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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this episode of TCP Talks, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Miles Ward, the founder of the Google Cloud’s Solutions Architecture practice. Currently, Miles leads the cloud strategy and solutions capabilities as the Chief Technology Officer for consulting and IT services company SADA. Startups have helped increase the popularity of open source products among enterprise businesses. Changing systems can be a struggle for larger, more traditional companies. But legacy businesses also want to accomplish more in a shorter amount of time, which requires shedding clunky, legacy systems. “Those building blocks make it so that companies operate at a certain rate of change. And I know zero companies asking me to slow down their rate of change,” he notes. The evolution of product compatibility is also discussed. Product sellers need to help customers understand how much of their system fits and how much doesn’t fit in one solution compared to another, Miles says. Customers need to have a clear understanding of what’s involved and how much work it’s going to be. In addition, Miles shares his thoughts on the role of the CTO as well as the benefits of rebranding a product everybody hates. Featured Guest Name: Miles Ward What he does: As CTO of SADA, Miles leads the cloud strategy and solutions capabilities. His remit includes delivering next-generation solutions to challenges in big data and analytics, application migration, infrastructure automation, and cost optimization; and engaging with customers on their most complex and ambitious plans around Google Cloud. Key quote: “There used to be big crunchy legacy impediments to adoption&#8230; But it&#8217;s 2021 — live in the future, that shit works. Now it&#8217;s more about making it easy enough and predictable enough to consume that folks can unlock the business justification.” Where to find him: LinkedIn | Twitter Key Takeaways Gone are the days when products from different technology providers, like Oracle or SAP, couldn’t work together to solve a customer problem. These days, companies need to make products easy and predictable enough so customers can unlock the business justification straight away. For Google Cloud, the next phase of growth will require investment in higher-level relationships with customers. Miles references his experience with current Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian (TK). “TK is super focused about spending the majority of his time face to face with customers,” he says. “He&#8217;s not doing it to be a glad-hand, he&#8217;s deal making and proposal pushing and thinking through the machinery of how to build higher level relationships.” There’s a huge opportunity to help the “the real world divisions inside of real world businesses” — not just serve the IT department. Miles says, “I think there&#8217;s a bunch of cloud providers that are working really hard now to facilitate the plumbing and governance and oversight and security controls and operational management of what is — not a hybrid between their data center, and a cloud — a hybrid between their SaaS fleet and the couple of things they still need to run on their own.” Worried about leveraging a Google solution and then having them pull the plug on it? Miles doesn’t think you should be too concerned about deprecation. “I think they have heard this feedback really loud and clear,” he says. “There&#8217;s a whole bunch of people that have made it really obvious that if you&#8217;re going to provide these

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

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

Note: This interview is part of a paid sponsorship between Open Raven and The Cloud Pod. In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Mark Curphey, Chief Product Office and Co-Founder of Open Raven, a fully integrated platform for security and privacy workflows. Featured Guest Name: Mark Curphey What he does: Mark is Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Open Raven. Where to find him: LinkedIn | Twitter Listen to Mark discuss the Open Raven strategy for protecting your data, the use of serverless workflows to scale to enormous workloads. Protecting your data and ensuring compliance using the Open Policy Agent – and more. Key Points Discover – Classify – Monitor – Protect “The cloud has moved in incredibly fast; security has been moved off to the side and as a result companies don’t know where their data is, breaches are happening constantly, and these are the big things that get companies in the press.” Macie “Every single customer that we spoke to in the early stages said, a) It doesn&#8217;t work b) It&#8217;s ridiculously expensive, and c) It&#8217;s only on s3 buckets. Well, whilst The Register is always reporting breaches of S3 buckets, my customer data is in RDS! That&#8217;s a real piece of the problem for me; sure, it&#8217;s popular, but I shouldn&#8217;t just be thinking about trying to protect myself from getting on The Register.” Part of the challenge is that data is not one thing&#8230; I may have a name, I may have an address, I may have a card number. There are all sorts of different parameters, and the data could be stored in multiple ways. So you have the concept of like data adjacency; If I have a CCV number, and expiry date and name associated to it that might be something which is real. With Macie, even if you just use the straight matching techniques, you don&#8217;t have control over the adjacency thing, so that&#8217;s why a lot of the basic trivial cases get completely missed. Security at the edge? &#8220;If you are protecting data in the cloud, you have to wire the tools into the cloud to understand which IAM has access, which routes, which security groups can give you access? That’s the only way to understand the context to protect it. You can&#8217;t do it in some sort of edge device.&#8221; Getting started with Open Raven Visit openraven.com to get a 15 day trial. Spin up a SaaS instance and go play. “We already think we&#8217;re a better choice than Macie, but don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s the end goal. Come partner with us, work with us on the end goal, because those are things that we love; solving massive, complex, and interesting problems.” https://www.openraven.com/thecloudpod

