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

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan has returned and is sitting in his garage letting it get darker and darker before he turns a light on. Gartner says low-code is growing!! NOOOOOO! 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 is teaming up with TV to make hockey more exciting. Google is no longer stuck in the 90s. Oracle thinks it’s ruggedly handsome — it is not. Follow Up: Somebody’s In Trouble SolarWinds hackers downloaded some Microsoft source code for Azure, Exchange and Intune. Intune is probably the most damaging — this is not good news for Microsoft. General News: The Glowing Puck Gartner is reporting that Low-Code development tool growth has grown 23% this year. Gartner, pay to play. AWS provides the National Hockey League with cloud, AI and machine learning services. It’s great to see computer tech adding to viewer engagement. Hashicorp announces the general availability of the Terraform Cloud Operator for Kubernetes. It’s an interesting solution to a very hard problem. Amazon Web Services: Everyone’s On Vacation Amazon EC2 Mac Instances now support macOS Big Sur. Completely stunned by this, aren’t you. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now shows scaling history for deleted groups. This actually solves a small but annoying problem for Justin. Google Cloud Platform: Jumping Back To 1994 Google introduces schedule-based autoscaling for Compute Engine. Finally catching up to Azure and AWS, both of which have had this for a few years now. Google adds several new features to Google Cloud VMware Engines to support workloads moving from the cloud. We just want the VMware tools. Google launches Cloud Domains to make it easy to register and use custom domains within its platform.

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan is getting his beauty sleep so you’ll have to make do with the comic stylings of Justin, Peter and Ryan. 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 Like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Amazon is turning into a beautiful butterfly. Google is helping to monetize Jonathan&#8217;s beauty sleep. It’s the end of the world, we can Azure you. Amazon Web Services: The Weird Kid in Class AWS announces Amplify Flutter is now generally available. Get your flutter on in the cloud. Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.19. Weird use case, but OK. AWS Direct Connect announces native 100 Gbps dedicated connections at select locations. No discount for more data — well done, Amazon. Google Cloud Platform: Jonathan’s Money Maker Easily build Kubernetes applications that span multiple clusters with Google’s new multi-cluster services (MCS). Now you can have your cake and eat it, too! Google announces general availability of Service Directory. Now Jonathan makes money while he sleeps. Google announces 9TB SSDs to bring ultimate IOPS per dollar to Compute Engine VMs. Still not that exciting. Azure: Lost in Space Azure announces Firewall Premium is now in preview. No more excuses for sticking with standard firewall protection. Microsoft will establish its next U.S. datacenter region in Georgia’s Fulton and Douglas Counties. Not only did Georgia go blue, they went Azure blue. Azure announces partnership with HPE and the upcoming launch of the Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2). Also known as SkyNet. </l

On The Cloud Pod this week, The Team are on the brink and three more months of the pandemic will likely push the podcast over the edge into an abyss of garble that no one can understand. 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. Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto-discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data. This week’s highlights Amazon has a gender reveal party and introduces its latest bundle of joy. Google is eating croissants for breakfast. Azure is dangling a pair of juicy fruits in front of us. Follow Up: The Mad Men Are Back Amazon announces its “Other” business segment, which consists mostly of its advertising business, has surpassed its “subscription services” segment. There’s speculation that Andy Jassy might split Amazon&#8217;s advertising business out once he becomes CEO. General News: Rolls Right Off The Tongue Vantage, an AWS Console alternative, has acquired ec2instances.info. They better not mess it up! Amazon Web Services: Undoing Your Hard Work New Amazon Elastic Block Store Local Snapshots on AWS Outposts makes it easier to meet data residency and local backup requirements. It’s like playing a video game and building up your weapons, only to start from scratch when you move regions. Amazon introduces CloudFront Security Savings Bundle. We appreciate the savings, but not sure about the bundle. Google Cloud Platform: Our Buzzword Bingo Is On Point Google launches improved troubleshooting with Cloud Spanner introspection capabilities. We love these types of tools, except if they’re on SQL Server. Google launches Apigee X to help enterprises manage their digital transformation assets. What is it with X? What happened to 8 and 9? Google introduces real-time data integration for BigQuery with Cloud Data Fusion. For

It’s Peter’s washing night so please enjoy the soothing sounds of the odd spin cycle as we dive into the huge news coming out of Amazon on The Cloud Pod this 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. Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto-discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data. This week’s highlights America’s version of Queen Elizabeth has stepped down. Google is a bit late to the party but brings the ice so we forgive its team. Azure is trying to claim it came first but the chicken says otherwise. Follow Up: A Bit Slack Slack explains how the January 4th outage occurred. It was all Amazon’s fault. FogOps for Linux is now available via the AWS Marketplace. Congratulations on getting FogOps on the marketplace, Peter! General News: It’s Earnings Season! Microsoft releases its earnings. This is nuts. Alphabet also released its earnings. We hope all the money it’s investing in infrastructure and data centers pays off in the long run, because that’s a big loss. Amazon announces financial results and CEO transition. That’s some crazy profit. Outgoing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos addresses employees. But who will head AWS now? Amazon Web Services: Bon Voyage, Bezos AWS launches multiple private marketplace catalogs for AWS organizations. Not a problem any of us have so not wowed by this. AWS PrivateLink for Amazon S3 is now generally available. We like it but don’t like the pricing. Amazon Macie announces a slew of new capabilities. Check out our sponsor OpenRaven, which is much better at solving the same issue and is much cheaper. Google Cloud Platform: Stop Blaming Our Database Google announces <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/

It’s a Wednesday so things could be better, but spare a thought for the team as they battle Mother Nature on The Cloud Pod this 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. Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto-discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data. This week’s highlights Amazon is forking people off big time. Google wants to help you lose those pandemic lockdown pounds. Azure didn’t overwhelm anyone with its “problem.” General News: The Elastic Kerfuffle Elastic blames Amazon for forcing it to change its licensing. One of the most ridiculous blog posts ever. Logz.io looks to launch a true open-source distribution for Elasticsearch and Kibana. Everybody’s forking now. AWS has also announced that it will also fork its project for a truly open source Elasticsearch. The beginning of the end for Elasticsearch. Logz.io followed up its previous announcement by announcing it’s combining its efforts with Amazon. This is great news for the open-source community. Amazon Web Services: Let’s Talk AWS Lex has released a new console experience and new V2 APIs to make it easier to build, deploy and manage conversational experiences. We’ve played with it and it’s very nice. Amazon CloudWatch Agent now supports OpenTelemetry APIs and Software Development Kits. Could be a sign it’s about to make a lot of investments in OpenTelemetry and is moving away from CloudWatch. Amazon GuardDuty enhances security incident investigation workflows through new integration with Amazon Detective. Integrated security — we like it! Amazon Chime SDKs for iOS and Android now support screen share. It’s great it has functionality that other apps have had from the start. Amazon ECS Agent v1.50.0 allows customers to <a href="https://github.com/aws/amazon-ecs-agent/releases/tag/v1

On The Cloud Pod this week, news has been a bit slow coming out of the Cloud Providers; the team suspects they might be curled up on the floor in fetal position after the events of last year. 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. Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto-discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data. This week’s highlights Amazon has gone to the gym over the holidays and is now kicking butt. Helping teach us the ways of the cloud, Google is. There’s nothing remotely funny about Azure this week. General News: Ryan Doesn’t Want to Wear Pants Amazon has kicked controversial social media platform Parler off AWS. The multi-cloud people are going to be unbearable now. Amazon defends its decision to suspend in response to Parler’s lawsuit. Most people don’t know Amazon sent Parler notices for months — it’s not like they weren’t warned. F5 Networks to acquire edge-as-a-service startup Volterra for $500M. There’s so much buzzword lingo in this announcement, we suspect this service will lack substance. Red Hat buys Kubernetes security startup StackRox. We’re surprised Google didn’t buy it. Pat Gelsinger is stepping down as VMWare CEO to replace Bob Swan at Intel. We think he has a very long road ahead to get Intel back on track. Amazon Web Services: Family Time AWS announces Transfer Family now provides support for EFS file systems as well as S3. Would be nice if this would tie into Incognito or Simple Directory Service. Amazon EMR now supports Apache Ranger for fine-grained data access control. Neat. Achieve faster database failover with Amazon Web Serv

