also relents and includes Azure news because he couldn’t handle any more Oracle mobile apps announcements. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Social media influencers can breathe a sigh of relief. Amazon is dangling a carrot in front of one of its partners. Azure is throwing a spanner in the works. General News: Not Cool News The FBI arrests a man for his plan to kill “70% of the internet” in an AWS bomb attack. 70% is quite a stretch but we’re sure it would have caused a crappy day for a lot of people. Hashicorp has released its Boundary 0.2 release with several new features. We’re really excited about this. Announcing HashiCorp Terraform 0.15 General Availability. If you believe it, this is really great news. Amazon Web Services: Good At Compromising AWS announces AQUA is now generally available. Justin should have gotten a prediction point for this one. Amazon Managed Service for Grafana now offers more support. We’ll see if Grafana can actually make money out of its partnership with Amazon. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now integrates with AWS Lambda. This is really cool! Decrease machine learning costs with instance price reductions and savings plans for Amazon SageMaker. Some pretty significant savings here. Google Cloud Platform: Colossal Google takes a deep dive into its scalable storage solution, Colossus. Nothing new here. Google announces tracking index backfill operation <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practition

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan has given all his money to the Amazon press team to write really confusing headlines just to annoy Peter. Also, Jonathan is missing presumed cranky buns. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 IBM is spinning off its infrastructure services business — the new public company will be called “Kyndryl.” Teresa Carlson has left the AWS building. The AWS VP is headed to big-data analytics company Splunk Inc. as its new chief growth officer. Google’s like the cool kids who know how to party. General News: Eventual Degradation of Profits IBM to name its infrastructure services business “Kyndryl”. We hope they didn’t spend a lot of money coming up with that name. Top AWS executive Teresa Carlson joins Splunk as President and Chief Growth Officer. We thought she might have been a candidate to succeed Andy Jassy. Amazon Web Services: 5G Not Included AWS formally launches the OpenSearch project. Seems like it’s listened to the open source feedback. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling introduces Warm Pools to accelerate scale-out while saving money. Please don’t let Andy name anything. AWS and Verizon team up to provide 5G-powered edge computing infrastructure. Justin got his COVID-19 vaccination and was disappointed it didn’t come with 5G. Amazon Redshift now supports data sharing when producer clusters are paused. We wonder what underlying tech made this possible? Google Cloud Platform: Excel at No Code Leaf Space enables next-gen satellites on Google Cloud. This fills a very obvious gap in the market and is pretty cool. Google introduces a new blog series: Cloud CISO perspectives. Hopefully

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the future of the podcast and how they’ll know they’ve made it when listeners use Twitter to bombard Ryan with hatred when he’s wrong. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Amazon gives Justin a long overdue birthday present. Google wants to educate the people. Azure has a new best friend but could they be a wolf in sheep&#8217;s clothing? General News: Goodbye, Friend The Apache foundation has decided to send Mesos to the attic. This makes us sad because we loved the concept. Amazon Web Services: Happy Birthday, Justin New AWS WAF Bot Control to reduce unwanted website traffic. This is great! AWS is releasing the Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS firewall to defend against DNS-level threats. Pricing is interesting on this one. AWS launches CloudWatch Metric Streams. After years of complaints, they’re finally fixing this issue. AWS Lambda@Edge changes duration billing granularity from 50ms down to 1ms. Nice price cut! AWS Direct Connect announces MACsec encryption for dedicated 10Gbps and 100Gbps connections at select locations. AWS has fulfilled their promise to Justin — three years later. Amazon announces new predictable pricing model up to 90% lower and Python Support moves to GA for CodeGuru Reviewer. If this goes down next week, blame Ryan. Google Cloud Platform: So Pretty Google is releasing an open-source set of JSON dashboards. This is super important. Google announces free AI and machine learning training for

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team is feeling nostalgic and a little nerdy, as you can see from the show title — a throwback to Serial Console and its ability to add a ton of characters when you didn’t want it to. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Amazon should be singing a different tune. Google has astonished us all by actually sharing something interesting. Azure is the strict school principal that just canceled lunch. General News: Justin Said It First VentureBeat predicts industry clouds could be the next big thing. Justin will take the royalties check anytime, VentureBeat. Amazon Web Services: Please Don’t Keep It To Yourself Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS is now generally available. Surprising because we don’t remember it going into beta. AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry adds StatsD and Java support. We’re glad to see the continued investment in OpenTelemetry. AWS DevOps Monitoring Dashboard solution is now generally available. The solutions library is a Rube Goldberg machine. Amazon Lookout for Metrics is now generally available — perfect for Ryan, who has no machine learning experience. Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces a new Auto-Tune feature for improved performance and application availability. We wish Amazon would open source this. AWS SSO credential profile support is now available in the AWS Toolkit for VS Code. Thank you, Jesus. Amazon is developing a chip to power the hardware switches that shuttle data around networks. Apparently Google and Apple are also doing this. Troubleshoot boot and networking issues with new EC2 Serial Console. Must be useful for someone,