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 new emulator and data analysis tools. Really great stuff! Azure: Busy Building Services It Promised For JEDI Microsoft announces multiple new features for Azure VPN Gateway in public preview. Some of these are amazing! Azure introduces the Knowledge center to simplify access to pre-loaded sample data. That electrical smell is the Team&#8217;s synapses firing on this one. Azure has announced that it will establish its first cloud datacenter region in Taiwan. It feels a bit like they’re trying to sell this as a good idea. TCP Lightning Round Jonathan was on his game and took this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (15 points), Jonathan (nine points) and Ryan (five points). Other headlines mentioned: Amazon Redshift announces support for Lambda UDFs and enables tokenization Amazon AppFlow supports importing custom dimensions and metrics from Google Analytics to Amazon S3 AWS Shield now provides global and per-account event summaries to all AWS customers Amazon SNS now supports selecting the origination number when sending SMS messages AWS App Mesh supports cross account sharing of ACM Private Certificate Authority Amazon RDS for Oracle supports managed disaster recovery (DR) with Oracle Data Guard physical standby database AWS Step Functions now supports Amazon Athena service integration Amazon Kendra now supports custom data sources Announcing two new on-demand digital courses for Game Tech New digital course: Advanced Testing Practices using AWS DevOps Tools Pause and Resume Workloads on I3, M5ad, and R5ad Instances with Amazon EC2 Hibernation Now customize your Session Manager shell environment with configurable shell profiles

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 time period plus a year to sort this out. You’re welcome? Google Cloud Platform: The Detectives On The Case Cloud Run for Anthos now includes an events feature allowing customers to easily build event-driven systems on Google Cloud. We’re a bit on the fence about this one. GCP launches Chronicle Detect, a threat detection solution to help enterprises identify threats at speed and scale. Really interesting that Azure and Google are heavily into threat intelligence so we’re curious to see if Amazon steps up as well. Google releases new enhancements for better monitoring and logging for Compute Engine VMs. If these enhancements were the default, then this would be awesome. Cloud Monitoring now gives zero-config, out-of-the-box visibility into Compute Engine VM fleets. AI Platform Prediction with improved reliability &amp; ML workflow integration is now generally available. We were not wowed by this. Azure: Welcome To Snoozeville Azure has announced several new Azure Infrastructure capabilities. None of us were particularly excited about this one. TCP Lightning Round Justin and Ryan have joined the queue with Jonathan taking this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (13 points), Jonathan (eight points) and Ryan (four points). Other headlines mentioned: Azure Blob storage point-in-time restore now generally available New MERGE command for Azure Synapse Analytics COPY command now generally available in Azure Synapse Analytics Column-level encryption for Azure Synapse Analytics Announcing the General Availability of Amazon Corretto 15 Amazon Connect decreases outbound telephony rates for the second time this year in Europe Amazon Aurora Increases Maximum Storage Size to 128TB Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Supports pglogical Extension AWS Launch Wizard now supports SQL Server Always On deployments on Linux Amazon Textract has improved accuracy of detecting currency symbols, key value pairs and checkboxes Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics strengthens end-to-end canary run debugging with X-Ray traces You can now queue purchases of AWS Savings Plans Amazon Redshift Spectrum adds support for querying open source Apache Hudi and Delta Lake