On The Cloud Pod this week, it appears 2020 is not done with us yet and Ryan receives a mystery emergency alert to kick the show off. 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. Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto-discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data. Due to the pandemic and the cancellation of just about every in-person event, Justin has hundreds of stickers at his house that (his wife says) need to go. Head to The Cloud Pod store and use codes 100EPISODE or 2020SUCKS for 75% off. This week’s highlights Amazon won’t be taking a holiday to China anytime soon. Google is tapping Linux users for new ideas. Azure is being annoyingly helpful to the healthcare industry. Amazon Web Services: Ready For Battle AWS Certificate Manager is now compliant with FedRAMP, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. What exactly makes up the compliance requirement? We’re not sure. Amazon Web Services launches appeal after losing $12-million AWS trademark war in China to local biz Actionsoft. You know who should be suing everyone? The American Welding Society, which has been around since the 1800s. Amazon SQS announces tiered pricing for monthly API requests. Discounts are good but we’re surprised they’re using tiered pricing. Amazon Elastic Container Service launches new management console. We want to like this but it sort of just aggravates us. Google Cloud Platform: Bowing to Demands Google announces a new tool to mimic the behavior of tail -f which displays the contents of a log file to the console in real time. Thank you Linux users for demanding this! Azure: Opt-in Introducing the Azure Health Bot, an evolution of Microsoft Healthcare Bot with new functionality. On the one hand, this is super helpful. On the other, it’s Clippy (the annoying paper clip assistant) and dear God, go away! Microsoft promises 9

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team looks back on the incredibly weird year that was 2020 and how all we want is to give each other a hug (but we don’t because social distancing is important). 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. Open Raven, the cloud-native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto-discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data. This week’s highlights Amazon hurts Google’s feelings with its harshly worded message. Google is tapping into its inner dictator by vying for world domination. Azure wants you to know it made something cheaper. Recapping the Shit Year That Was 2020 The Predictions That Were Made for 2020 Justin: Amazon and Microsoft will work hard to compete with GKE. Peter: Kubernetes workloads will double in the next year. Jonathan: Amazon will open data centers across growing African economies, RISC-V based RISC instances will release (and Slack will be acquired this year for sure). No One: A global pandemic and Ryan would join the podcast (coincidence?). Favorite Announcements of 2020 Ryan: AWS Serverless host and run applications, bringing it closer to what developers need. Tooling, savings plan Covid-19 response, from each vendor, from public data lakes, responding to capacity needs, database of research and overall support of WFH A big shift for Container Ecosystems, Split from enterprise/developer, Docker.com on downward trend, download limits Peter: Google’s creation of the Open Usage Commons for trademarks Amazon Braket WFH trend — which may be permanent Jonathan: Solarwinds Hack, and the risk of a supply chain hack occurs Confidential Computing and the enclave needs

In its final week, re:Invent continues to deliver a slew of announcements, which are captured on The Cloud Pod this week. It came and went quickly for the team unlike Google Cloud Next, which seemed to go on forever. 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. Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data. This week’s highlights Amazon and Microsoft are acting like children that need to be separated. Infrastructure nerds are rejoicing at re:Invent. You can spend while you sleep with Google. General News: Everyone&#8217;s Favorite Topic A heavily redacted version of AWS&#8217;s latest protest against Microsoft and the JEDI contract has been unsealed. Trump made them do it. U.S. Treasury and Commerce Department communications were reportedly compromised by a supply chain attack on security vendor SolarWinds. Go hug a security team this week. Amazon Web Services: The Presents Keep On Coming re:Invent Continued AWS launches the VPC Reachability Analyzer to measure reachability between two endpoints without sending any packets. Anything that makes life easier is a win. The re:Invent infrastructure keynote lacked announcements but gives insight into how AWS thinks about data centers. Old school infrastructure nerds, take note of this one. AWS announces the general availability of Amazon EMR on Elastic Kubernetes Service. EMR fans will be super happy about this. AWS has released an Infrastructure Code Template generator to make it easy to start using Spot Instances. You can go straight to production now, no testing! Just kidding… Please test. Amazon EBS reduces the minimum volume size of Throughput Optimized HDD and Cold HDD Volumes by 75%. This is kind of nice! Amazon EC2 announces new network performance metrics for EC2 instances. Troubleshooting

This week on The Cloud Pod, the team admits defeat and acknowledges they are not experts in machine learning. Joining them in that club is the rest of us. 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. Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data. This week’s highlights Amazon is helpfully pointing out all your mistakes. Google knows you have deep pockets and wants a piece. Microsoft is really bad at keeping secrets. General News: Jonathan Called It Salesforce has acquired Slack for $27.7 billion. We’re hoping Chatter will die a horrible death now. Amazon Web Services: Error 404 Amazon explains the Thanksgiving Kinesis outage that occurred in North East Virginia. We feel bad for the Ops team that had to support this. re:Invent Continued Amazon adds stronger Read-After-Write consistency to S3. A really fantastic technical feat. Amazon announces S3 Replication support for multiple destination buckets. Nice and simple! Amazon S3 Replication now has the ability to replicate data from one source bucket to multiple destination buckets. Super excited about this! Integrate Amazon Honeycode with popular SaaS applications, AWS services and more. It’s finally usable now. Amazon announces new AWS Region is in the works for Melbourne, Australia. It will also use 100% renewable energy, which is cool. Fully serverless batch computing with AWS Batch Support for AWS Fargate. Batch is a weird service to begin with. Amazon debuts Trainium, a custom chip for machine learning training in the cloud. We’re confused by this one. Amazon HealthLake stores, transforms and analyzes <a href="http

Santa arrived early and he brought all the goods with him to The Cloud Pod this week. The team dives into all the big announcements from AWS re:invent 2020. 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 Amazon flips the bird at Microsoft with its Babelfish announcement. AWS is angling for a free Jeep Wrangler with its new service. AWS is helping customers get out of the sticky situation they’re in and don’t know it. Amazon Web Services: Thankfully They Didn’t Ruin Our Predictions Amazon launches managed workflows for Apache Airflow to simplify data processing pipelines. Interesting to see it giving some alternative options. AWS Lambda now has Code Signing, a trust and integrity control to confirm code is unaltered and from a trusted publisher. Not a nice way to start Thanksgiving if you are Palo Alto. Amazon announces centralized account access management of AWS Single Sign-On and Attribute-based access control. Has a few rough edges. Multi-Region Replication is now enabled for AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory. We’re so glad this is finally here. Amazon announces reusable building blocks called modules to define infrastructure and applications in AWS CloudFormation. Amazon is jumping on the reusable elements bandwagon with this one. AWS Security Hub integrates with AWS Organizations for simplified security posture management. Basically a centralized security hub. AWS Elasticsearch Announcements: Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces support for Elasticsearch version 7.9 Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports anomaly detection for high cardinality datasets <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/11/amazon-elasticsearch-service-introduces-piped-proce

This week on The Cloud Pod, the team used their slightly cloudy crystal balls to share their predictions for Re:Invent 2020. They hope Amazon doesn’t ruin them before the event. 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. Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. This week’s highlights Amazon spoils the prediction party by revealing a new product just before Re:Invent. Google is making sandcastles by itself in the sandbox. Azure is smart enough not to announce anything exciting right before Amazon’s big day. Amazon Web Services: Crushing Hopes and Dreams Amazon Lightsail lets developers easily deploy containers in the cloud. This is like the cloud version of candy-flavored tobacco — somebody out there will be excited. Amazon announces visual data preparation tool AWS Glue DataBrew. Really cool — we wish they’d created this sooner! AWS Key Management Service now supports three new hybrid post-quantum key exchange algorithms. We’re just happy that the defense is ahead of the offense this time. Amazon launches AWS Network Firewall, a highly available, managed network firewall service for VPC. Peter is angry that Amazon killed one of his Re:Invent predictions. Introducing Amazon S3 Storage Lens for organization-wide visibility into object storage. We think the dashboard is built on years of customer complaints, not experience. Re:Invent Predictions Prediction rule: If it’s already been officially announced by Amazon, then it doesn’t count. It needs to be in the rumor mill and somewhat specific. Peter Integration between Sumerian and Chime/Slack (messaging service) for virtual in-person meetings Major upgrade to CloudWatch/Logs/GuardDuty/CloudWatch Events (SIEM) but an actual SIEM product. Will have its own name or does something to GuardDuty Robot SDK for tight integrations into AWS Cloud Jonathan Serverless graph database <l

