The Cloud Pod

TCP Talks: SAP Cloud Migrations with Protera CTO, Patrick Osterhaus Aug 31, 2020

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’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’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’s what was mentioned in the episode

SAP: Systems in Application Products and Data Processing

“What is DevOps?“: 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

“What is SAP HANA?”: A Protera blog post

SAP GUI: Used to initiate a session in a SAP server

“VDI Solutions“: 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

“Infrastructure as Code” (IaC): A Microsoft blog post describing the IaC managing model

“What is Hybrid Cloud?”: A Microsoft blog post defining what a hybrid cloud is

“What is the Public Cloud?“: A Microsoft blog post defining the terms of the public cloud

Top quotes in this episode

[6:14] “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’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.”

[13:29] “I joke, [making the cloud decision is like] the Coke versus Pepsi. It’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’s every single week, there’s a new feature. And, it’s a very exciting time.”

Episode 92: The Cloud Pod is first in, first out Oct 30, 2020

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’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:

The Cloud Pod wins second place for the Jedi contract – Ep 45 Oct 30, 2019

The DOD awards the coveted Jedi contract, the MS ignite Draft, Earnings season and more this week on The Cloud Pod.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Topics

General News/Topics

Earnings Season

AWS

Google

Azure

MS Ignite Draft

Jonathan

Digital Assistant to compete with Alexa or Google Home.
3 more Azure Regions in US
More or Improved tooling for Devops Community

Peter

Istio for AKS
1 more region in Canada
Visual Studio Online

Justin

Azure Portal Redesign
Sagemaker/Databricks like Competitor.
Oracle on Stage

Lightning Round (Jonathan 12, Justin 16, and Guest 4):

137: Now Serving Clients in the Shire Sep 30, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, Justin may be out but the cloud stops for no one. Also, AWS announces a New Zealand region, GCP releases GKE Backup, and Azure Functions 4.0 is now in public preview.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

Grab your togs and sunnies! AWS is opening a New Zealand region to serve Asia Pacific. The move is expected to create more than 1,000 jobs in the next 15 years.
GCP users can now protect their GKE workloads with GKE Backup, which helps automate recovery tasks and shows reporting for compliance and audit purposes.
Azure Functions 4.0 has arrived — in public preview, that is. It’s expected to be generally available by November 2021, just in time for the .NET 6.0 release.

Top Quotes

“Microsoft Excel is still the most powerful tool for making business decisions. And [Amazon QuickSight] is the same thing: It’s a way to visualize the raw data you have. Being able to ask a service a question in normal words is gonna be super powerful.”
“It’s funny because for at least the last 18 months, this has been my daily life: Thinking hard about how software makes it from environment to environment and into production. And no matter where you’re hosting this workload — what cloud provider, what technology — there are trials and tribulations and hurdles that have to be overcome … So I’d like to see more of these bespoke deployment technologies that are really focused on doing one thing really well, rather than doing all things.”

AWS: AWS says ‘Kia Ora’ to its Newest Region: New Zealand

With the newly available Amazon QuickSight, business users can use natural language (read: normal words) to quickly create interactive BI dashboards and receive accurate insights and data visualizations.
Look out, Kiwis and hobbits: Amazon is set to open new data centers in New Zealand by 2024, adding the AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region to its 81 existing availability zones. It’s estimated that the new region will create 1,000 jobs in the next 15 years, but we believe it will have an even bigger impact.
Tracing support is now generally available in AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. Users can now send telemetry data to various AWS applications as well as partner destinations. Telemetry, dear Watson.
AWS releases AQ UA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift RA3.xlplus nodes. This new distributed and hardware-accelerated cache enables Redshift to run up to 10X faster than AWS competitors by boosting certain query types. Magic!
AWS users can now easily select, detect and manage sensitive data with Amazon Macie. Using machine learning and pattern matching, users can create custom alerts based on the specific data governance and privacy needs of their organizations.
You can now (finally) replicate individual repositories to other regions and accounts with Amazon ECR — instead of all images in the registry.
Christmas has come early this year for Amazon EC2 users. Windows Server 2022 AMIs are now officially available on AWS, meaning you can now enjoy the latest Windows features.

GCP: Making Stateless Stateful with GKE Backup

Google expands its cloud storage capabilities, allowing users to choose from a larger selection of regions for their data replication, rather than the previous dual-region buckets.
Google releases GKE Backup to help users protect, manage and restore stateful application data — or basically make your containers VMs.
Google announces the release of Google Cloud Deploy, which allows users to define delivery pipelines and targets for each release, making continuous delivery to GKE faster and more reliable.

Azure: Welcome to the Azure Peep Show

4⃣ Azure Functions 4.0 is now in public preview and is expected to be released in November 2021 to coincide with the planned release of .NET 6.0. (How are we only on version 6?) Functions 4.0 will also support the following versions: Node.js 14; Python 3.7 and 3.8; Java 8 and 11; PowerShell 7.0; and Custom Handler
Java apps users can soon view richer data from their functions applications — i.e. requests, logs, metrics — with Azure Monitor’s application insights integration with Azure Functions on Linux. Currently in public preview, the integration will feature monitoring for the application insights Java 3.x agent.
A twofer! Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL Pipeline Support are now in public preview. Users will be able to fully automate testing and delivery in multiple services, and craft DB update commands against the database. Just make sure you have a tested rollback process first.
Also in public preview is the Azure Resource Health For Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server. This new feature helps monitor database health and alerts users to widespread issues and “non-platform” events.
Terraform support from Azure Database for PostgreSQL — Flexible Server is in public preview. This comes a mere four and a half years after Azure Database for PostgreSQL was first in public preview.

TCP Lightning Round

Jonathan wins the point this week with a not-so-subtle jab at DevOps engineers, bringing the scores to Justin (15), Ryan (9), Jonathan (11), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

Things Coming Up

Announcing the new cloud pod CTL for Kubernetes – Ep 33 Jul 30, 2019

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

AWS Reinvent Music Festival – https://intersect.aws/

Topics

General News

Earnings

AWS

Google

Azure

Lightning Round (Jonathan 8, Justin 10, Peter 1 and Guest 3):

EP 70: The Cloud Pod is now fully ‘Synthetic’ Apr 30, 2020

The Three Musketeers have gained their D’Artagnan and take on the world (metaphorically and from home) 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

Take a break with us and enjoy a music video.
Oracle managed a whole two headlines this week!
Jonathan called it: AWS opens the Africa (Cape Town) Region.

General News: Chime After Chime

- Tim Leehane and Spencer Johnson released a working-from-home anthem titled Chime After Chime we just had to share with you.

Security company Rapid7 will acquire SaaS platform DivvyCloud for $145 million.

COVID-19

Zoom picked the dark horse of cloud platforms Oracle for their next upscaling deal. Zoom is moving around 93 years of video through Oracle servers every day.
AMD revealed an anonymous customer (probably Oracle or Microsoft) deployed 10,000 new Epyc servers in just 10 days.

AWS: Summit Predictions

Jonathan
1. Improved DLP Tools for S3
2. AI Powered submarine to explore the depths of the ocean
3. ES service will pivot to Open Distro for ElasticSearch
Ryan
1. Docker Exec based Debugging tools/capability
2. Remote Debug capabilities for Lambda Functions
3. Security Code Scanning service (similar to code guru). (static and dynamic code analysis)
Peter
1. Direct Competitor to Anthos
2. DLP for VPC, always wanted a layer 7 like proxy. Filtering/Domain Whitelisting
3. A caricature of larry ellison will appear on the screen in the slides
Justin
1. Price Cut in EC2, S3 or Networking
2. Covid Crazy Growth Numbers (service dig on Azure)
3. A Diplo T-shirt will be worn by Werner Vogel

Honorable Mentions:

Amazon Crucible their first person shooter game, online multiplayer game
Dr. Matt Wood will make a passionate attempt for people to love sagemaker
6 foot distancing robots
Keyspaces will be on the HIPAA BAA list
Detective Named/Sherlock named security tool
In person events for 2020 will be canceled
New Region coming in a few years.

Tie BreakerHow many new features for year, will AWS say they:

70 – Justin
200 – Peter
150 – Ryan
157 – Jonathan

AWS: Global Reach, Mediocre Branding

The butt of TCP jokes at Re:Invent — Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Services — has rebranded to Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) and became generally available.
AWS Transfer for Secure File Transfer Protocol now supports File Transfer Protocol and File Transfer Protocol over SSL/TLS. Please, please don’t use File Transfer Protocol if you’re transferring data of any sensitivity.
AWS published their guide to CloudWatch Synthetics in a blog post. In fact, we set it up for The Cloud Pod and it’s running cleanly.
# Amazon AppFlow promises to automate the data flows between AWS services and SaaS apps. This might actually be a good piece to build onto #NoCode.
AWS Chatbot is now generally available for anyone to use for ChatOps. They’ve added quite a bit since we last saw this at Re:Invent.
You can cross it off your predictions bingo card: AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region and AWS Europe (Milan) Region are open for business.
- The promised xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/705/
Those of you carefully budgeting your cloud spends may be interested to know that cost controls are now available for Amazon Redshift Spectrum and Concurrency Scaling.
AWS Control Tower will allow you to create and manage multi-account environments. That fixes an entire half of the problem!
AWS Glue promises to manage streaming data automatically. Break out the acetone because this is Super Glue now.

