The Cloud Pod on Lockdown – EP 64

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