This week on The Cloud Pod, the team is getting ready to share their predictions for re:Invent, and that may or may not involve greasing the palms of some Amazon employees. 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. Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. This week’s highlights Amazon is becoming a connoisseur of international cuisine with its new region. Google is borderline nefarious in the scientific community. Azure adds a long overdue feature. Amazon Web Services: Spicing Things Up AWS announces the new Hyderabad region in India will open in mid-2022. We’re surprised at how long this took to happen. AWS launches managed messaging service Amazon MQ for Rabbit MQ. Only took three years of Justin whinging. Amazon now allows customers to proactively manage the EC2 Spot instance lifecycle using the new capacity rebalancing feature. Not sure this needed a whole blog about it. AWS announces AWS Gateway Load Balancing for easy deployment, scalability and high availability for Partner Appliances in the cloud. Thanks for helping us out, Amazon! AWS makes it easier to export DynamoDB table data to S3 with no code writing required. At lots less Lamda spackle, we like it. AWS announces a full set of features across the storage family as part of AWS Storage Day 2020. Buckets, buckets and more buckets. Google Cloud Platform: Doing What It Does Best Google Cloud SQL now supports Postgres 13. Next up, Google announces deprecation of Postgres 13… Just kidding. GCP launches a unified console for document processing with Document AI platform. For anyone who hates data en

While waiting on tenterhooks to find out who will win the U.S. presidential race, the team welcomed guest Jacques Chester to The Cloud Pod this 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. Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. Manning Press is offering a 40% discount on any Manning Publication, and we highly recommend Knative in Action by guest Jacques Chester. Use the code PODCLOUD20 to receive 40% off; additionally, the first five people who retweet this episode from the official @thecloudpod1 twitter account will get a free copy. This week’s highlights AWS will be enjoying fondue in Switzerland. Google is clearing out the old junk in the attic. Dr. Microsoft is now taking appointments. General News: Money, Money, Money Microsoft has reported its earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2021. Microsoft is over 2020 already. Google’s parent company Alphabet crushed expectations for both earnings and revenue in its third-quarter earnings results. This could be a good sign it’s not planning on killing Google Cloud just yet. Amazon reports $96.1 billion in Q3 2020 revenue. Overall a pretty strong quarter! Amazon Web Services: Spend Or Save? Amazon launches AWS Nitro Enclaves to carve out isolated environments on any EC2 instance that is powered by the Nitro System. A great increase in security for no additional cost. Customers can now use Jira Service Desk to track operational items related to AWS resources. This is great for the start-ups and smaller organizations that are using Jira! Amazon announces new Application Load Balancer Support to make it easier to use gRPC with your applications. Another great feature! New AWS Europe region will allow customers to run their applications and serve end-users from <a href="https://aws.amazon.com

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the conspiracy theory surrounding media coverage of daylight savings and continues counting down 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. Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. This week’s highlights Amazon sells a whole bunch of stuff on its website. Google is nosy and wants people to know what files you’ve been looking at. Azure wants people to think more with its new knowledge center. Amazon Web Services: Getting Excited for re:Invent Jeff Barr shares how AWS helped to make Prime Day a reality for its customers. Congratulations to the Amazon Ops and Dev teams for this amazing feat. AWS Global Accelerator announces the ability to override destination ports used to route traffic to an application endpoint. Pretty neat! AWS is launching AWS Distro for Open Telemetry in preview. We’re excited to see what this builds out to become. AWS launches fully managed publishing/subscribing messaging service enabling message delivery to a large number of subscribers. This is great and we already have use cases for this. Amazon introduces the AWS Load Balancer Controller to simplify operations and save costs — a huge win for anyone using EKS today. AWS CloudFormation now supports increased limits on five service quotas. Sounds good unless you’re trying to make smaller CloudFormation templates. Google Cloud Platform: A Bit Confused GCP is introducing new Scale-in controls for Compute Engine, to prevent the autoscaler from reducing a managed instance group size too far. We’re a bit confused by the term “Scale-in.” GCP improves security and governance in PostgreSQL with Cloud SQL. Great for companies that are highly audited. Google updates Firebase with

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team acknowledges the very real issue of canine confusion as a result of everyone wearing face masks. 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. Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. This week’s highlights Amazon is in the Halloween spirit with its tricky new feature. Google is solving a potentially nonexistent problem for retailers. Microsoft is sending Azure into spaaaaaaaaaaace to power satellite projects. General News: All About Hash(iconf) HashiCorp Consul is now available in public beta while Vault is available in private beta. We’re hesitant to trust anything from HashiCorp. Terraform 0.14 is now available in beta and includes feature improvements in security, visibility and stability. Justin looks forward to the upgrade that breaks everything later this year. HashiCorp Consul 1.9 introduces new service mesh visualization tools. Pretty minor but cool! HashiCorp launches Boundary for simple and secure remote access based on trusted identity. We see huge potential in this. HashiCorp launches Waypoint, a new open source project that provides developers a consistent workflow. These types of announcements are a dagger through Ryan’s heart. HashiCorp introduces Consul Terraform Sync, a new tool for automating network infrastructure. Really powerful but really packed in a way we don’t understand. Amazon Web Services: Handy Amazon launches Cloudwatch Synthetics Recorder, a Chrome browser extension, to help monitor endpoints and APIs. We hope this does better than others we’ve tried in the past. Amazon announces better cost-performance for Amazon Relational Database Service databases. Has some rough edges but once you overcome them, this is rock solid. Amazon Aurora now enables dynamic resizing

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter turns into an old man in his yard, yelling at 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. Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. This week’s highlights The big cloud providers must not tell lies about their cloud customers. Google keeps us guessing if features will survive after the Preview. Microsoft launches the world’s smallest Machine Learning degree. General News: An Expensive Gimmick Microsoft, AWS and others boast of exclusive cloud customers that aren’t actually exclusive to them. At the end of the day, being “all in” is a gimmick. Palo Alto Networks, Inc. announced it’s adding four new cloud security modules to Prisma Cloud. All for the low, low price of a lot of money. Red Hat, Inc. ties Ansible automation to Kubernetes cluster management to improve automation in cloud-native infrastructure. The only thing that’s going to make Kubernetes easier to manage is a whole bunch of Ansible catalogues and code that you don’t understand. Spinnaker-as-a-service startup Armory raises $40M in new funding. This makes us all cranky — these giant one-stop solutions are not the answer. Amazon Web Services: Strangely Quiet Amazon EventBridge now supports Dead Letter Queues, making event-driven applications more resilient. We love this! Amazon EKS now officially supports Kubernetes version 1.18. We’re taking bets on when version 1.19 comes out. Google Cloud Platform: Apply Sunscreen Google announces that all new GCP products will launch in Preview or General Availability. Tread carefully here — we’ve been burne

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan is shocked the rest of the team managed so well without him while he was on vacation. 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. Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. This week’s highlights Progress is tapping its inner Freddy Kruger after acquiring Chef. AWS is soothing the burns of many with its Compute Optimizer. Google is behind the eight ball with the launch of its healthcare API. General News: On The Chopping Block IBM is splitting itself into two public companies to focus on high-margin cloud computing. We’re not sure about this strategy so we’ll keep an eye on this one. Google will give up direct control of the Knative cloud open-source project. We’re glad to see this is getting closer to a resolution. Business application platform Progress is making job cuts at recently acquired enterprise automation technology company Chef. The cuts included part of the Chef engineering team — when you’re buying a product company, that doesn’t seem like a good play. Amazon Web Services: In Happier News Amazon S3 on Outposts expands object storage to on-premises environments. If only this had existed a year ago! AWS Systems Manager now enables developers to view, author and publish Automation runbooks directly from Visual Studio Code. We like this! Amazon launches several new features with Redis 6 compatibility to Amazon ElastiCache for Redis. These enhancements are making it well on its way to being useful on a big project. Amazon SageMaker leads the way in machine learning and announces up to 18% lower prices on GPU instances. That’s a huge price cut that we think is great! Three new securit

Your hosts have an action-packed episode in store for you on The Cloud Pod this week, and Ryan is back after surviving the wild Oregon forest. 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. Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform. This week’s highlights Amazon is helping you figure out where your money is going. Google isn’t wowing anyone with its AI Platform Prediction improved reliability. Azure has some underwhelming improvements you should read about. General News: This Is What Happens When You Go On Vacation VMware, Inc. is acquiring SaltStack, Inc. to enhance its vRealize cloud management software suite. It’s interesting that this comes only a few weeks after Chef was acquired. Amazon Web Services: Always Comes Through For Us AWS launches Glue Studio, which provides a simple visual interface to compose jobs that move and transform data and run them on AWS Glue. Surprised it wasn’t just an integration with Visual Studio Code. AWS Backup now supports application-consistent backups of Microsoft workloads. This is not the cloud way to do it. AWS Security Hub has released 14 new automated security controls for the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard. Typical Amazon — gives you a control that costs you more money. Preview the Anomaly Detection and alerting now available in AWS Cost Management. It’s great to have these features for those weird quirky things that can happen when you’re spending money. Usability improvements for AWS Management Console are now available. Some of us are super grumpy with this and others super happy, so up to you to decide! AWS backtracks on plans to block old-style S3 paths. You now have some unknown