Google:

Anthos support for Multi-cloud is now generally available. All the boundless freedom of locking into Anthos!
Migrate for Anthos has been updated with enhanced Virtual-Machine-to-container conversion capabilities. It’s a big deal assuming it actually works.
Thomas Kurian stated that Istio will be donated to “a foundation,” but did not specify what foundation or when. Expect Istio to go to the WWF sometime in 2040?
Shielded Virtual Machines are now the default for Google Compute Engine. It’s just common sense to employ robust default security settings.
Rumor has it that Google is looking to purchase Kubernetes startup D2iQ. Neither company will comment, but this appears to us to be a talent hire.

Azure: A Strong Third Place

Query Acceleration for Azure Data Lake Storage promises yet another way to increase the efficiency of your spend.
Microsoft admitted the ongoing global pandemic led to capacity constraints in some Azure regions. We anticipate a mixed response to Microsoft’s decision making…but we appreciate the transparency.
If you didn’t think there were enough cloud service brand names to keep track of, then there’s good news for you: Visual Studio Online has rebranded to Visual Studio Codespaces.
Microsoft is now a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider. Not much of a feat for a company of Microsoft’s size.
Azure Kubernetes Service support for Windows Containers is now generally available. Somehow Microsoft is the third of the big three to support Windows containers.
Strange bedfellows Azure and Red Hat will jointly manage new OpenShift services, and you can thank IBM.

Oracle: Wait, Oracle?!

Microsoft hiked up the Windows Server licenses and Oracle is passing those losses on to you.

Lightning Round

Somehow Ryan makes his debut with an unprecedented negative one point by the end of this week’s lightning round. Better luck next time?

Other headlines mentioned:

Episode 21: The Cloud Pod exceeds quarterly listener expectations Apr 30, 2019

A New Cost Management blog, APAC gets a new AWS region and Docker Hub gets hacked. Plus Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon all release earnings and we break out the highs and lows. With special guest, Ian Mckay @iann0036 talks about his new AWS tool www.former2.com

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – https://fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Apple actually reducing dependence on Amazon Cloud services

Topics

Lightning Round

Cool Tools

https://former2.com/ with guest Ian McKay

Episode 88: The Chronicles of The Cloud Pod Sep 29, 2020

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 & 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:

Episode 80: The Cloud Pod now with more Seoul Jul 29, 2020

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…
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 & 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:

The Cloud Pod has a Secret – Episode 57 Jan 29, 2020

Your hosts are back at it — well some of them are. Ian Mckay (@iann0036) fills in for Peter this week as we cover all of the triumphs and troubles in cloud.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

Ian Mckay gives an Aussie perspective on the AWS outage in Sydney.
Amazon streamlines permissions with the IAM policy simulator.
Google competes with AWS with competitively priced services.

Amazon Pressures Pentagon, Suffers in Sydney

On January 22, Amazon filed a motion to halt work on the JEDI contract between Microsoft and the Department of Defense until a court rules on the protest filed by Amazon last year. Expect more news here as the story develops through February.

That same day, Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a six hour outage across multiple services in the Sydney region “including EC2, elastic load balancing (ELB), relational database service (RDS), AppStream 2.0, ElastiCache, WorkSpaces and Lambda.” After the issue was resolved, Amazon assured customers it will use this experience to learn and improve future operational performance.

AWS Adds, Updates and Improves

AWS DataSync has received an update: You can now use DataSync to quickly transfer large amounts of data to and from Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. Previously, DataSync was not fully compatible with Windows applications and environments.

All seven sizes of the T3 instances are now available on single-tenant hardware. It might help you meet your compliance goals by physically isolating your machine from other AWS accounts, but the unlimited bursting capability makes us wonder what use cases Amazon has in mind for these.

Amazon GuardDuty has globally released a threat detection enhancement which should allow customers with common architectures to see fewer false alarms, and ultimately 50 percent fewer alerts overall.

You can now export Amazon Relational Database Service or Amazon Aurora snapshots to Amazon Simple Storage Service as Apache Parquet. Compared to uncompressed text, Parquet is twice as fast to export and takes up one-sixth the storage space.

The new Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy simulator will allow administrators to test new permission boundary policies without removing the old ones, heavily streamlining the process of implementing new permissions.

Amazon announced that Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image security support will be phased out over the next few years until June 2023, instead of June 2020. This should give users the time they need to move from Amazon Linux 1 to Amazon Linux 2.

Google Kills and Creates Services

If you’re a data scientist, you’ll be pleased to hear that Google Cloud’s Dataproc has been updated with several new features: autoscaling and notebook support, logging and monitoring enhancements for SparkR job types, accelerator support for GPUs, and scheduled cluster deletion.

The NVIDIA T4 GPU AI deployments are now over 60 percent cheaper, which also makes them cheaper to run than their AWS counterpart, the g4dn.xlarge.

BigQuery rolled out their January update announcement which included several new interesting features including new machine learning capabilities.

Google announced it will shut down its low-code App Maker service on January 19, 2021. Google claimed the move was due to low usage, but it is likely that Google is simply shifting focus over to the recently-acquired AppSheet.

Google Cloud’s new Secret Manager service offers sensitive data storage at 15 percent the price of AWS Secret Manager. Expect AWS to make a competitive price drop soon.

Forrester Consulting released a study claiming four ways Anthos delivers a return on investment to customers. Well, it reads more like a paid advertisement than a study. You can check out Justin’s analysis on Twitter here.

Lightning Round

There are no points awarded in the Lightning Round this week, leaving the score at one for Justin and two for Jonathan.

Other headlines mentioned:

Episode 8 – Now with Insane Magic Jan 29, 2019

Episode 8 – Now With Insane Magic

This week we talk about TLS support for NLB, AWS Worklink, Kubernetes Metering and retailers pushing back on AWS. Plus the lightning round and cool tools with Jonathan. #thecloudpod

Thanks to our Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

News

Microsoft Earnings – http://fortune.com/2019/01/30/microsoft-stock-down-slowdown-azure-cloud/

Idera acquires Travis CI – https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/23/idera-acquires-travis-ci/

Google Gives Wikipedia Millions – https://www.wired.com/story/google-wikipedia-machine-learning-glow-languages/

NLB now supports TLS Termination – https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-tls-termination-for-network-load-balancers

Microsoft Acquires Citus Data – https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2019/01/24/microsoft-acquires-citus-data-re-affirming-its-commitment-to-open-source-and-accelerating-azure-postgresql-performance-and-scale/

AWS Worklink secures on premise website and apps – https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-worklink-secure-one-click-mobile-access-to-internal-websites-and-applications/

GKE Usage Metering

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/gke-usage-metering-whose-line-item-is-it-anyway

Albertsons picks Azure to run cloud workloads due to Amazon being a competitor – https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/01/28/amazon-fear-is-driving-retailers-to-microsofts-clo.aspx

Lightning Round

Python Shell for AWS Glue – https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/01/introducing-python-shell-jobs-in-aws-glue/

AWS Elasticsearch Service now supports maximum cluster size of 200 nodes – https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/01/amazon-elasticsearch-service-doubles-maximum-cluster-capacity-with-200-node-cluster-support/

AWS SSM now supports management of in guest and instance level configuration –

Episode 99: 2020 overstays its welcome Dec 28, 2020

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:

Peter:

Jonathan:

128: Azure puts its gold in CloudKnox Jul 28, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, it’s a merry-go-round of vacations, with Jonathan returning and Ryan escaping while Peter tunes in from Hawaii. Also, there is some big news in an otherwise quiet week.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS announces that Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) users can now assign IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes to EC2 instances. It should help simplify the process of using container and networking applications that require multiple IP addresses.
AWS releases a new feature for SAM CLI, SAM Pipelines. It provides quick and easy access to the benefits of CI/CD, making it easier to get out new products faster and check for errors.
Microsoft has acquired security platform CloudKnox, which was designed to work across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

Top Quotes

“I hope to see more of these [SAM Pipelines-style features]. It’s been one of my mental blocks. I’ve been using serverless ever since Lambda was announced, but building into a pipeline is such a chore. And Jenkins is such a chore in itself. So if you have a canned way to deploy a pipeline, it’s great.”
“I think it [CloudKnox] had a potential to be really interesting and really valuable. But Azure was actually building a lot of these capabilities into their cloud natively, including least privilege access. And Google’s building that kind of stuff too. So I don’t know if there’s a long runway left for them to get a lot of adoption and a lot of new customers, or if they’re going to be replaced by the cloud providers over time, and ultimately not be needed.”

General News: Don’t Off Slack

Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Slack for $27.7 billion. Hopefully they don’t kill slack because we do not want to use Teams.

Amazon Web Services: Winning

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud customers can now assign IP prefixes to their EC2 instances. Being able to assign multiple IPs is super helpful, so there are some great use cases for this.
AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) Pipelines is a new feature of the AWS SAM CLI. We hope to see more of these types of announcements, this out-of-the-box function is

Episode 73: The Cloud Pod Celebrates BigQuery’s 10th Birthday May 28, 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

An unusually short AWS segment this week featured new Backup customizations.
Azure is bringing their HoloLens2 to a new set of countries.
We celebrate BigQuery’s 10th birthday and the accompanying BigSale.

AWS: Only Three Stories Somehow

Jonah Jones of the AWS Open Source Blog published an article on how to use the PromCat (Prometheus Catalog) to monitor AWS services used by Kubernetes. It’s great to see Prometheus and Kubernetes continue to take over the world.
You can now opt-in or opt-out of AWS Backup services at the account level. Opt-in is nice and all, but opt-out provides peace of mind to the largest user base.
Information on AWS regions and servers is now available programmatically in the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. It’ll be nice when we see other tools pulling this data.