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 —

In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Forrest Brazeal, a Senior Manager at A Cloud Guru, a cloud education platform that has attracted more than two million students. A Cloud Guru offers full certification training and technical deep dives for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and more. Forrest talks about why companies need to invest in training to reap the benefits of “cloud fluency,” and how A Cloud Guru is contributing to cloud adoption success at Fortune 500 companies. While discussing knowledge gaps, Forrest highlights how important it is to clearly identify which cloud services and knowledge areas you’re going to become certified in to avoid missing important high level areas. “Going through the certification training and prep really helps you to avoid those blind spots that will keep you from speaking effectively to the other teams that you work with,” says Forrest. Featured Guest Name: Forrest Brazeal What he does: Forrest is a Senior Manager at cloud learning platform A Cloud Guru. Key quote: “When I look at people who are going from the data center to the cloud today, they are thinking about the cloud as something that&#8217;s going to take undifferentiated heavy lifting away from them.” Where to find him: LinkedIn l Twitter | Personal Website Key Takeaways Be strategic with your cloud certifications. If you’re trying to reach a certain number of certifications, make sure you have a plan or you might end up with gaps in your knowledge. “It’s so easy to do, right?” Forrest says, “as I&#8217;m sitting on one team, and I&#8217;m touching one technology all the time, I could go two, three, four years and never know anything about networking because all I&#8217;m doing is databases, right? Or never know anything about compute, because all I&#8217;m doing is storage. Going through the certification training prep really helps you to avoid those blind spots that will keep you from speaking effectively to the other teams that you work with.” College grads beware: Just because you have a Computer Science degree doesn&#8217;t mean you&#8217;ll just be writing algorithms all day. If you’re looking at a career in programming, the day to day job includes negotiating with people and figuring out what requirements of the business are &#8211; not just writing algorithms. Forrest says “it&#8217;s figuring out requirements, and it&#8217;s writing the same line of code and then deleting it because it turns out the business requirement changed.” Scaling to zero, where a function can be reduced down to zero replicas when idle and brought back to the required amount of replicas when needed, is one example of how the underlying principles adopted by the serverless community that might have been considered “radical” five or six years ago is now seen as welcome wisdom in the broader cloud community. The term, “serverless,” might be retired eventually, but the fundamental principles will remain and evolve into “cloud native.” Here&#8217;s what was mentioned in the episode Microsoft Azure: Cloud Computing Services AWS: Amazon Web Services Google Cloud Platform