On The Cloud Pod this week, your hosts eagerly await next week&#8217;s Google product announcements so they can update their old phones. 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. When the girls get coding!. Join us on your screens, Oct 13, for the live@Manning “Women in Tech” conference to celebrate the rising movement of women in technology. http://mng.bz/MolW This week’s highlights Amazon is helping stop the insanity with patching. Google is tired after its event but has still managed to give us new tools. Microsoft’s new data center is an igloo in the desert. Amazon Web Services: Do the Work For Us Amazon API Gateway enhances the security of APIs to protect data from client spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks with mutual TLS support. Twice as nice and great for the financial industry! Amazon Detective now analyzes IAM role sessions to assist security analysts in diagnosing issues and understanding their root cause. The Detective is on the case! Amazon CloudWatch Agent is now Open Source and included with Amazon Linux 2. Not really a fan of doing a multi-billion dollar company’s job&#8230; AWS Security Hub now supports viewing patch compliance findings across AWS accounts. Now the question is, do people shadow patch so no one knows they’re out of date? AWS Perspective is a new AWS Solutions Implementation that helps customers build detailed architecture diagrams of workloads. Be wary of how much this will cost to run. Three new AWS Wavelength Zones on Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network are now available in Atlanta, New York City and Washington, D.C. With COVID shutting everything down and more things going online,

On The Cloud Pod this week, your hosts just want to be wowed and Ryan is off motorcycling somewhere in the desert. 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. When the girls get coding!. Join us on your screens, Oct 13, for the live@Manning “Women in Tech” conference to celebrate the rising movement of women in technology. http://mng.bz/MolW This week’s highlights Fighting words from Amazon over JEDI loss. Microsoft has gone to crazy town with their AWS connector pricing. Oracle taps their inner millennial to win the Tik Tok U.S bid. General: A Bit Picky Business App Platform Progress will acquire automation technology company Chef for $220 million. That’s a bargain price when you look at their recurring revenue. Pentagon reaffirms Microsoft as winner of $10B JEDI cloud contract. Nobody says the government is the most efficient at doing anything so picking the second best cloud vendor is unsurprising. AWS has responded to the Pentagon reaffirmation of Azure with a harshly worded blog post. Well, life’s just not fair. Foghorn Consulting (sponsor alert!) are teaming up with Hashicorp and sponsoring a virtual Q&amp;A with Kelsey Hightower on September 24. Head to The Cloud Pod Slack page after to discuss! Amazon Web Services: You’ll Need Some Pain Relief AWS named Cloud Leader in Gartner’s Infrastructure &amp; Platform Services Magic Quadrant. Gartner, are you listening to The Cloud Pod? Amazon CloudFront now supports Transport Layer Security v1.3 for improved performance and security. Good move for privacy, but will cause a lot of pain. Amazon CloudWatch now monitors Prometheus metrics to reduce monitoring tools needed for application performance degradation and failures. Might be worth the money —

On The Cloud Pod this week, your hosts introduce the idea of plaques to commemorate a feature suggestion becoming a product. 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. When the girls get coding!. Join us on your screens, Oct 13, for the live@Manning “Women in Tech” conference to celebrate the rising movement of women in technology. http://mng.bz/MolW This week’s highlights Active Directory just will not die. Someone is excited about Google’s Data Fusion pipelines. We just don’t know them. Azure gets features that AWS and Google already have. General: Did You Do Your Homework? Former Google engineer Steve Yegge resurrects his blog to explain why Google’s deprecation policy is killing user adoption. We’re still bitter about Google Reader. The Cloud Pod is sponsoring the Rust Conference and Women in Tech conference. We’re super excited about both of these conferences and supporting more women in the technical world. Amazon Web Services: So confused AWS launches second Local Zone in Los Angeles for customers requiring very low latency. This caused massive confusion when they launched the first one as they already had a localized region concept they forgot about. Connect to AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory seamlessly with new AWS Linux feature. No one has jumped on board with killing Active Directory yet. Someday we’ll get there. AWS now lets you log all Domain Name System queries to understand how your applications are operating. We don’t really know why you would want this (except maybe Jonathan). AWS launches Bottlerocket to improve security and operations of containerized infrastructure. Really a joy to set up and makes you feel really secure, without needing a therapist. AWS Site-to-Site now <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/08/aws-site-to-site-vpn-now-supports-internet-key-exchange-initiation/" target="_blank" rel

Your hosts kick off this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod by discussing the elephant in the room… the great Google outage. A big thanks to this week’s sponsors: Commvault is data-management done differently. It allows you to translate your virtual workloads to a cloud provider automatically, greatly simplifying the move to the cloud or your disaster recovery solution to the cloud. 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 customers the opportunity to spend lots of money with them. Your hosts sit on the fence discussing Google’s new platform. Azure gets features everybody else already has. General: The Great Google Outage Google explained how and why big chunks of its cloud crashed last week — turns out it broke itself. Google didn’t tell us who broke it because developers shouldn’t be publicly shamed&#8230; although they did break Google. That’s pretty bad. Amazon Web Services: Dollar Bills Amazon introduced the newest AWS Heroes who go above and beyond to share AWS knowledge and teach others. It’s great to see friend of the show, Ian McKay, recognized for his awesomeness. AWS Firewall Manager now supports security groups on Application Load Balancers and Classic Load Balancers. Slowly but surely, it’s becoming the tool we’ve always wanted. Amazon launches new API Gateway to manage business rules around how data is created, stored and changed in AWS services. We think this is a complete rewrite due to the fact they’re having to reimplement integrations. AWS Controllers for Kubernetes is a new tool that makes it simple to build scalable and highly-available Kubernetes applications. We’re pretty impressed by the controller which centralizes your deployment. AWS releases the latest update to Provisioned Input/output Operations Per Second (IOPS) allowing users to dial in the level of performance that they need. Amazon now gives you the opportunity to give them more money. How nice! Google Cloud Platform: To Be or Not To Be Google announces a number of improvements to log storage and management for Cloud

Your hosts set right what once went wrong in this week’s quantum episode of The Cloud Pod. 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. Commvault is data-management done differently. It allows you to translate your virtual workloads to a cloud provider automatically, greatly simplifying the move to the cloud or your disaster recovery solution to the cloud. live@Manning: Sign up for RustConf and Manning&#8217;s Women in Tech conferences here. This week’s highlights Amazon and Rackspace may be growing closer soon. Your hosts may or may not know how quantum computing works. Google is now available for 35 more minutes out of the month. General: High Stakes Reuters reported that Amazon is looking to acquire a stake in cloud infrastructure and services company Rackspace Technology. It is unclear exactly how much of the company Amazon may buy. AWS: A Discrete Quantity of Computers You can now run Amazon Braket on real or simulated quantum chips. We’ll try to explain quantum computing to you if we ever understand it ourselves. AWS Step Functions has been updated to Amazon State Language. Alright, let’s learn this thing the hard way! AWS Security Hub Automated Response &amp; Remediation is now generally available. It’s an old architecture, but cool to see formalized. The new Distributor capability of AWS Systems Manager installs and manages third party agents, and that’s pretty cool. AWS Fargate for Elastic Kubernetes Service and Elastic Container Service now supports Elastic File System. It’s the interface that really makes it work. Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports EC2 Inf1 instances. Serverless icon Ben Ellerby wrot

It’s a new week, and that means you can be sure that Google Next is still going on… and of course, we’ve got a new episode of The Cloud Pod. 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. Commvault is data-management done differently. It allows you to translate your virtual workloads to a cloud provider automatically, greatly simplifying the move to the cloud or your disaster recovery solution to the cloud. live@Manning: Sign up for RustConf and Manning&#8217;s Women in Tech conferences here. This week’s highlights Foghorn has two new solutions we’d love for them to advertise with us. Azure advances the open-source front. Oracle wins the 4th place medal in the VMware race. What would a 4th place medal be — aluminum?! JEDI: Wait and See The Department of Defense has been granted an additional month to issue its remand decision. Neither Amazon nor Microsoft have objected to the delay. COVID-19 AWS is supplying Moderna with the computing as they work on their COVID-19 vaccine. Our deepest gratitude to the 30,000 human subjects in the phase 3 trials. AWS: Brought to You by Foghorn The AWS Wavelength 5G partnership is now available in Boston and San Francisco. Inevitably though cloud platforms, like the iphone, will need to break free from their provider-locks. TCP sponsor Foghorn has developed VPC-In-A-Box℠ for Amazon VPC creation and management, and the Fog360 Security security analysis and visualization service. Send all your questions our way! The new AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that features a new default mesh configuration. It’s an interesting concept for sure but it might not be for the best. AWS <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-glue-version-2-0-featuring-10x-faster