Azure: Mixed With What?

HoloLens 2, the latest in Azure’s “mixed reality” glasses technology, is now available in 10 countries and will be coming to more soon. Once the technology becomes as functional as it is in the advertisements, we’re going to be thrilled to play with it. There’s a lot of potential here for industrial applications that are already being explored.
The Azure Arc preview now supports Kubernetes which was hotly requested in customer feedback. Expect to see some very interesting use cases from Azure Arc in the next 12 months.

Google: Happy Birthday!

After dropping out early in the JEDI contract competition citing conflicts with its AI principals, Google has signed a seven-figure contract with the Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit. Google anticipates that this may lead to future business deals with branches of the DoD.
Serverless VPC Access now features ingress settings. It’s really nice to see a tightening down of function access on VPCs and vice versa. This should make a lot of people happy.
Google’s new open-source t

Episode 25: Optimize your Journey with The Cloud Pod Center of Excellence May 28, 2019

This week we talk about Cloud Center of Excellence, New Encryption options, open source update on Firecracker and more. Elise Carmichael (twitter: @uncfleece) from @tricentis joins us to talk about some of their tools.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – https://fogops.io/thecloudpod

Topics:

Lightning Round (Jonathan 5, Justin 9, Peter 1 and Guest 3):

Episode 16: This week in the cloud blob Mar 28, 2019

AWS Summit Season 2019 is officially underway. Justin, Peter and special guest Chris Short @chrisshort. Plus the famous lightning round.

Sponsors

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod

Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Topics

AWS Multi-Account Support for Direct Connect Gateway

Introducing AWS Deep Learning Containers

AMD Processors now available on AWS Ec2 Instances

AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive GA

AWS App Mesh now Generally Available

Concurency Scaling for Amazon Redshift

New ALB Request routing for HTTP customer headers

AWS Transfer for SFTP now supports VPC’s and Private Link

AWS Toolkit for IntelliJ GA and Visual Studio Code now in Preview

Amazon EKS opens public preview for Windows Container Support

ECS now supports local testing

AWS Fargate and ECS now support external deployment control

Episode #2 of Now Go Build

New IAM

Google will shutdown The Cloud Pod in 2027 – Ep. 37 Aug 27, 2019

VMWare acquires Pivotal and Carbon black, plus VMworld debrief. Google kills more products and AWS reduces the cost of SageMaker training.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Topics

General News

Oracle files new appeal over Pentagon’s $10B JEDI cloud contract RFP process

VMWorld

AWS

Google

119: Oracle announces something amazing, The Cloud Pod worldview shook May 27, 2021

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

Episode 102: The Cloud Pod is NOT OK Jan 27, 2021

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

Episode 3 – 2018 Recap Dec 26, 2018

The podcast has just started, but we've reached the end of 2018 already. To recap 2018 Justin, Jonathan and Peter scoured the AWS, Azure, GCP and General Cloud news to find their favorite stories, features and capabilities from 2018. Run through their top stories and see if you agree!

#3Jonathan - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-use-any-programming-language-and-share-common-components/ Peter - https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/06/the-high-stakes-battle-for-the-pentagons-winner-take-all-cloud-contract/Justin - https://aws.amazon.com/secrets-manager/

#2Jonathan - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-update-additional-instance-types-nitro-system-and-cpu-options/ Peter - https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/23/snap-barely-met-its-cloud-spending-commitment-last.aspx Justin - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

#1Jonathan - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-instances-a1-powered-by-arm-based-aws-graviton-processors/ Peter - https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/microsoft-apple-most-valuable-company/index.html Justin - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/

Honorable Mentions

Microsoft sponsors the Open Source Initiative - https://opensource.org/node/901Resource Based Pricing - https://cloud.google.com/compute/resource-based-pricing

K8 Takes over the WorldAzure K8 - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kubernetes-service/Amazon EKS - https://aws.amazon.com/eksGKE on Premise - https://cloud.google.com/gke-on-prem/

Sponsors

Foghorn Consulting – www.fogops.io/thecloudpod – Your leading AWS premier partner helping companies move to the cloudLast Week in AWS – www.lastweekinaws.com – Your weekly dose of AWS Snark and announcements. The Cloud Pod - www.thecloudpod.net/sponsor

Clipart: ID 126311059 © Bulat Silvia | Dreamstime.com

132: The Cloud Pod takes a trip down MemoryDB lane Aug 26, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, the results of the AWS Summit prediction draft are in. It was probably worth getting up early for — especially if you’re Jonathan.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

At the Summit, AWS announces AWS Backup Audit Manager, sealing the prediction draft winner: Congratulations, Jonathan.
Outside the Summit, AWS announces MemoryDB for Redis, new split charge rules, and cybersecurity updates.
Former AWS leader Charlie Bell is joining Microsoft. What his role will be is unclear, but we speculate that he’ll play some part in improving Azure availability.

Top Quotes

“I suspect that certificate-based access to the console is going to be more prevalent. I don’t know of this in Microsoft Azure or Amazon, but I also know that this is one of the things popping up in custom security audits or in documentation that I’ve started to see more and more, which is, how do you control access to this publicly available API?”
“This could be an additional $5 billion boost in revenue for Microsoft Office 365, which is important to us because Microsoft 365 is included in the Azure number and reported as one line item. So a $5 billion increase could be a pretty big increase in revenue and growth that Azure could then tout and say, We are finally the biggest, fastest-growing cloud.”

General News: Later Days

GitHub is saying goodbye to password authorization, but you can still create a personal access token to log in.

Amazon Web Services: We’ve Reached the Summit

Redis users in select regions can now use Amazon MemoryDB to boost their application performance with data durability, microsecond read, and single-digit millisecond writes. Unlike ElastiCache, MemoryDB does not require adding a cache from your database to achieve low latency.
Amazon EC2 turns 15 this year. Launched with a single instance in 2006, there are now over 400 variations of instances. Happy birthday, EC2 — next year we’ll buy you a car.
Good news for finance pros: AWS Cost Categories will now allow you to create split charge rules to allocate shared costs to different categories. Time to bust out the corporate card.
IAM Access Analyzer users can (finally) get rid of localized cloud trails and consolidate them into a single account. This makes us super happy, ex

Episode 84: We knew Ian was a hero before AWS Aug 26, 2020

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… 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 f

TCP Talks with Aqua Security’s Liz Rice Jul 26, 2020

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’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.

“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,” Liz explains.

In addition to her role at Aqua Security, she is the chair on the CloudNative Computing Foundation‘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’re interested in,” she says.
Liz discusses CNCF’s role with Kubernetes and beyond. “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,” she explains.

Resources

Here’s what was mentioned in the episode

“Container Security: Fundamental Technology Concepts that Protect Containerized Applications“: 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: Googl

Episode 29: The Cloud Pod Re:Inforces Security Jun 26, 2019

We recap the AWS Reinforce conference from Boston Massachusetts. Draft results, overall impressions of the conference and we break down each announcement.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod
Turbonomic – turbonomic.com/cloudpod

Reinforce Results

Justin

DLP Cloud solution on AWS
SIEM for AWS
Endpoint Security Tools

Jonathan

Redlock or Trusted Advisor for security
VPC Security Group Improvements
1. Lists of Source IP’s
2. IP/Name matching/Tag sources for Security Groups
Machine Learning around Flowlogs and Payload data

Peter – Wins!

L7 Egress Firewall/proxy
Flowlogs with Payload data/Packet Capture – VPC Traffic Flow Mirroring
Security Scanning of Container for ECR

Honorable Mention

Justin
- WAF Enhancement
- Client VPN based Dynamic Access/Security Groups
- Tagging Namespace fix
Jonathan
- Organizations enhancements to make security easier across a set of accounts
Peter
- Lunch will be free

Reinforce Announcements

Episode 30: The Cloud Pod remains Cloud-full Jun 26, 2019

We talk about AWS EKS 1.13 release, Slack IPO, GCP Workload identity and more this week on the cloud pod.

Note: This episode was recorded after reinforce recap show due to vacation schedule of the hosts. We will cover the first few weeks of July for all cloud providers in Episode 31 and then back to normal schedule.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Topics

Lightning Round (Jonathan 7, Justin 9, Peter 1 and Guest 3):

The CloudPod opens the Azure front door – EP65 Mar 26, 2020

Jonathan is out with a back injury, so it’s just Justin and Peter on this week’s intranational episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Teleconferencing services continue to boom.
Amazon opens up a new avenue of attack on Microsoft’s JEDI contract.
Azure UK declares it will triage who gets service if need be.

General News: Cloud Provider Moves to Internet for Business

Business for web conferencing applications has boomed this month. Microsoft Teams gained 12 million users in a week and Slack’s paid version gained over 7,000 customers since the start of February. Hopefully people continue to use these tools to stay more connected even after we’ve gotten through this pandemic.

With AWS testing centers closed, AWS Certification is now offering all exams online with online proctoring. Considerations are being made for those who need to reschedule.

AWS: Chipping Away at JEDI

The price of Amazon GuardDuty use over 10,000 gigabytes (GB) was reduced from 25 cents to 15 cents per GB.

The normally quiet CloudFront announced they have cut propagation times down to five. Propagation times used to average between 17 and 35 minutes. CloudFront has always been cost-effective, but now it’s as efficient as it needs to be.