Disappointed not to see Amazon take the opportunity to increase its executive diversity with its new CEO. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 If Amazon was the royal family, this would be like Harry becoming King. Google found slugs in its lettuce and is not happy about it. Azure wants to shut The Cloud Pod up for good this time. General News: Nothing Spicy Sysdig is releasing unified cloud and container security with the launch of Unified Threat detection across AWS cloud and containers. Interesting that it uses Cloud Custodian. Amazon Web Services: No Longer Hiring Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky will return to Amazon Web Services as CEO. We did not see this coming. Introducing Amazon S3 Object Lambda. They listened to us! Google Cloud Platform: Slurm It Up Google Cloud caps sales commissions as losses mount. This will remove the motivation to go after smaller deals. Google announces a new method of obtaining Compute Engine instances for batch processing. We thought it was attacking our workloads but it actually wasn’t — our bad. Google is announcing the preview of its Network Connectivity Center. No potatoes, thankfully. Announcing the newest set of features for Slurm running on Google Cloud. Worst name ever. Google announces A2 VMs are now generally available with the largest GPU cloud instances with NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Is this the computer version of scalping tickets? Google announces high-bandwidth network configurations for General Purpose N2 and Compute Optimized C2 Compute Engine VM families. We’d love to know what the technology is behind this. Azure: Not Happy With The Cloud Pod Azure announces plans to expand the Azure Availability Zones to more regions. We’l

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team debate the merits of daylight savings and how they could use it to break things in a spectacular fashion. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Amazon is injecting the fun back into the party. Google is going mission-critical, spare a thought for its employees. Azure has released a new storage defender to reduce the threat of storage exploitation. General News: Back From The Dead Docker CEO talks about their progress, product-led strategy, and coders as “kingmakers.” We’re not sure how solid that funding is but we’ll see how it goes when the renewals come around. Amazon Web Services: So Many Faults Amazon is launching the AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) for controlled fault experiments on AWS workloads. We can’t wait for FIS to go wrong and start injecting faults where they don’t belong. Amazon announces price reduction for S3 Glacier. We can hear the cash registers ringing in the background. Amazon is celebrating 15 years of Amazon S3 with “Pi Week” livestream events. It’s not a sentient being! Amazon gives customers an easy way to execute commands in a container running on ECS ec2 based instances or Fargate with ECS Exec. A little clunky to set up but it’s amazing! Amazon announces end of life date for ECS-optimized Amazon Linux AMI. We’re predicting Amazon announces an extension announcement in January 2023! Amazon is launching a new set of Graviton2 based instances for memory-intensive workloads. This sounds really good. Amazon is adding policy validation to IAM Access Analyzer. Can’t argue with the price, it’s been so helpful. Google Cloud Platform: Yell At Us Google is releasing a new service called <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/introducing-google-cloud-mission-critical-services" target

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan’s brain is a little scrambled and he can’t remember when he last went out for dinner even though it was with Justin on Tuesday. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 honey pot might be about to dry up for Microsoft&#8217;s lawyers. If you need a headache to get out of dinner with the in-laws, read this. Google has finally started listening to the sage advice from The Cloud Pod. General News: Burn, Baby, Burn Okta says it’s buying security rival Auth0 for $6.5 billion, sending its stock plunging. The company’s not telling us its plan so don’t panic just yet. OVH data center burns down knocking major sites offline. Brutal. JEDI: Things Are Not Going Well With a $10 billion cloud-computing deal snarled in court, the Pentagon may move forward without it. We can’t wait to see what this has cost taxpayers. Amazon Web Services: Bottom Of The Barrel AWS Lambda has received four new trusted advisor checks. This is a real advantage! AWS Secrets manager now lets you replicate secrets across multiple AWS regions. This makes our brains hurt. Google Cloud Platform: Just Listen To The Cloud Pod Introducing Apache Spark Structured Streaming connector for Pub/Sub Lite. Easy tools to make life easier! Google’s Cloud Healthcare Consent Management API is now generally available. Could be a Trojan horse. Save the date for Google Cloud Next ‘21: October 12–14, 2021. Thank you, Jesus, it’s not nine weeks long! Managing cloud firewalls at scale with new Hierarchical Firewall Policies. This is a terrible name. Azure: Hot Po

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter is spending the next 12 hours in a rejuvenation chamber like a regular villain straight out of a James Bond film. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: 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 Amazon is on a mission to replace humans so we can go on holiday permanently. Google is a bit early with the April Fools’ joke. Azure is, much to our surprise, ahead of everyone else for once. Amazon Web Services: Battle Bots Amazon announces Alexa Conversations is now generally available for voice app development. We’re still a bit disappointed in her voice — it would be nice to hear something a bit more natural. Amazon launches computer vision service to detect defects in manufactured products. Soon we’ll just be sitting around eating bon bons — we can’t wait! AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) region now open to all, with three availability zones and more services. We think this is a reaction to the huge cloud growth in Japan. AWS DeepRacer League’s 2021 season launches with new Open and Pro divisions. Apparently it&#8217;s gone virtual and is being dominated by experts. Google Cloud Platform: A Bit Jealous Google introduces GKE Autopilot, a revolutionary mode of operations for managed Kubernetes. Autopilot makes it sound like an Oracle product. Google announces the Risk Protection Program to enhance trust in cloud ecosystems. Google wants you to pay insurance in case its cloud goes down… Google extends BigQuery BI engine for faster insights across popular BI tools. Pretty cool! New enhancements for Google Cloud Marketplace Private Catalog including Terraform support. This is pretty good for internal teams managing private catalogs. Azure: Killing It Microsoft has announced a trio of <a href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2021/02/24/