It’s an unexpectedly short and sweet conference week on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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. Commvault is data-management done differently. It allows you to translate your virtual workloads to a cloud provider automatically, greatly simplifying the move to the cloud or your disaster recovery solution to the cloud. This week’s highlights Alphabet and AWS release their first all-pandemic quarterlies. Google leverages their machine learning horsepower. You can get your kicks on our Route 53 console rant after the lightning round. General: Growth Mindsets For the first time in its 16 years as a public company, Alphabet’s quarterly sales have dropped. This is of course due to pandemic-related macroeconomic effects. It will be interesting to see if the ad revenue business model is changed long-term. Despite being less than anytime in the last two years, Amazon reported AWS revenue up 29%. The retail end of Amazon is faring even better, with sales up 43% in North America. COVID-19 Google Cloud AI and Harvard Global Health Institute have partnered to create the COVID-19 Public Forecasts model. You can query the forecasts for free in BigQuery or download as CSV. AWS: Accepting Applications Anomaly and threat detection for Amazon Simple Storage Service is coming to Amazon GuardDuty at an 80% discount. You can get a 30 day free trial of the improved and affordable service even on accounts already enabling GuardDuty. The new AWS Community Builders Program is now open for anyone (to apply to). If you’re as interested as we are, be sure to sign up before September 15. Amazon Simple Storage Service resources can be found in AWS Toolkits for Visual Studio Code using AWS explorer view. Tools like this that make things easier on developers are a good investment for AWS. AWS CodeBuild now <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/07/aws-codebuild-supports-code-coverage-reporting/" targe

Ian Mckay fills in for Jonathan on this week’s double-stuffed episode of The Cloud Pod. 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. Commvault is data-management done differently. It allows you to translate your virtual workloads to a cloud provider automatically, greatly simplifying the move to the cloud or your disaster recovery solution to the cloud. This week’s highlights A string of attacks deletes, but does not leak, unsecured databases. Cloudfare’s Matthew Prince plans to be the next top dog of data. Following the eight weeks of Next’ 20 we’ll get three weeks of Re:Invent. General: Cat Got Your Data? It’s earnings season and revenues are up for Azure, but for whatever reason Azure isn’t happy with it. Aqua Security announced Aqua Wave and Aqua Enterprise. Check out our interview with Liz Rice for more. The rash of automated “Meow” attacks has deleted at least 3,800 databases. The deleted text is replaced with random text and the word “Meow”, hence the name. And deleting unsecured databases does keep it from being leaked&#8230; Matthew Prince of Cloudflare believes their new Workers Unbound platform will beat the big three providers on performance and price. Good luck making money on those margins. AWS: Remote Viewing It’s official: Re:Invent will be all digital this year. Not only that, but it will run for three weeks starting November 30. AWS’s 77th availability zone will also be their fourth in the Seoul Region. The new Amazon Interactive Video Service allows you to integrate live video to your apps and websites. Doesn’t seem like there’s much difference from MediaLive. The Cloud Development Kit (CDK) for Terraform and the CDK Pipelines construct library for AWS CDK are now in preview. The new <a href="https://siliconangle.com/2020/07/23/aws-launches-ai-powered-contact-lens-analytics-features-cont

The Cloud Pod Confidential — Episode 79 Your hosts kick off the nine weeks of Google Next on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: &nbsp; 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. &nbsp; This week’s highlights We kicked off this year’s Google Next by crowning our draft picks winner! Friend of the show Ian Mckay wrote a tool to automate your auto-remediation. Azure is here too. (We just wanted them to feel included this week.) Google: What’s Next? The Google Cloud Next keynote address was this week, and Jonathan has taken the win for our draft picks by predicting new collaborations and productivity tools in Google Meet. Congratulations, Jonathan! Google launched the Open Usage Commons framework to support Open Source development. Google has donated the ISTIO trademark to the Commons, upsetting IBM. AutoML Tables has received several user-friendliness features, including explanations for online predictions. (Not that any of us use AutoML.) Google is releasing Network Endpoint Groups, which is a collection of network endpoints to use as backends for some load balancers. This is what you need to have if your hybrid cloud isn’t going to be just a transition. The new Active Assist portfolio of tools promises to help you reduce the complexity of your cloud operations. Moving around the complexity, how very… Oracle of you. Assured Workloads for Government, now in private beta, promises to help government customers, suppliers and contractors meet the security and compliance standards of federal agencies. The compliant-but-not-isolated model can be expected to bleed out into non-governmental workloads. BigQuery Omni will allow you to access and analyze data across your multi-cloud environment. It’s a solution to the data gravity problem, but keep in mind it’s still an onramp to GCP. The Confidential Virtual Machines product, no

Architect Matt Kohn fills in for Peter on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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 Ian McKay has cool tools for the new Honeycode service. Amazon shoots for the stars with their new Aerospace and Satellite Solutions business unit. A new family of Virtual Machines boast powerful performance benchmarks. AWS: Business! In! Space! Amazon’s No-Code solution has finally shipped in the form of Amazon Honeycode, fully managed and now in beta. Friend of the show Ian McKay has created Honeycode export and appflow integration projects which add a lot of usability to the service. After a six-month beta period, Amazon CodeGuru is now generally available featuring CodeGuru Reviewer and CodeGuru Profiler. CodeGuru is still sticking to Java support, so if you’re working in another language, you won’t find much here. AWS CodeCommit now supports a limited set of Emoji Reactions to comment on pull requests and commits. The set includes , , , and “ship-it”, though we’d have rather used , , , and . AWS announced a foray into the space sector with the launch of the Aerospace and Satellite Solutions business unit. AWS appointed former director of Space Force Planning Clint Crosier to lead the unit. On the last day of June, AWS launched AWS App2Container to help containerize currently running applications without the need for code changes. Once this applies to applications other than .NET 3.5+ and Java, we expect this to be adopted like hotcakes. On the first of July, AWS announced the Porting Assistant for .NET, a tool to port .NET Framework applications to .NET Core running on Linux. This should clean up the last of the .NET apps in the next, say, 25 years. Amazon Relational Database Service instances are now <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/n

Google Cloud Next Predictions Your show hosts come to you with their cloudy crystal balls to give us Google Cloud Next Prediction show for Thomas Kurian&#8217;s keynote. Justin CloudSQL/Firebase/BigQuery via Anthos More Granularity in Stackdriver reports/analytics around status reports (Thanks /u/casper_man) Cloud endpoint Security Protection (Antivirus, Endpoint DLP, HIDS) Jonathan New Collaborations &amp; Productivity tools Google Meet, New or Improved Price reduction (token for Anthos (Small cut pacify the haters) Thomas Kurian will speak about community governance (Peter) Matt GCP will launch a new region somewhere in the midwest Partnership with a pro-sports league. Will announce their commitment to cloud infrastructure beyond 2023 Ryan Tout their amazing bigquery &amp; ML stuff to help with Covid research A significant price reduction for Anthos drop it by more than 40% or removing 12 month commitment Layer 7 network inspection and egress filtering Honorable Mentions Endpoint Security will run in the hypervisor (Agentless) &#8211; Jonathan Tool Similar to Sagemaker Threat Hunting Tools ML/AI chops to Cloud Monitoring Configuration Management Endpoints Major Updates to Docs, Sheets, Slides, Quantum Computers Tie Breaker: Number of Virtual Attendees on the Register? Ryan &#8211; 45,000 Matt &#8211; 60,000 Jonathan- 85,000 Justin &#8211; 100,000

Your hosts see a new cloud on the horizon and anticipate a flood on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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 HashiCorp enters the ring with HashiCorp Cloud Platform. Microsoft offers free AI classes. Bayer Crop Sciences pushes cluster size to new heights. General News: A Challenger Approaches HashiCorp has launched the HashiCorp Cloud Platform featuring managed Consul as the single initial service. HashiCorp is currently soliciting feedback on the alpha version of HashiCorp Cloud Platform and is planning on releasing Vault next. AWS: Let it Snow The AWS Snow family of devices is now joined by AWS Snowcone, a four-and-a-half pound eight terabyte data storage and transfer device, both the most storage and least weight yet. Don’t lose it though — this little guy runs around $2,000. Aurora Global database now supports write request forwarding for low latency global data reads. This is fantastic news for lazy devs like us. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Groups now support the Instance Refresh feature, eliminating the need for custom scripts and systems. This is a long-anticipated feature for TCP. We can’t believe it’s taken until 2020! The new Lambda Powertools library within the Serverless Lens for the Well Architected Framework features Tracer, Logger and Metrics as its three core utilities. Using these tools to get yourself set up will save you a lot of strife down the line. Azure: An ‘Udacious’ Plan Azure and Udacity are partnering to launch a scholarship program and the free Azure Machine Learning course to address the growing demand for AI specialists. We’ve had good experiences with Udacity so this offering appeals directly to us. Azure is catering to users new to ARM templates with new features including a template Quickstart gallery and Azure Resource Manager Tools in Visual Studio Code. How did we ever get by without this? Google: Seeds and Nodes G