Amazon QuickSight launched image support on dashboards through the insight editor. Neat, but indicative of a slow news week.

AWS Site-to-Site VPN now enables you to use digital certificates for all site-to-site connections. This is great for mobile devices or other cases without static IP addresses.

In our developing coverage of the JEDI contract, AWS has now charged that the DoD is unfairly granting Microsoft a “do-over” on flawed portions of its bid.

The UpdateShardCount API for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams upgraded from a 500 shard capacity to a 10,000 sh

TCP Talks: Josh Stella on How Security Automation is Changing the Game in the Cloud Oct 25, 2021

In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Josh Stella, co-founder and CEO of Fugue, a cloud security company that helps businesses run faster on the cloud without breaking any rules.

Josh shares insights from Fugue’s State of Cloud Security 2021 Report, and highlights key themes, including preventative security measures, automation, and engineering-first compliance.

According to the report, within the next two years, all but 1% of security breaches will be caused by misconfiguration of cloud resources. Josh and his team at Fugue aim to minimize these mistakes by simplifying cloud security through a systems-based approach.

One way to streamline security, Josh notes, is to take advantage of automation. With cloud environments becoming increasingly complex, relying on pure knowledge will soon be untenable. Josh urges business leaders to embrace automation to reduce the risk of human error in their security systems.

Josh also discusses how businesses can declutter security tech stacks, the “land grab” happening in the cloud, and trends he predicts will shape the future of cloud compliance.

Featured Guest

Name: Josh Stella

What he does: Josh is the co-founder and CEO at Fugue, a cloud security company on a mission to help businesses move faster by ensuring safe cloud environments. He has over a decade of experience in the cloud security space, including positions at Amazon Web Services and in national security.

Key quote: “If Fugue as a software vendor and as domain experts in cloud security can’t make your job a lot easier through tooling, then we’re not doing our job.”

Where to find him: LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube

Key Takeaways

While compiling the State of Cloud Security 2021 Report, Josh and his team at Fugue interviewed over 300 organizations. They found that as cloud environments have grown and become more complex, organizations are seeing more instances of misconfigurations.

According to the report, 49% of respondents experienced over 50 misconfigurations per day. Another interesting detail: For the first time since Fugue started compiling its annual report, Identity and Access Management (IAM) was the number one concern regarding misconfigurations.

Josh argues that automation is the next step in making cloud environments more secure. Fugue aims to make security automation easy by providing pre-built rules and templates to automatically check code and monitor deployments.

Looking forward, Josh is optimistic that automation will become a key piece in enterprise cloud security. “The thing I would like to see a change in is the attitude that security problems are because people are screwing up … [I would like to see people] thinking about how to actually solve these problems, which is through computer science and automation,” he says.

One way to enable automation is to put engineering departments in charge of compliance, as opposed to traditional security teams. According to the State of Cloud Security 2021 Report, more than 66% of businesses are delegating security policy to engineering teams — a trend Josh hopes to see continue.

He says that today, engineering and DevOps teams work so fast security teams struggle to keep pace. Businesses that haven’t moved responsibility for security over to these teams are more likely to experience those potentially dangerous misconfigurations.

Resources

Episode 106: The Cloud Pod disagrees with Gartner on Low-Code Feb 25, 2021

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 reg

The Cloud Pod now with Dynamic Parallelism – Ep 41 Sep 24, 2019

Chef finds a bad recipe for success, AWS rolls out Step Functions, Google launches its native load balancer for Kubernetes and Microsoft confuses us further with premium tier storage offerings.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Topics

General News/Topics

AWS

Google

Azure

Azure Files premium tier gets zone redundant storage

123: The Cloud Pod does Step in the Studio Jun 24, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan pulls a classic move from 2020 and doesn’t realize he’s on mute. Also, the team completely destroys an article about the cloud being too expensive for what you get.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

VC firm a16z calls the cloud a “trillion-dollar paradox” in a blog post, noting the pressure cloud computing puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits. We think there are quite a few holes in their analysis and the Dropbox example doesn’t work.
AWS releases Step Functions Workflow Studio. Developers new to Step Functions will enjoy being able to build workflows faster.
Google announces that Quantum computers from IonQ are now on its marketplace. Developers, researchers and enterprises alike can now access IonQ’s high-fidelity, 11-qubit system via Google Cloud.

General News: A Trillion-Dollar Paradox

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, known as “a16z,” thinks the cost of cloud computing outweighs its benefits. Dropbox is a terrible example to use in this case.
Splunk launches Splunk Security Cloud and announces a billion-dollar investment by a private equity firm. We think it’s having some integration problems in the background — it’s something to keep an eye on.

Amazon Web Services: Jonathan, You’re On Mute

AWS launches Step Functions Workflow Studio. This is great for developers new to Step Functions as it reduces the time it takes to build their first workflow.
AWS invites individual developers and small teams to take the Graviton Challenge. They’re obviously trying to drive adoption.
AWS Key Management Service is introducing multi-region keys. A nuisance that has plagued Justin for years has finally been solved.
AWS announces a public registry for CloudFormation, providing a searchable collect

110: They didn’t even call The Cloud Pod about the AWS CEO role Mar 24, 2021

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

Episode 87 – The Cloud Pod gets the AWS Perspective Sep 23, 2020

On The Cloud Pod this week, your hosts eagerly await next week’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…
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 goin

Amazon triggers a cloud pod panic – Ep 36 Aug 23, 2019

AWS introduces new kernel panic API trigger, Azure storage gets complicated, and Google’s big query gets a terraform module.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Cloudflare files for IPO, revealing revenue of $129M in first half of 2019

Topics

General News

AWS

Google

The Cloud Pod placed outside the cloud magic quadrant – Ep 32 Jul 23, 2019

Gartner releases the new magic quadrant for IaaC and PaaS Cloud providers and Amazon continues to dominate. AT&T gets busy with the cloud, Google introduces spinnaker and Microsoft invests 1B in OpenAI this week on The Cloud Pod.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Topics

Lightning Round (Jonathan 8, Justin 9, Peter 1 and Guest 3):

Azure is Silo Busting with new Multi-Protocol access for the Azure Data Lake

Episode 20: The Cloud Pod spends 30 dollars a month on AWS Apr 23, 2019

Google Kubernetes Engine Advanced, Jedi Contract Finalists, Cloud Migrations services and Apple’s 30 million a month spend on AWS this week on The Cloud Pod, plus the lightning round.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – https://fogop.io/thecloudpod

Topics:

136: Take us to your Google Cloud Digital Leader Sep 22, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, the whole team definitely isn’t completely exhausted. Meanwhile, Amazon releases MSK Connect, Google offers the Google Cloud Digital Leader certification, and DORA’s 2021 State of DevOps report has arrived.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

Users of AWS’s fully managed Apache Kafka service can now use MSK Connect to easily set up and deploy Kafka Connect clusters.
GCP releases the new Google Cloud Digital Leader training and certificate program, which trains users on all things Google in just four classes.
Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team publishes the 2021 State of DevOps, identifying key trends.

Top Quotes

“From a least-privileged perspective, it’d be better to have a purpose-built tool that does one thing really well — what you need it to do — versus building out this huge AWS CLI you have to install on every server and expose attack vectors if it has the wrong permissions.”
“Digital transformation is such a broad thing for so many industries … and giving them this cloud knowledge helps them drive outcomes from a technical perspective, and map the business need to the technical need … It’s helpful for [business users] to get a little bit of language, but also for the technical person to actually learn how to translate technical ideas into business ideas that have value.”

General News: F5 Absorbs Threat Stack

F5 sets its sights on Threat Stack, paying $68 million to add this Boston-based cloud monitoring company to its growing list of cloud and security software acquisitions. This recent buy brings F5’s investment in cloud monitoring capabilities to over $2 billion.

AWS: MSK Connect – the New Easy Button for Managed Kafka Service users

AWS is eliminating undifferentiated heavy lifting for users of its fully managed Apache Kafka service, by introducing MSK Connect, which allows users to configure and deploy a connector using Kafka Connect with a few clicks.
Amazon Redshift users can now use RSQL, a fully-featured command-line client, to interact with their clusters and databases. Working as a complement to the PostgreSQL psql command line tool, RSQL is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS X.

GCP: Anointing Future Digital Leaders

Google introduces the new Cloud Storage trigger in Eventarc, which eliminates the need for audit logs and supports bucket filtering. Now you can do what you’ve always done in Eventarc, only better.
Google has answered its c

127: The Cloud Pod drowns in the HealthLake Jul 22, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, if you were impressed by Matthew Kohn’s ability to wing it last time, then you’re in luck because he’s back. Also, the team hopes AWS is listening to the show and reading these notes, so it can get on with creating its own unified agent for CloudWatch.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS has launches HIPAA eligible Amazon HealthLake. The service enables information exchange across healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, patients, and others parties.
Google previews new Cloud IDS for network security. The system makes it easier to manage threat detection from the cloud.
Microsoft announces the evolution of the Azure Migration Program (AMP). The new Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) will help enterprises improve their apps while moving them to Azure.

Top Quotes

“I have a couple of customers that I sent this [HealthLake] press release over to, and they’re very excited. They have no idea how they want to use it yet, but they’re very excited to figure out how to do something interesting with it. So I’m really curious to see how people actually start to play with this, and figure out how to use it to be beneficial for their companies.”
“I was surprised that they limited the open-source UDP proxy to just gaming. I get that there’s some undifferentiated heavy lifting that is provided with session management security. But a UDP proxy that scales is something valuable to most companies that are using some legacy protocols. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this expand a little bit to enable some other UDP use cases in the future.”