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

Note: This interview is part of a paid sponsorship between Protera and The Cloud Pod. In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Patrick Osterhaus, CTO and Founder of Protera Technologies, a preeminent provider for SAP and cloud managed services. Patrick discusses how the cloud, COVID-19, and work-from-home are influencing SAP and legacy enterprise software packages today, and Protera’s goal to provide the very best SAP services available on the cloud. Covering issues around migration to SAP, Patrick takes the opportunity to reflect on Protera’s history, while also addressing corporate IT integration. “We call this the transformation journey-site assessment, specific to each client’s needs, looking beyond SAP to the SAP systems, we use a tool we call [Protera] FlexBridgeSM,” notes Patrick. Featured Guest Name: Patrick Osterhaus What he does: Patrick is CTO and Founder of Protera Technologies. Key quote: “The complexity of moving to public cloud is getting those non-cloud native applications into the cloud, and then looking at the transformation of those applications once they&#8217;re in the cloud.” Where to find him: LinkedIn | Twitter Key Takeaways The best way to prepare for cloud migration is what Patrick calls “the journey,” which involves a site assessment of the customer environment and understanding how everything on-premise, or in a hybrid environment, is working together. COVID-19 has accelerated migration to the cloud and has forced companies to plan their disaster recovery systems. Patrick says businesses aren’t just thinking about their earpiece systems — the thinking extends to ancillary systems like CRMs and web access systems — “all these systems to be connected and have it fully available in the cloud as a backup.” He adds, “We&#8217;ve seen a natural interest in what is good practice,” which is to have a protection plan for critical SAP applications. Working with many compliance-heavy industries, such as financial or military and defense clients, Protera stresses has learned the importance of not only application security, but also the physical security necessary around data centers. He says the discussing the real-world protection of data centers — “who owns the data, how it’s governed, how it’s protected” — is important to raise with the client. Resources Here&#8217;s what was mentioned in the episode SAP: Systems in Application Products and Data Processing &#8220;What is DevOps?&#8220;: An AWS blog post explaining the DevOps model Microsoft Azure: Cloud Computing Services Amazon Redshift: Cloud Computing Services Google Cloud Platform: Cloud Computing Services DR system: Multi-cloud disaster recovery system &#8220;What is SAP HANA?&#8221;: A Protera blog post SAP GUI: Used to initiate a session in a SAP server &#8220;VDI Solutions&#8220;: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure AWS: Amazon Web Services AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK): An open-source development framework to model and provision cloud application resources FlexBridgeSM: Protera FlexBridgeSM migration software &#8220;Infrastructure as Code&#8221; (IaC): A Microsoft blog post describing the IaC managing model “What is Hybrid Cloud?”: A Microsoft blog post defining what a hybrid cloud is &#8220;What is the Public Cloud?&#8220;: A Microsoft blog post defining the terms of the public cloud Top quotes in this episode [6:14] &#8220;And the big challenge with SAP, in my opinion, is they have such a tremendous customer base that is already running in their own data centers … and the challenges to make that transition. And being that they&#8217;re not just the number of customers and the number of SAP systems each of those customers has, but just the tremendous volumes of data. And the dependency that their whole business has on SAP as the lifeblood of the organization, not just as the data itself, which is obviously very important.&#8221; [13:29] “I joke, [making the cloud decision is like] the Coke versus Pepsi. It&#8217;s the two challengers and people certainly have biases … people have very strong opinions on each side, and we try to satisfy [customers] as best we can. So we keep our certifications up on the providers, try to keep our team up [to date] with all the new developments, which in and of itself is always a challenge.” [16:38:] “You know, [competition between cloud providers] reminds me of the 90’s when we had the browser wars in that it&#8217;s every single week, there&#8217;s a new feature. And, it&#8217;s a very exciting time.”

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 Contact Lens AI features will help optimize contact centers using Amazon Connect. Connect is really taking the contact center world by storm with its ease of adoption. Amazon now offers “d” variants to all three of their Graviton2 EC2 instances. Amazon has reduced the prices for their Amazon RDS for SQL Server Enterprise Edition database instances in the Multi-AZ configuration by about 25%. Google: A Series of Tubes The new External HTTP(S) Load Balancing integration will bring the HTTP(S) load balancing capabilities of all Google Cloud serverless offerings into parity with each other. The most recent version of gRPC includes xDS API support. The new Google Cloud Rapid Assessment &amp; Migration Program (RAMP) will help enterprises migrate to the cloud simpler and faster than before. Google Cloud Armor now features Managed Protection Plus, curated Named IP lists and pre-configured WAF rules all in beta. Google Cloud announced a slate of infrastructural upgrades, including a new transatlantic cable. If you’re in Australia or India, keep an eye out for when this comes online in 2022. Azure: Following the Blueprints Azure has made the new Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework available in the Azure Architecture Center. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Azure shared disks and other Disk Storage enhancements are now generally available. The next generation of Azure Stack HCI features native Azure Hybrid capabilities. Network File System 3.0 for Azure Blob storage is now in preview. Beware the Blob! Lightning Round Ryan takes this week’s point, leaving the score at Jonathan (seven points), Justin (eight points) and Ryan (three points). Other headlines mentioned: Amazon SQS Now Supports New Console Experience New Amazon Elastic File System console simplifies file system creation and management AWS Global Accelerator launches One-Click Acceleration for Application Load Balancers Announcing automatic backups for Amazon Elastic File System Java 11 for Azure Functions is now available in preview AWS X-Ray .NET Auto-Instrumentation Agent is now available in beta Announcing AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI now generally available for production use AWS CodeBuild now supports accessing Build Environments with AWS Session Manager Azure SQL Database—A performance optimization change to default settings is coming soon Amazon Elastic File System increases per-client throughput by 100%, from 250MB/s to 500 MB/s Amazon CloudFront announces Cache Key and Origin Request Policies AWS Control Tower console update adds more visibility into OUs and accounts Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI add support for OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication of private workers Easily enable operations best practices across AWS accounts and Regions with AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup Eight ways to optimize costs on Azure SQL HTTP compression support now available in Amazon Elasticsearch Service Introducing AWS Purchase Order Management (Preview) You can now Improve website performance with Lightsail Content Deliv