Your hosts (minus Jonathan) talk outages and instances on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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 Mark Russinovich (twitter: @markrussinovich) published a guide on scaling-up during the pandemic. Sagemaker Ground Truth lets robots see in 3D. Check out our interview with Spot CEO Amiram Schachar. General News: Not Our Fault IBM assigned the cause of a several-hour global outage on June 10 to an unnamed third party. We can expect a full formal report from IBM soon. Data warehouse specialist company Snowflake is rumored to be filing for initial public offering at $20 billion, 1,333% of its valuation just two and a half years ago. It’s just a matter of time until Amazon Redshift makes a move to break into Snowflake’s space. COVID-19 Chief Technical Officer at Azure Mark Russinovich detailed how Azure scales Microsoft Teams during the pandemic in what appears to be a face-saving measure after Azure’s recent capacity issues. It’s a weighty article — we recommend checking this one out for yourself if you’re encountering any scaling issues of your own. AWS: The Third Dimension is Data AWS CodeArtifact, a managed artifact repository service, is now generally available. Everyone has to store their Build Artifacts somewhere, so this is an exciting tool, especially at this price point. Amazon Sagemaker Ground Truth can now label 3D point clouds using a new editor and assistive labeling features. We don’t know how this one works but expect widespread adoption in advanced machine learning. New EC2 instances with Graviton2 processors are now generally available. Whether you choose C6 or R6, expect some hefty price-performance improvements. AWS Lambda functions can now connect to Amazon Elastic File Systems. Sure, some people may make the point that this runs counter to the purpose of Lambda, but just think of the use cases! The AWS CloudFormation Guard open-source command-line interface is now available in preview. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of remediation, and it’s good to see that made easy. Azure: An Instance of Poor Optics The live video analytics platform <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-live-video-analytics-on-iot-edge-now-in-pre

Your co-hosts announce parity with the leading cloud-computing podcast hosts on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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 Amazon is suing their former vice president of marketing. AWS introduces new instances. Google pulls the perfect hat-trick and celebrates parity with AWS three times. General News: What? Amazon is Litigious? No&#8230; Amazon is suing their former vice president of marketing Brian Hall over the breach of his non-compete agreement after taking a position with Google Cloud. We will see whether Amazon’s inconsistent enforcement of their non-compete agreements will give Hall a win in court. Slack is partnering with AWS, integrating Slack Calls with Amazon Chime. For an interview with Chime GM Sid Rao, check out friend of the show Corey Quinn’s podcast Screaming in the Cloud. Rackspace rebranded this week to “Rackspace Technology.” This shift mirrors their move from selling equipment to selling services. AWS: Instant Hits AWS launched new EC2 instances, this time bumping up to second generation AMD EPYC processors. Well, it’s cheaper than the Intel counterpart. EC2 G4dn bare metal instances are now available with up to eight NVIDIA T4 GPUs. You’ve got to be working on some seriously cool machine learning projects to need something this expensive. You can now find the machine-learning powered anomaly detection feature and interactive <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new

The Cloud Pod Gets Their Groove Back — Episode 74 Your co-hosts have cooked up a good one on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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 Your co-hosts cover DockerCon 2020. Chef announced several new features at ChefConf 2020. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) teaches you how to take an online certification exam. General News: Prince Ali Mirantis has released the first major update to Docker Enterprise since it acquired the platform in November — a loss for the startup community. Over 60,000 people registered for the online DockerCon, the first DockerCon after the loss of Enterprise. During the keynote, Docker CEO Scott Johnston announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft. Chinese cloud titan Alibaba’s revenue grew 62% in the first quarter of 2020, though it remains behind AWS, Microsoft and Google for now. With the regional advantage, it seems all Alibaba needs to do is maintain parity with AWS features to stay on top. Chef Conference: Too Many Cooks Predominant Configuration Management software platform and TCP punching-bag Chef held their virtual ChefConf where they debuted several new capabilities. Chef Compliance now features Chef Compliance Audit and Chef Compliance Remediation. Chef Desktop helps IT managers centrally deploy, manage and secure an organization’s laptops, desktops and workstations. Chef Infra and Chef Automate now integrate with ServiceNow Configuration Management Database. AWS: No Back-SaaS Upgrading contracts for SaaS and usage-based products on the AWS Marketplace is now easier. Look to this for grabbing those high-volume discounts when scaling up. AWS Single Sign-On now <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/single-sign-on-between-okta-universal-direct

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 An unusually short AWS segment this week featured new Backup customizations. Azure is bringing their HoloLens2 to a new set of countries. We celebrate BigQuery’s 10th birthday and the accompanying BigSale. AWS: Only Three Stories Somehow Jonah Jones of the AWS Open Source Blog published an article on how to use the PromCat (Prometheus Catalog) to monitor AWS services used by Kubernetes. It’s great to see Prometheus and Kubernetes continue to take over the world. You can now opt-in or opt-out of AWS Backup services at the account level. Opt-in is nice and all, but opt-out provides peace of mind to the largest user base. Information on AWS regions and servers is now available programmatically in the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. It’ll be nice when we see other tools pulling this data. Azure: Mixed With What? HoloLens 2, the latest in Azure’s “mixed reality” glasses technology, is now available in 10 countries and will be coming to more soon. Once the technology becomes as functional as it is in the advertisements, we’re going to be thrilled to play with it. There’s a lot of potential here for industrial applications that are already being explored. The Azure Arc preview now supports Kubernetes which was hotly requested in customer feedback. Expect to see some very interesting use cases from Azure Arc in the next 12 months. Google: Happy Birthday! After dropping out early in the JEDI contract competition citing conflicts with its AI principals, Google has signed a seven-figure contract with the Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit. Google anticipates that this may lead to future business deals with branches of the DoD. Serverless VPC Access now features ingress settings. It’s really nice to see a tightening down of function access on VPCs and vice versa. This should make a lot of people happy. Google’s new open-source tool <a hr

Your co-hosts cover conferences past and yet to come on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: &nbsp; 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. &nbsp; This week’s highlights We take a good, hard look at the ways Google Cloud has AWS beat. Microsoft Build 2020 featured the fifth most powerful computer in the world. Google Cloud Next is here to stay for a long, long time. General News: Let Me Count the Ways Peter Wayner of InfoWorld wrote an article listing the 13 ways Google Cloud beats AWS. Well…he didn’t say they were all good reasons. AWS: That’s a MTHFL AWS announced the Cloud Development Kit for Kubernetes called cdk8s is now in alpha. Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it? You can now use Attribute-based access control with EC2 Instance Connect to define Secure Shell access permissions based on attributes. It’s good to move away from passing around all those extra keys. State Manager features for Systems Manager now integrate with AWS CloudFormation. Assuming we’re parsing the naming conventions correctly in these press releases, that’s good news! Amazon CodeGuru Profiler added -javaagent switch, and CodeGuru Reviewer now supports Atlassian Bitbucket Cloud. Obviously, profiling and reviewing are totally different services — how could anyone get those mixed up? The AWS CloudTrail console has been redesigned. It’s just the S3 user interface again, so it’s not a very intuitive interface. Amazon Elastic Container Service now <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/05/amazon-elastic-container-service-supports-env