Amazon Web Services: Swimming Upstream

AWS has launched a HIPAA eligible service for customers in healthcare and life sciences, called Amazon HealthLake. We recommend checking out the pricing before getting excited, as it seems expensive to us.
AWS EBS io2 Block Express volumes are now

69 – The Cloud Pod asks: Can you hear us now? Apr 22, 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

AWS Summit Online is on May 13.
Drama brews in the developing JEDI contract story.
Please welcome Ryan Lucas as our new full-fledged non-guest host!

General News: This Isn’t the Evidence You’re Looking For

AWS Summit Online is free to attend on May 13. Expect to hear our predictions soon!
Following a partial review, the Department of Defense’s inspector general’s office announced they have found no evidence of the DoD awarding the JEDI contract unfairly. Meanwhile, Jon Palmer, Deputy General Counsel for Microsoft argued that allowing AWS a second bid would give Amazon an unfair advantage. But who inspects the inspector?

COVID-19

Verizon is breaking out the big bucks to purchase video conference company BlueJeans for $400 million. It’s interesting to see BlueJeans back in the spotlight.
The Information reports that AWS has been comparatively inflexible on cloud bill payments compared to Azure and Google Cloud Platform. At the same time, AWS has maintained the messaging that it is “here to help” during this “unprecedented time.”

AWS: A Snowball’s Chance at the JEDI Contract

The Snowball family of devices received a ton of updates. All that work on military applications and no JEDI contract to apply it to.
Federated querying is now generally available on Amazon Redshift. It’s clear that Amazon is investing heavily in Redshift.
AWS Security Hub launched the BatchUpdateFindings API and the Workflow Status field. Good to see some of these issues worked out.
This one goes out to all the auditors: AWS Secrets Manager now in

The Cloud Pod: A Masterclass in Cloud Architecture – Episode 56 Jan 22, 2020

Your co-hosts move from the atmosphere to DigitalOcean as they recap the week in Cloud on this episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

Microsoft releases an ambitious plan to erase its carbon footprint.

Amazon slashed prices for two services.

Google Cloud fights for market share as connections change with Epic and Sabre.

Justin’s Adventures in Oracle Cloud Revisited

On Episode 54 we featured an investigative segment where Justin sought answers as to whether non-boot volume cross-region backups were available yet. And while that sleuthing was still an informative experience, Max Verun, a Product Manager at Oracle, has reached out to let us know that those answers were also in paragraph two of the very article we linked to.

Thanks, Max. We’d love to have you on the show sometime.

Microsoft and DigitalOcean Make Major Reductions (But Not the Same Kind)

Microsoft has declared an ambitious plan to remove all of the carbon it has ever emitted from the atmosphere, a goal that far outstrips that of other tech giants. Currently carbon neutral, Microsoft plans to use a combination of forestation, reforestation and other carbon sequestration technologies to go carbon negative and completely remove its legacy carbon footprint.

DigitalOcean, on the other hand, is reducing its workforce by about 10 percent with a round of layoffs. Co-founder Moisey Uretsky assured the public that the move is a strategic one, and not indicative of any sort of poor financial health.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) — New Features and Price Reductions

AWS announced four new features this week, starting with:

AWS Health organizational view, which can now

Episode 91: The Cloud Pod Hashi’s it out Oct 21, 2020

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 overco

Episode 24: Happy 5th Birthday to Kubernetes from The Cloud Pod May 21, 2019

Kubecon is happening in Barcelona, Spain, VMWare purchases bitnami, Apptio buys Cloudability and a ton of Kubernetes announcements out of KubeCon this week on The Cloud Pod.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – https://fogops.io/thecloudpod

Topics:

Lightning Round (Jonathan 5, Justin 8, Peter 1 and Guest 3):

114: The Cloud Pod looks forward to rewriting Terraform code… again Apr 21, 2021

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

282: Search – ChatGPT vs Google…. Fight! Nov 14, 2024

Welcome to episode 282 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Ryan, and Matthew are happy to be joining you in the clouds versus watching election information. This week we’re talking nuclear energy, AI Search tools, and all things Pre:Invent. Welcome, and thanks for joining us!

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod Would Much Rather Record This Show Than Watch the Election Results
IBM Comes for Your AI Dollars
AWS Goes Limitless with the PostgreSQL Possibilities
It is Upon Us the Pre-Invent Period and AWS Does Not Disappoint
Amazon Loses Its Nuclear Superhero

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.

Follow Up

01:13 Energy regulators scrutinizing data center use reject Amazon bid

Late Friday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected a proposal that would have allowed an Amazon data center to co-locate with an existing nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
The commission voted it down 2-1
FERC chairman Willie Phillips said that the commission should encourage the development of data centers and semiconductor manufacturing as national security and economic development priorities.
Commissioners Mark Christie and Lindsay See (both R) voted to reject the proposal, while Davis Rosner and Judy Change (D) didn’t vote.
Talen Energy, who signed the agreement, drew challenges from neighboring utilities AEP and Exelon – who challenged the novel arrangement, arguing it would unfairly shift costs of running the broader grid to other consumers.
FERC’s order found the region’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, failed to show why the proposal was necessary and prove such a deal would be limited to the Susquehanna plant given the widespread interest in placing data centers next to power plants.
Talen said the ruling would have a chilling effect on the region’s economic development and it is weighing its options.
Will see what happens with Microsoft/Constellation energies plan to restart 3-Mile Island.

3:21 Justin – “It’s sort of sad because I kind like the idea of nuclear power to solve a bunch of problems, but it has to be done in the right way for sure.”

General News

04:12 IT’S EARNINGS TIME!

04:22 IBM revenue misses, but execs say AI will drive future growth

- This week, we have an additiona

281: Happy Birthday, ECS. You’re still so much better than K8 at 10! Nov 07, 2024

Welcome to episode 281 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Ryan are your hosts as we search the clouds for all the latest news and info. This week we’re talking about ECS turning 10 (yes, we were there when it was announced, and yes, we’re old,) some more drama from the CrowdStrike fiasco, lots of updates to GitHub, plus more. Join us!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Github Universe full of ECS containers
Github Universe lives up to the Universal expectations

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.

Follow Up

01:09 Dr. Matt Woods ended up at PWC as chief innovation officer

YAWN
What exactly does a chief innovation officer at PWC do? Is this like a semi-retirement?

General News

01:44 TSA silent on CrowdStrike’s claim Delta skipped required security update

Delta isn’t backing down with CrowdStrike, and in a court filing said CrowdStrike should be on the hook for the entire $500M in losses, partly because CrowdStrike has admitted that it should have done more testing and staggered deployments to catch bugs.
Delta further alleges that CrowdStrike postured as a certified best-in-class security provider who “never cuts corners,” while secretly designing its software to bypass Microsoft security certifications to make changes at the core of Delta’s computer systems without Delta’s knowledge.
Delta says they would never have agreed to such a dangerous process if it had been disclosed.
In its testimony to Congress, CrowdStrike said that they follow standard protocols, and that they are protecting against threats as they evolve.
CrowdStrike is also accusing Delta of failing to follow laws, including best practices established by the TSA.
According to CrowdStrike, most customers were up within a day of the issue – while Delta took 5 days.
Crowdstrike alleges that Delta’s negligence caused this in following the TSA requirements designed to ensure that no major airline ever experiences prolonged system outages.
CrowdStrike realized Delta failed to follow the requirements when its efforts to help remediate the issue revealed alleged technological shortcomings and failures to follow security best practices, including outdated IT systems, issues in Delta’s AD environment and thousands of compromised passwords.
Delta threatened to sue Microsoft as well as CrowdStrike, but has only named CrowdStrike to date in the lawsuits.

3:48 Ryan – “It’s a tool that needs to evolve very quickly to emerging threats. And while the change that was pushed through shouldn’t have gone through that particular workflow, and that’s a m

280: Evidently, The Cloud Pod Was Always Right Oct 31, 2024

Welcome to episode 280 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are your hosts as we travel through the latest in cloud news. This week we’re talking more about nuclear power, some additional major employee shakeups, Claude releases, plus saying RIP to CloudWatch Evidently and hello to Azure Cobalt VMs.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The cloud providers are colluding on Nuclear Power
I fear our AWS AI nightmare might get worse without Dr. Matt Wood.
I’m a glow with excitement about nuclear cloud power
Plainly no one else knew what “CloudWatch Evidently” did either
We sing a Claude Sonnet about Nuclear Power
Evidently, The Cloud Pod was always right
Amazon goes nuclear while their AI VP goes AWOL

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.

AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All It’s Money

00:53 Introducing computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku

Anthropic is announcing the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and a new Model Claude 3.5 Haiku.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers across the board improvements over its predecessor, with particularly significant gains in coding — an area where it already leads the field (per anthropic).
Claude 3.5 Haiku interestingly matches the performance of Claude 3 Opus, the prior largest model, on many evaluations at the same cost and similar speed to the previous generation of Haiku.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet also includes a groundbreaking new capability in beta: Computer Use.
Available today as an API, developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do – by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons and typing text.
Claude 3.5 is the first frontier AI model to offer this capability.
Anthropic warns the feature is still experimental – at times cumbersome and error-prone. As well as things that are effortless for a human are still difficult including scrolling, dragging or zooming.
The idea is to make Claude complete individual tasks, without always needing to leverage an API, like clicking in a GUI, or uploading a file from a computer. These types of solutions are typically found in Build and Test like scenarios with tools such as Saucelabs or Browserstack.
To do this, Claude was built to perceive and interact with computer interfaces. You can use data from my computer to fill out this online form or check a spreadsheet, move the cursor to a web browser, navigate to the relevant web pages, select the data for the spreadsheet and so on.