In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker chat with Liz Rice, VP of open source engineering for Aqua Security, which provides tools to secure cloud-native deployments. Liz describes Aqua&#8217;s evolution over the years: From a provider of container security to its acquisition of CloudSploit and its development of open-source security solutions. Most customers are using cloud native software, and Aqua wants to secure those workloads and engage that community. &#8220;As a business, we have to be where the discussions are. Having open-source tools that are genuinely useful gives us a good way to participate in that community,&#8221; Liz explains. In addition to her role at Aqua Security, she is the chair on the CloudNative Computing Foundation&#8216;s (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee. During the conversation, Liz gives an overview of how they handle projects. Key Takeaways Open source tools offer an entry point into communities. “As a business, we have to be there — we have to be where the discussions are. And having open source tools and solutions that are genuinely useful gives us a good way of participating in that community,” Liz says of the value of Aqua developing open-source tools. The company’s Starboard toolkit for finding risks in Kubernetes workloads and environments is a recent example. Liz discusses Starboard’s comparative advantage — it integrates existing Kubernetes tools, not just from Aqua but also from third-parties, into the Kubernetes experience. “You can run Trivy through Starboard and your results are right there next to the workload you&#8217;re interested in,” she says. Liz discusses CNCF’s role with Kubernetes and beyond. &#8220;Google today contributes tons of time, energy, and engineering hours into Kubernetes. If tomorrow they were to decide they were going to walk away, Kubernetes still exists, and it would do so because of the CNCF and its participants,&#8221; she explains. Resources Here&#8217;s what was mentioned in the episode &#8220;Container Security: Fundamental Technology Concepts that Protect Containerized Applications&#8220;: Liz Rice’s book. Aqua Security: a company that delivered security solutions for applications. Cloud Native Computing Foundation: CNCF serves as the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing open-source projects, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CloudSploit: security scanner for cloud accounts. Trivy: vulnerability scanner for container images. Starboard: makes security information available across the Kubernetes API in a native way. Prometheus: an open-source metrics-based monitoring system. Istio: Google&#8217;s open-source independent service mesh allows companies to connect, monitor, and secure mic

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

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

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

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

In this episode of TCP-Talks we chat with Amiram Shachar, founder and CEO of Spot, which aims to help its customers reduce complexity and compute costs by up to 90% in the AWS, GCP and Azure clouds. We talk about the impact on the spot pricing market, and the differences between the AWS, GCP and Azure approach to spot pricing and delivery, and whether customers are asking for multi cloud solutions. Amiram discusses the problems Spot solves, why they chose to partner with NetApp and reveal the mystery of the rebrand from Spotinst, then takes us on a deeper dive into Spot&#8217;s Ocean, a Serverless Infrastructure Engine for Containers,.