We crown the winner of the AWS Summit Draft Picks on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: &nbsp; 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. &nbsp; This week’s highlights We crown the winner of this year’s AWS Summit Draft Picks! Amazon and Microsoft keep slinging blog posts over JEDI. We’re all just trying to stay sane, honestly. AWS Summit: Draft Picks While it wasn’t a particularly accurate set of predictions this year (with no honorable mentions scoring and even the tiebreaker non-functional), Justin managed to squeak out a win by correctly predicting a price cut in EC2, S3, or Networking and the Covid Crazy Growth Numbers. Jonathan scored the only other point with his prediction of improved DLP Tools for S3. Amazon Macie simplified its pricing plan and dramatically reduced costs. Is the 80% price cut the new way of announcing a product is generally available? Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud cut prices across all regions for Standard Reserved Instances and EC2 Instance Saving Plans. Inter-Region Data Transfer prices have been reduced for data coming out of São Paulo, Bahrain, Cape Town and Sydney. General News Amazon filed a second, concurrent bid protest to the Department of Defense. Microsoft and Amazon continue to snip at each other in public blog posts. COVID-19 Amazon will allow non-warehouse employees to work from home for at least five months. Microsoft updated their WFH policy, and will give employees the option to work remotely through October. AWS Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer has seen pricing changes. Now CodeGuru’s terrible payment model is much less terrible. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service now supports Kubernetes version 1.16. It’s good to see they’re putting out these updates progressively faster. A new wizard will allow for simplified creation and management of Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters. This should clean up some of the EKS console nicely. AWS Identity and Access Management introduced basic password<a href="ht

The Three Musketeers have gained their D’Artagnan and take on the world (metaphorically and from home) on this week&#8217;s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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 Take a break with us and enjoy a music video. Oracle managed a whole two headlines this week! Jonathan called it: AWS opens the Africa (Cape Town) Region. General News: Chime After Chime Tim Leehane and Spencer Johnson released a working-from-home anthem titled Chime After Chime we just had to share with you. Security company Rapid7 will acquire SaaS platform DivvyCloud for $145 million. COVID-19 Zoom picked the dark horse of cloud platforms Oracle for their next upscaling deal. Zoom is moving around 93 years of video through Oracle servers every day. AMD revealed an anonymous customer (probably Oracle or Microsoft) deployed 10,000 new Epyc servers in just 10 days. AWS: Summit Predictions Jonathan Improved DLP Tools for S3 AI Powered submarine to explore the depths of the ocean ES service will pivot to Open Distro for ElasticSearch Ryan Docker Exec based Debugging tools/capability Remote Debug capabilities for Lambda Functions Security Code Scanning service (similar to code guru). (static and dynamic code analysis) Peter Direct Competitor to Anthos DLP for VPC, always wanted a layer 7 like proxy. Filtering/Domain Whitelisting A caricature of larry ellison will appear on the screen in the slides Justin Price Cut in EC2, S3 or Networking Covid Crazy Growth Numbers (service dig on Azure) A Diplo T-shirt will be worn by Werner Vogel Honorable Mentions: Amazon Crucible their first person shooter game, online multiplayer game Dr. Matt Wood will make a passionate attempt for people to l

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 Summit Online is on May 13. Drama brews in the developing JEDI contract story. Please welcome Ryan Lucas as our new full-fledged non-guest host! General News: This Isn’t the Evidence You’re Looking For AWS Summit Online is free to attend on May 13. Expect to hear our predictions soon! Following a partial review, the Department of Defense’s inspector general’s office announced they have found no evidence of the DoD awarding the JEDI contract unfairly. Meanwhile, Jon Palmer, Deputy General Counsel for Microsoft argued that allowing AWS a second bid would give Amazon an unfair advantage. But who inspects the inspector? COVID-19 Verizon is breaking out the big bucks to purchase video conference company BlueJeans for $400 million. It’s interesting to see BlueJeans back in the spotlight. The Information reports that AWS has been comparatively inflexible on cloud bill payments compared to Azure and Google Cloud Platform. At the same time, AWS has maintained the messaging that it is “here to help” during this “unprecedented time.” AWS: A Snowball’s Chance at the JEDI Contract The Snowball family of devices received a ton of updates. All that work on military applications and no JEDI contract to apply it to. Federated querying is now generally available on Amazon Redshift. It’s clear that Amazon is investing heavily in Redshift. AWS Security Hub launched the BatchUpdateFindings API and the Workflow Status field. Good to see some of these issues worked out. This one goes out to all the auditors: AWS Secrets Manager now integrates with AWS Config. And when the auditor’s happy, eve

Ryan Lucas and Ian Mckay fill in for Jonathan on this week’s free-tier episode of The Cloud Pod. 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 GitHub announced a new business model. Amazon announced a giant pile of Beanstalk updates. Google published a free book on secure and reliable systems. General News: [Upgrade to Premium for Full Segment Title] GitHub has switched to a freemium business model — core features will be free to all users, and premium features like Security Assertion Markup Language will require a paid plan. This is a great new direction, though they may lose a few paid customers tempted to downgrade to the new free tier. AWS: Amazon Golden Goose The new AWS Launch Wizard for Solutions and Pricing (SAP) service will orchestrate resource provisioning to help customers deploy or migrate SAP workloads. If you’re paying the premium for a big fancy SAP instance, you’re going to want to be invested in how your infrastructure is set up. Amazon unveiled a giant pile of Beanstalk updates this week. The AWS Elastic Beanstalk console is now generally available, and upcoming features can be followed the roadmap on GitHub. New generations of Docker, Corretto and Python platforms built on Amazon Linux 2 will all run applications on Elastic Beanstalk. Elastic Beanstalk has added API support for listing platform branches. Beanstalk is looking to be a very popular option for smaller developers, and is getting more impressive with every update. You can now preview Amazon RDS Proxy with PostgreSQL compatibility, which resolves connection pool issues. This is going to be a super helpful service and at about three cents per hour to run a proxy, it’s also extremely cost effective. <

Your hosts meet online to work on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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 Profits of The Cloud Pod’s sticker sales will be donated to charity. DeepComposer is now generally available. You can play around with March Madness simulations in BigQuery. General News: The Cloud Pod Tackles COVID-19 We’re donating profits of our sticker sales to the John Hopkins University COVID-19 Research Response Program through July 1, 2020. AWS: Staying Productive The Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights feature, which gives users an overview of their operational problems, is now generally available. CloudWatch Contributor Insights is also generally available for DynamoDB, though it is 50 percent more expensive per million log events than Insights not for DynamoDB. You can build some neat automation around this. Back in Episode 51, we covered the new instances with ra3.16xlarge nodes, and now Amazon is adding instances with ra3.4xlarge nodes, which lack the excess power of ra3.16xlarge. At a quarter of the price of the larger larges, that’s some considerable savings. Amazon Redshift now features elastic resize, allowing users to change node types within minutes. This will be helpful if you want to make the move to those cheaper instances. If you’re looking for something fun while sheltering in place, you may be pleased to hear that AWS DeepComposer is now generally available (and with new features!) You can buy an Amazon keyboard for $99 or a generic for $50. Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports In-Region Read Replicas on SQL Server Enterprise Edition in the Multi-AZ config with Always On Availability. Careful though, you can really rack up a bill this way if you’re careless. Amazon announced that Amazon Elastic File System has quintupled its speed for General Purpose mode file systems to 35,000 read operations per second. That leads into our next headline: Amazon Elastic

Jonathan is out with a back injury, so it’s just Justin and Peter on this week’s intranational episode of The Cloud Pod. 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 Teleconferencing services continue to boom. Amazon opens up a new avenue of attack on Microsoft’s JEDI contract. Azure UK declares it will triage who gets service if need be. General News: Cloud Provider Moves to Internet for Business Business for web conferencing applications has boomed this month. Microsoft Teams gained 12 million users in a week and Slack’s paid version gained over 7,000 customers since the start of February. Hopefully people continue to use these tools to stay more connected even after we’ve gotten through this pandemic. With AWS testing centers closed, AWS Certification is now offering all exams online with online proctoring. Considerations are being made for those who need to reschedule. AWS: Chipping Away at JEDI The price of Amazon GuardDuty use over 10,000 gigabytes (GB) was reduced from 25 cents to 15 cents per GB. The normally quiet CloudFront announced they have cut propagation times down to five. Propagation times used to average between 17 and 35 minutes. CloudFront has always been cost-effective, but now it’s as efficient as it needs to be. Amazon QuickSight launched image support on dashboards through the insight editor. Neat, but indicative of a slow news week. AWS Site-to-Site VPN now enables you to use digital certificates for all site-to-site connections. This is great for mobile devices or other cases without static IP addresses. In our developing coverage of the JEDI contract, AWS has now charged that the DoD is unfairly granting Microsoft a “do-over” on flawed portions of its bid. The UpdateShardCount API for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams upgraded from a 500 shard capacity to a 10,000 shard capacity. If you want to work with social