3:06 Jonathan – “If you can take pictures of the screen, then it can identify where buttons and things are with

279: The Cloud Pod Glows With Excitement Over Google Nuclear Deal Oct 23, 2024

Welcome to episode 279 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan and Matthew are your guide through the Cloud. We’re talking about everything from BigQuery to Google Nuclear power plans, and everything in between! Welcome to episode 279!

Titles we almost went with this week:

AWS SKYNET (Q) now controls the supply chain
AWS Supply Chain: Where skynet meets your shopping list
Digital Ocean follows Azure with the Premium everything
EKS mounts S3
GCP now a nuclear
Big query don’t hit that iceberg
Big Query Yells: “ICEBERG AHEAD”
The Cloud Pod: Now with 50% more meltdown protection
The Cloud Pod radiates excitement over Google’s nuclear deal

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.

Follow Up

00:46 OpenAI’s Newest Possible Threat: Ex-CTO Murati

Apologies listeners – paywall article.
Given the recent departure of Ex-CTO Mira Murati from OpenAI, we speculated that she might be starting something new…and the rumors are rumorin’.
Rumors have been running wild since her last day on October 4th, with several people reporting that there has been a lot of churn.
Speculation is that Murati may join former Open AI VP Bret Zoph at his new startup.
It may be easy to steal some people, as the research organization at Open AI is reportedly in upheaval after Liam Fedus’s promotion to lead post-training – several researchers have asked to switch teams.
In addition, Ilya Sutskever, an Open AI co-founder and former chief scientist, also has a new startup.
We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this particular soap opera.

2:00 Jonathan – “I kind wonder what will these other startups bring that’s different than what OpenAI are doing or Anthropic or anybody else. mean, they’re all going to be taking the same training data sets because that’s what’s available. It’s not like they’re going to invent some data from somewhere else and have an edge. I mean, I guess they could do different things like be mindful about licensing.”

General News

4:41 Introducing New 48vCPU and 60vCPU Optimized Premium Droplets on DigitalOcean

Those raindrops are getting pretty heavy as Digital Ocean announces their new 48vCPU Memory and storage optimized premium droplets, and 60vcpu general purpose and CPU optimized premium droplets.
Droplets are DO’s Linux-based virtual machines.
Premium Optimized Droplets are dedicated CPU instances with access to the full hyperthread, as well as 10GBps of outbound data transfer.
The 48vCPU boxes have 384GB of memory, and the 60vCPU boxes have 160gb.

6:02 Justin – “I’ve been watchi

278: Azure is on a Bender: Bite my Shiny Metal FXv2-series VMs Oct 16, 2024

Welcome to episode 278 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! When Justin’s away, the guys will… maybe get a show recorded? This week, we’re talking OpenAI, another service scheduled for the grave over at AWS, saying goodbye to pesky IPv4 fees, Azure FXv2 VMs, Valkey 8.0 and so much more! Thanks for joining us, here in the cloud!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Another One Bites the Dust
Peak AI reached: OpenAI Now Puts Print Statements in Code to Help You Debug

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Archera

There are a lot of cloud cost management tools out there. But only Archera provides cloud commitment insurance. It sounds fancy but it’s really simple. Archera gives you the cost savings of a 1 or 3 year AWS Savings Plan with a commitment as short as 30 days. If you don’t use all the cloud resources you’ve committed to, they will literally put money back in your bank account to cover the difference. Other cost management tools may say they offer “commitment insurance”, but remember to ask: will you actually give me my money back? Archera will. Click this link to check them out

AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All It’s Money

00:59 Introducing vision to the fine-tuning API.

OpenAI has announced the integration of vision capabilities into its fine-tuning API, allowing developers to enhance the GPT-4o model to analyze and interpret images alongside text and audio inputs.
This update broadens the scope of applications for AI, enabling more multimodal interactions.
The fine-tuning API now supports image inputs, which means developers can train models to understand and generate content based on visual data in conjunction with text and audio.
After October 31, 2024, training for fine-tuning will cost $25 per 1 million tokens, with inference priced at $3.75 per 1 million input tokens and $15 per 1 million output tokens.
Images are tokenized based on size before pricing. The introduction of prompt caching and other efficiency measures could lower the operational costs for businesses deploying AI solutions.
The API is also being enhanced to include features like epoch-based checkpoint creation, a comparative playground for model evaluation, and integration with third-party platforms like Weights and Biases for detailed fine-tuning data management.
What does it mean? Admit it – you’re dying to know.
Developers can now create applications that not only process text or voice but also interpret and generate responses based on visual cues, and importantly fine tuned for domain specific applications, and this update could lead to more intuitive user interfaces in applications, where users can interact with services using images as naturally as they do with text or speech, potentially expanding the user base to those less tech-savvy or in fields where visual data is crucial.

03:53 Jonathan – “I mean, I think it’s useful for things like quality assurance in manufacturing, for example. You know, could, you could tune it on what your nuts and bolts are supposed to look like and what a good bolt looks like and what a bad bolt looks like coming out of the factory. You just stream the video direct

277: Class E IPs, so now you can procrastinate IPv6 even longer Oct 10, 2024

Welcome to episode 277 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matthew are your hosts this week for a news packed show. This week we dive into the latest in cloud computing with announcements from Google’s new AI search tools, Meta’s open-sourced AI models, and Microsoft Copilot’s expanded capabilities. We’ve also got Oracle releases, and some non-liquid Java on the agenda (but also the liquid kind, too) and Class E IP addresses. Plus, be sure to stay tuned for the aftershow!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Which cloud provider does not have llama 3.2

Vmware says we will happily help you support your old Microsoft OS’s for $$$$

Class E is the best kind of IP Space

Microsoft says trust AI, and so does Skynet

3.2 Llama’s walked into an AI bar…

Google gets cranky about MS Licensing, join the club

Write Your Prompts, Optimize them with Vertex Prompts Analyzer, rinse repeat into a

vortex of optimization

Oracle releases Java 23, Cloud Pod Uses Amazon Corretto 23 instead

Oracle releases Java 23, Cloud Pod still says run! MK

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: Archera

There are a lot of cloud cost management tools out there. But only Archera provides cloud commitment insurance. It sounds fancy but it’s really simple. Archera gives you the cost savings of a 1 or 3 year AWS Savings Plan with a commitment as short as 30 days. If you don’t use all the cloud resources you’ve committed to, they will literally put money back in your bank account to cover the difference. Other cost management tools may say they offer “commitment insurance”, but remember to ask: will you actually give me my money back? Archera will. Click this link to check them out

https://shortclick.link/uthdi1

AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All It’s Money

01:06 OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, 2 other execs announce they’re leaving

Listener Note: paywall article
OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati is leaving, and within hours, two more OpenAI executives joined the list of high-profile departures.
Mira Murati spent 6.5 years at the company, and was named CEO temporarily when the board ousted co-founder Sam Altman.
“It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally,” Altman wrote. “I feel tremendous gratitude towards her for what she has helped us build and accomplish, but most of all, I feel personal gratitude towards her for her support and love during all the hard times. I am excited for what she’ll do next.”
Mira oversaw the development of ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E. She was also a pretty public face for the company, appearing in its videos and interviewing journalists.
The other two departures were Barret Zoph, who was the company’s Vice President of Research and Chief Research officer Bob McGrew

276: New from AWS – Elastic Commute – Flex Your Way to an Empty Office Sep 30, 2024

Welcome to episode 276 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, our hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan do a speedrun of OpenWorld news, talk about energy needs and the totally not controversial decision to reopen 3 Mile Island, a “managed” exodus from cloud, and Kubernetes news. As well as Amazon’s RTO we are calling “Elastic Commute”. All this and more, right now on The Cloud Pod.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod Hosts don’t own enough pants for five days a week
IBM thinks it can contain the cost of K8s
Microsoft loves nuclear energy
The Cloudpod tries to give Oracle some love and still does not care
The cloud pod goes nuclear on k8s costs
Can IBM contain the costs of Kubernetes and Nuclear Power?
Google takes on take over while microsoft takes on nuclear
AWS Launches ‘Managed Exodus’: Streamline Your Talent Drain
Introducing Amazon WorkForce Alienation: Scale Your Employee Discontent to the Cloud
Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab: Now with Real-Time Resignation Prediction

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.

General News

01:08 IBM acquires Kubernetes cost optimization startup Kubecost

IBM is quickly becoming the place where cloud cost companies go to assimilate? Or Die? Rebirthed mabe? Either way, it’s not a great place to end up.
On Tuesday they announced the acquisition of Kubecost, a FinOps startup that helps teams monitor and optimize their K8 clusters, with a focus on efficiency – and ultimately cost.
This acquisition follows the acquisitions of Apptio, Turbonomic, and Instana over the years.
Kubecost is the company behind OpenCost; a vendor-neutral open source project that forms part of the core Kubecost commercial offering.
- OpenCost is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundations cohort of sandbox projects.
Kubecost is expected to be integrated into IBM’s FinOps Suite, which combines Cloudability and Turbonomic.
- There is also speculation that it might make its way to OpenShift, too.

02:26 Jsutin- “…so KubeCost lives inside of Kubernetes, and basically has the ability to see how much CPU, how much memory they’re using, then calculate basically the price of the EC2 broken down into the different pods and services.”

AI Is Going Great –

275: I SQream, You SQream, We All SQream for AI Ice Cream Sep 18, 2024

Welcome to episode 275 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matthew and Ryan are awake and ready to bring you all the latest and greatest in cloud news, including SQream, a new partnership between OCI and AWS (yes, really) Azure Linux, and a lot of updates over at AWS. Get comfy and we’ll see you all in the cloud!

Titles we almost went with this week:

I SQream, You SQream, The CloudPod SQreams for AI Ice Cream
AWS East gets Stability, but only for AI.
AWS has some Lofty Goals
Claude Learns BigQuery
Azure now Securely Checks the Prompts from the cloud pod
Azure find out about Linux

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.

AWS

00:28 Stability AI’s best image generating models now in Amazon Bedrock

If you are like The CloudPod hosts, the part you care most about AI is the rapid ability to create graphics for any meme-worthy moment or funny pictures for that group chat.
Luckily AWS has access to the latest image generation capability with 3 models from Stability AI.
- Stable Image Ultra – Produces the highest quality, photorealistic outputs perfect for professional print media and large format applications. Stable image Ultra excels at rendering exceptional detail and realism.
- Stable diffusion 3 large – strikes a balance between generation speed and output quality. Ideal for creating high-volume, high-quality digital assets for websites, newsletters and marketing materials.
- Stable Image Core – Optimized for fast and affordable image generation, great for rapidly iterating on concepts during ideation.

One of the key improvements of Stable Image Ultra and Stable Diffusion 3 large compared to Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) is text quality in generated images, with fewer errors in spelling and typography thanks to innovation diffusion transformer architecture, which implements two separate sets of weights for image and text but enables information flow between the two modalities.

02:46 Justin – “I do notice more and more that, you get it, you get the typical product shot on Amazon, but then like they’ll insert the product into different backgrounds and scenes. Like, it’s a, it’s a lamp and all of a sudden it’s on a thing and they’re like, Hmm, that doesn’t look like a real photo though. It looks like AI. So you do notice it more and more.”

04:13 AWS Network Load Balancer now supports configurable TCP idle timeout AWS Gateway Load Balancer now supports configurable TCP idle timeout

We see you Amazon – trying to get two press releases for basically the same thing, not today sir!
- Both the AWS Network Load Balancer and Gateway Load Balancer have received a configurable TCP Idle timeout.

274: The Cloud Pod is Still Not Open Source Sep 11, 2024

Welcome to episode 274 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan and Matthew are your hosts this week as we explore the world of SnapShots, Maia, Open Source, and VMware – just to name a few of the topics. And stay tuned for an installment of our continuing Cloud Journey Series to explore ways to decrease tech debt, all this week on The Cloud Pod.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod in Parallel Cluster
The Cloud Pod cringes at managing 1000 aws accounts
The Cloud Pod welcomes Imagen 3 with less Wokeness
The Cloud Pod wants to be instantly snapshotted
The Cloud pod hates tech debt

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.

General News

00:32 Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again

- Shay Banon is pleased to call ElasticSearch and Kibana “open source” again. He says everyone at Elastic is ecstatic to be open source again, it’s part of his and “Elastics DNA.”
- They’re doing this by adding AGPL as another license option next to ELv2 and SSPL in the coming weeks.
- They never stopped believing or behaving like an OSS company after they changed the license, but by being able to use the term open source and by using AGPL – an OSI approved license – removes any questions or fud people might have.
- Shay says the change 3 years ago was because they had issues with AWS and the market confusion their offering was causing.
  - So, after trying all the other options, changing the license – all while knowing it would result in a fork with a different name – was the path they took.
- While it was painful, they said it worked.
  - 3 years later, Amazon is fully invested in their OpenSearch fork, the market confusion has mostly gone, and their partnership with AWS is stronger than ever.
  - They are even being named partner of the year with AWS.
- They want to “make life of our users as simple as possible,” so if you’re ok with the ELv2 or the SSPL, then you can keep using that license. They aren’t removing anything, just giving you another option with AGPL.
- He calls out trolls and people who will pick at this announcement, so they are attempting to address the trolls in advance.

“Changing the license was a mistake, and Elastic now backtracks from it”. We removed a lot of market confusion when we changed our license 3 years ago. And because of our actions, a lot has changed. It’s an entirely different landscape now. We aren’t living in the past. We want to build a better future for our users. It’s because we took action then, that we are in a position to take action now.

“AGPL i

273: Phi-fi-fo-fum, I Smell the Bones of The Cloud Pod Hosts Sep 04, 2024

Welcome to episode 273 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Hold onto your butts – this week your hosts Justin, Ryan, Matthew and (eventually) Jonathan are bringing you two weeks worth of cloud and AI news. We’ve got Karpenter, Kubernetes, and Secrets, plus news from OpenAI, MFA changes that are going to be super fun for Matthew, and Azure Phi. Get comfy – it’s going to be a doozy!

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod Teaches Azure-normalized Camel Casing
The Cloud Pod Travels to Malaysia
Azure Detaches Itself From its Own Scale Sets
The Cloud Pod Conditionally Writes Show Notes
You got MFA!
The Cloud Pod Delays Deleting Itself
The Cloud Pod is Now the Cloud Pod Podcast!

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.

General News

01:37 Terraform AzureRM provider 4.0 adds provider-defined functions

Terraform is announcing the GA of Terraform AzureRM provider 4.0. The new version improves the extensibility and flexibility in the provider.
Since the Providers’ Last major release in March 2022, Hashi has added support for some 340 resources and 120 data sources, bringing the total Azure resources to 1,101 resources and almost 360 data sources.
The provider has topped 660M downloads, MS and Hashi continue to develop new, innovative integrations that further ease the cloud adoption journey to enterprise organizations.
With Terraform 1.8, providers can implement custom functions that you can call from the Terraform configuration. The new provider adds two Azure-specific provider functions to let users correct the casing of their resource IDs or access the individual components of it.
Previously, the Azure RM provider took an all-or-nothing approach to Azure resource provider registration, where the Terraform provider would either attempt to register a fixed set of 68 providers upon initialization or registration or be skipped.
This didn’t match Microsoft’s recommendations, which are to register resource providers only as needed, and to enable the services you’re actively using.
With adding two new feature flags, resource_provider_registrations and resource_providers_to_register, users now have more control over which providers to register automatically or whether to continue managing a subscription resources provider.
AzureRM has removed a number of deprecated items, and it is recommended that you look at the removed resources/data sources and the

272: AI: Now with JSON Schemas! Aug 24, 2024

Welcome to episode 272 of The Cloud Pod! This week, Matthew and Justin are bringing you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including new updates to the ongoing Crowdstrike drama, JSON schemas, AWS vaults, and IPv6 addresses – even some hacking opportunities! All this and more, this week in the cloud.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The cloud pod is now logically air-gapped
The Cloud Pod has continuous snark
The Cloud Pod points the finger at delta
AI now with JSON SCHEMAS!!!

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.

Follow Up

00:35 Crowdstrike RCA

The final RCA is out from Crowdstrike, and as we talked during the preliminary report, this was an issue with a channel file that had 21 input parameters. No update previously had more than 20, and it was not caught in earlier testing.
Crowdstrike has several findings, and mitigating actions that they are taking. They go into detail on each of them, and you can read through all of them at the linked document.

02:31 Justin – “…the one thing I would say is this would be a perfect RCA if it included a timeline, but it lacks, it lacks a timeline view.”

12:06 Justin – “…their mitigations don’t have any dates on them of when they’re going to be done or implemented, which, in addition to a timeline, it would be nice to see in this process.”

15:46 Microsoft joins CrowdStrike in pushing IT outage recovery responsibility

back to Delta

Microsoft has joined Crowdstrike in throwing Delta under the bus.
Delta Airlines has been blaming Crowdstrike and MS for their recent IT woes, which the company claims cost them over $500 million.
Microsoft says “Our preliminary review suggests that Delta, unlike its competitors, has not modernized its IT infrastructure, either for the benefit of its customers or for its pilots and flight attendants” Mark Cheffo from law firm Dechert representing MS.
Gonna get ugly before this all gets settled. *Insert Michael Jackson eating popcorn gif here*

16:43 Justin – “The struggle with, you know, offering to send someone on site to help you is, you know, you, you can’t vet them that quickly. And so you also have an obligation to your shareholders. You have obligations to your security controls and your SOC and ISO and all the things that you’re doing, you know, to, to allow some strangers into your network and then give them access required to fix this issue, which in some cases required you to

271: AWS Deprioritizes 7 Services, Cloud Pod Hosts Prioritize Therapy Aug 14, 2024

Welcome to episode 271 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan and Matthew are your hosts today as we discuss the latest news in cloud and AI, including earnings reports, Google’s legal trouble, and SQL updates. We even take a minute to give some side eye to AWS’s deprioritization techniques. Spoiler alert: 0 out of 5 stars for keeping customers informed.

Titles we almost went with this week:

No Google, you can’t own Park Place, Boardwalk, the railroads and the utilities
Amazons Titan Image Generator is no titan of photography
BigTable graduates to SQL support
TikTok/Instagram, Azure Reliability and Temu bring down the big three clouds’ earnings
Span your Mind to Graphs & Vectors
DOJ rules The Cloud Pod should be your default news source
The CloudPod – now with SQL support
AWS Deprioritizes 7 Services, Cloud Pod Hosts Prioritize Therapy

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.