Your hosts join the rest of the world in phoning one in on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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 More conference cancellations roll in due to the ongoing global pandemic. Amazon Redshift made several improvements this week. We take a look at a bug-hunt by a Site Reliability Engineer at Google. General News: Working From Home As the pandemic response ramps up across the world, teleconferencing services like Slack and Zoom have struggled to meet demand. Microsoft Teams users in Europe reported difficulty logging into the service. If you’re looking for an open-source web conferencing application, AWS recommends you use Jitsi. If you’re a startup with more AWS credits to spend than money, we recommend you check it out. In the continued wave of canceled conferences, Microsoft moved the May 19-21 Build developer conference to a virtual-only format. Even virtual conferences aren’t entirely safe bets, as Google has postponed Google Cloud Next 2020: Digital Connect. Perhaps they will try to wait until they can safely host a physical conference again, but who knows when that will be? AWS: Redshifting Into Gear Amazon Redshift now allows users to pause and remove clusters so they are not billed for their use while unneeded. In other Amazon Redshift news, the cloud data warehouse now supports materialized views functionality. We suspect that Redshift will be going serverless before long. As a part of its release, API Gateway will offer private integrations with AWS Elastic Load Balancers and AWS CloudMap. There’s a lot there, but we wish it had a Lambda

Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter again as we practice social distancing on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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. Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms. This week’s highlights Details emerged from the ongoing legal battle surrounding the JEDI contract. Amazon shows off its new operating system. Powershell 7.0 brings long-awaited features to Windows. General News Due to the ongoing global pandemic, AWS Summits have been (responsibly) cancelled in Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai, Paris, San Francisco and Brussels. Hopefully we’ll see these events move online. Court documents from Amazon’s injunction have been unsealed. The documents reveal that Microsoft’s bid included “non-compliant storage” which was not counted against them. The Department of Defense responded that Amazon’s bid did not include technically compliant storage either. Our very own Justin Brodley made the news! His comments are included in an article covering a cloud alternatives panel discussion at Altitude 2020. VMware Inc. overhauled its portfolio of products to focus on Kubernetes support. Expect to see the whole host of products available by May 2020. AWS: The new CloudWatch composite alarms will allow you to combine alarms and get a clearer picture of what is happening when something goes wrong. You can now host your applications with the AWS <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/host-your-apps-with-aws-amplify-console-from-the-aws-amplify-cli/" targ

Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter as we cover all the news you can use on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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. Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms. This week’s highlights AWS restructures its sales force. Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect is canceled. Who’s else is excited to re-network their printers!? General News We’re proud of the Bonus Episodes we’ve produced lately. Check out our interviews with Rob Martin and Ben Kehoe! Check out Aviatrix’s panel on Multi-Cloud architecture and networking — featuring our very own Justin Brodley. And if you’re here because you saw Justin’s panel, welcome to TCP! Global research firm Gartner has named AWS the top leader in Cloud AI developer services. Gartner categorizes industry leaders as having a complete vision and the ability to execute on it. Microsoft and Google were close behind, though unlike Microsoft, Google spread the news. AWS: Human Salesforce, AI Oversight Amazon Transcribe can now automatically redact personally identifiable information. You can rest assured when a robot collects your personal information for data analysis, it will use discretion in what it shares with humans. AWS Global Accelerator users may now use their own IP addresses and tag resources. We already had AnyCast, but the tagging is nice. Faced with tougher competition, AWS plans to double the size of its sales team. This will be the first major sales restructuring for AWS in

Your hosts talk about AWS Lambda, Azure’s Cybersecurity of Things and Google’s loquacious AI on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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. Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms. This week’s highlights AWS Lambda sees savings and supports Dart. Your kitchen appliances are safer with developments in the Internet of Things. It’s the last week of our trial of the new Lightning Round format. Comedy’s hard. TCP News ICYMI, check out our second episode of TCP Talks: Finops in the cloud with Rob Martin. We learned some things about financial operations, and we’re sure you will too. AWS Lambda Updates AWS Compute Savings Plans now apply to your AWS Lambda workloads. That’s nice, but even a decent percentage of such a cheap service probably won’t impact your expenses all that much. In addition, those Lambda workloads now support Dart, an open-source programming language made by Google. If you’re making mobile apps, you’ll be happy to use this. If you’re not making mobile apps, you probably didn’t need to read this paragraph. AWS Identity and Access Management now allows you to control access for requests made on your behalf by AWS services. It’s a great security feature. We’re looking forward to AWS taking this a step further at this year’s re:Inforce conference. Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports previous Secrets Manager versions and can read keys directly from JSON objects. It’s going to be much more convenient now that you can use one key instead of, say, 10. AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr outlined a laundry list of updates to Amazon FSx for Lustre in this blog post. All these changes add up to SageMaker integration, to make SageMaker more attractive to customers. Spherical Things At this yea

We follow continuing stories with the JEDI contract, GigaOM and our new Lightning Round format on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod. 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. Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms. This week’s highlights Amazon makes progress contesting the JEDI contract. AWS and Azure introduce shared cloud block storage. Google shows signs of shifting priorities. Arrested Development United States judge Patricia Campbell-Smith has granted Amazon’s request to temporarily halt work on the JEDI contract by Microsoft. She also ordered Amazon to post $42 million in the event the injunction was issued wrongfully. AWS Not First to Share Blocks CloudFormation StackSets users can now manage multiple AWS accounts. We recommend you get your organizational units structured properly now so you’re ready for when that must-have feature for your organization is added. AWS customers running Linux on Ec2 can now attach provisioned IOPS (io1) EBS volumes to Multiple Ec2 instances. Be careful though: wielding fine control over your data means taking responsibility for your data losses, as well. This news comes a day after Azure announced their own Azure Shared Disks, which was, for those sweet brief hours before AWS’s announcement, the industry’s only shared cloud block storage. What’s in the Box? Azure released a new GigaOM study which backs up the findings from the GigaOM study we covered on episode 58. How incredible — Azure, which paid for the scientific (and unverifiable) study, was found to be the best at everything once again! The Azure Backup service now offers a preview of the <a href="https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-offline-backup-with-azure-data-box-now-in-preview/" target="_blank" rel=

Peter’s returned from his trip to Asia and the band’s back together on this episode of The Cloud Pod. 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. Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms. This week’s highlights Registration for Amazon Re:Mars 2020 is now open! Academics can use code ACAD20REMARS for a discount. Google releases several new tools for building and managing data pipelines. We tried out a new format for our lightning round! Amazon Web Services: To Infinity and Beyond Registration is open for the Amazon Re:Mars 2020 robotics and technology conference running June 16-19 in Las Vegas. Tickets cost $1,999, but astronauts get in free! Academics and students registering with a .edu email address can use the discount code ACAD20REMARS if a couple grand is too pricey. AWS Sync Routes is available on the AWS Open Source blog to allow you to synchronize routes across tables. If you’ve got only a few VPCs, you might have the right use case for this. AWS CodeDeploy’s blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS now include “linear and canary deployments.” Hidden in that announcement is the implication that they seem to have invented linear deployments. You can now use a full-screen narrative editor with a preview mode thanks to enhancements to Amazon QuickSight. You can also add static and dynamic URLs within those narratives. If you’re a Well-Architected Framework practitioner, the new Serverless Lens for AWS Well-Architected Tool may improve your architecture assessments. If you (somehow) have a workload that can tolerate lost events, the Multi-Region Asynchronous Object Replication Solution may be for you. We’ll hope for a global bucket option to replace this down the line with something more elegant. Azure’s S

Your hosts are joined again by Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) who is filling in for Peter as we recap the week in 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. Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms. This week’s highlights It’s earnings season as the top dogs show their growth. Azure gets back in the headlines with a bold but contested study. Google fulfills an old TCP prediction with reports of a unified service. Certificates of Doom Update Amazon has given customers an extension until March 5, 2020 to rotate their SSL/TLS certificates. Previously, rebooting or manually changing a relational database service (RDS) instance would automatically switch to the new certificate authority, even if the customer didn’t have their application ready to do so. IBM Changes Leadership Speaking of new authorities, major changes are coming to IBM. Arvind Krishna will replace current CEO Ginni Rometty on April 6 and current Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will become president. Hopefully the changes in leadership and the acquisition of Red Hat will be what IBM needs to turn around what’s been a rough decade for the tech giant. Earnings Season It’s that time of the year where financial analysts are breaking out the line graphs to show investors just how much their holdings are growing. Let’s see what the quarterly reports had to say this time around: Microsoft saw a rebound from slowing cloud growth last quarter with Azure up 62 percent, Surface up 6 percent, and LinkedIn up 24 percent. Google Cloud growth was strong enough for the company to brag, but still lags behind AWS, Azure and even Google’s own YouTube. <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazon-stock-soars-tech-giant-crushes-holiday-quarter-expect