Follow Up

00:45 Amazon decision to deprioritize 7 cloud services caught customers and

even some salespeople by surprise

Jeff Barr confirmed on Twitter (Yes will always call it Twitter) after recording last week’s episode that they had made the tough decision to deprioritize 7 cloud services.
There is still no official blog post announcing this, beyond the confirmation from Jeff Barr.
Amazon is discontinuing new access to a small number of services in the tweet – but would continue to run them in a secure environment.
Jeff Bar confirmed the list of services to be S3 Select, CloudSearch, Cloud9, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline and CodeCommit.
An AWS Spokesperson claimed to Business Insider that the changes were communicated through multiple channels within and outside the company.
- But were they REALLY though?

01:33 Justin – “Yeah, they kind of took a leap out of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book and put the planning commission in the filing cabinet downstairs with the broken light.”

General News

It’s Earnings Time!

07:35 Alphabet meets earnings expectations but misses on YouTube ad revenue

Alphabet revenue was up 14% YOY, driven by search and cloud, GCP surpassed $10B in quarterly revenues and

270: The Cloud Pod Puts a Hex-LLM on all these AI Announcements Aug 09, 2024

The Cloud Pod Puts a Hex-LLM on all these AI Announcements

Welcome to episode 270 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Jonathan, Ryan, Matt and Justin are your hosts today as we sort through all of the cloud and AI news of the week, including updates to the Crowdstrike BSOD event, more info on that proposed Wiz takeover (spoiler alert: it’s toast) and some updates to Bedrock. All this and more news, right now on the Cloud Pod!

Titles we almost went with this week:

The antivirus strikes back
The return of the crowdstrike
The cloud pod is worth more than 23B
The cloud pod is rebranded to the AI podcast
The cloud pod might need to move to another git provider
Amazon finally gets normal naming for end user messaging
Amazon still needs to work on it’s end user messaging
The CloudPod goes into hibernation before the next crisis hits
EC2 Now equipped with ARM rests

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Follow Up

01:33 In what feels suspiciously like an SNL skit, CrowdStrike sent its partners $10 Uber Eats gift cards as an apology for mass IT outage

As you can imagine, Twitter (or X) had thoughts.
Turns out they were just for third party partners that were helping with implementation.
2024 Economics wants to know – what are you going to do with only $10 with Uber Eats?
Crowdstrike: Preliminary Post Incident Review
Moving on to the actual story – The Preliminary Post Incident Review (PIR) is now out for the BSOD Crowdstrike event we talked about last week.
Crowdstrike reports that a Rapid Response Content Update for the Falcon sensor was published to Windows hosts running sensor version 7.11 and above.
The update was to gather telemetry on new threat techniques that targeted named pipes in the kernel but instead triggered a BSOD on systems online from 4:09 – 5:27 UTC.
Ultimately, the crash occurred due to undetected content during validation checks, which resulted in an out-of-bounds memory read.
To avoid this, Crowdstrike plans to do a bunch of things:
- Improve rapid response content testing by using testing types such as Local developer, content update and rollback, stress, fuzzing, fault injection, stability and content interface testing.
- Introduce additional validation checks in the content validator to prevent similar issues.
- Strengthen error handling mechanisms in the Falcon sensor to ensure errors from problematic content are managed gracefully.
- Adopt staggered deployment strategies, starting with a canary deployment to a small subset of systems before further staged rollouts
- Enhanced sensor and system performance monitoring during the staggered content deployment to identify and mitigate issues promptly.
- Allowing a granular section of when and where these updates are deployed will give customers greater contro

269: Crowdstrike: Does Anyone Know the Graviton of this Situation? Jul 29, 2024

Welcome to episode 269 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matthew and Ryan are your hosts this week as we talk about – you guessed it – the Crowdstrike update that broke, well, everything! We’re also looking at Databricks, Google potentially buying Wiz, NY Summit news, and more!

Titles we almost went with this week:

You can’t take Justin down; but a 23-hour flight to India (or Crowdstrike updates) can
Google wants Wiz, and Crowdstrike Strikes all
Crowdstrike, does anyone know the Graviton of this situation?
We are called to this summit to talk AWS AI Supremacy
Crowdstrike, Wiz and Chat GPT 4o Mini… oh my
An Impatient Wiz builds his own data centers not impacted by Crowdstrike

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat!

General News

00:58 You Guessed It – Crowdstrike

Microsoft, CrowdStrike outage disrupts travel and business worldwide

Our Statement on Today’s Outage (listener note: paywall article)

It’s not every day you get to experience one of the largest IT Outages in history, and it even impacted our recording of the show last week.
Crowdstrike, a popular EDR solution caused major disruption to the worlds IT systems with an errant update to their software that caused servers to BSOD, disrupting travel (airplanes, trains, etc), governments, news organizations and more.
Crowdstrike removed the errant file quickly, but still the damage was done with tons of systems requiring manual intervention to be recovered.
- The fix required booting into safe mode, and removing a file from the crowdstrike directory.
  - This was all complicated by bitlocker and lack of local admin rights for many end user devices.
- Sometimes doing up to 15 reboots would bring the server back to life.
- Swinging the hard drives from one broken server to a working server manually removes the files and puts them back.
The issue also caused a large-scale outage in the Azure Central region.
- In addition to services on AWS being impacted that run Windows (Amazon is a well-known large Crowdstrike customer)
Crowdstrike CEO Goerge Kurtz (who happened to be the CTO at Mcafee during the 2010 Update Fiasco that impacted Mcafee clients globally) stated that he was deeply sorry and vowed to make sure every customer is fully recovered.
By the time of this recording, most clients should be mostly fixed and recovered, and we are all anxiously waiting to hear how this could have happened.

04:50 Justin – “It’s really an Achilles heel of the cloud. I mean, to fix this, you need to be able to boot a server into safe mode or into recovery mode and then remove this file manually, which requires that you have console access, which, you know, Amazon just added a couple of years ago.”

07:45 Matthew – “It’s always fun when you’re like, okay, everyone si

268: Long Time Show Host is CloudPod’s first Casualty to AI (For This Week, at Least) Jul 21, 2024

Welcome to episode 268 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin says he’s in India, but we know he’s really been replaced by Skynet. Jonathan, Matthew, and Ryan are here in his stead to bring all the latest cloud news, including PGO for optimization, a Linux vulnerability, CloudFront’s new managed policies, and even a frank discussion about whether or not the AI Hype train has officially left the station. Sit back and enjoy!

Titles we almost went with this week:

OpenSSH sings “Oops I did it again”
All aboard, the AI hype train is leaving the station
Caching In on CloudFront’s New Managed Policies
Get your Go Apps a personal trainer this summer with PGO
Was Japan actually using floppy disks or were they 3.5
Azure is on summer break
Singapore will soon just be datacenters

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat!

General News

00:56 Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks

Here’s a bit of tech nostalgia meets modernization for you!
Japan’s government has finally phased out the use of floppy disks in all its systems.
The Digital Agency has scrapped over 1,000 regulations related to their use, marking a significant step in their efforts to update government technology.
Digital Minister Taro Kono, who’s been on a mission to modernize Japan’s government tech, announced this victory last week. It’s part of a larger push to digitize Japan’s notoriously paper-heavy bureaucracy, which became glaringly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Japan’s digitization efforts have hit some bumps along the way, including issues with a contact-tracing app and slow adoption of their digital ID system.
It’s a reminder that modernizing legacy systems isn’t just about replacing old hardware – it’s a complex process that involves changing long-standing processes and especially mindsets.

02:36 Jonathan – “Yeah, I remember a couple of years ago they started talking about this modernization they were doing and people started to panic because Japan’s the largest purchaser of floppy disks anymore, or three and a half inch disks anyway. And so I ended up buying some because I’ve still got a USB floppy drive and some machines that have floppy disks. And I wanted just to stock up on some for the future, just in case the price went through the roof if Japan finally cut them and they have.”

05:16 regreSSHion: Remote Unauthenticated Code Execution Vulnerability in OpenSSH server

The Qualys Threat Research Unit just dropped a bombshell – they’ve discovered a remote code execution vulnerability in OpenSSH that affects millions of Linux systems.
The vulnerability, dubbed “regreSSHion,” allows unauthenticated attackers to execute code as root on vulnerable system

267: Cloud Maturity – Still Rarer Than a Unicorn Sighting Jul 12, 2024

Welcome to episode 265 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, Jonathan, Ryan, and Justin are trying to keep cool in new WorkSpaces Pools, avoiding the Heatwave with Oracle’s new LLM, taking a look at AWS Jamba (hold the straw) and taking a look at the ever elusive Cloud Maturity.

All this news and more, this week on The Cloud Pod!

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod takes a dip in the Workspaces Pool
The Cloud Pod Lineage view is suspect
A Gitlab, A BitBucket, and a Blueprint build a Workspaces Pool
AWS goes for a Jamba Juice
Google Cloud Autokey does exactly what it sounds like
Oracle LLM Heatwaves send us to the Amazon Workspace Pool
Jonathan is unimpressed with this weeks show
Highway to the DataZone

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat!

General News

01:03 HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey 2024: Cloud Maturity is Elusive but Valuable

Hashicorp just released the results of its State of Cloud Survey, and guess what? Cloud maturity is pretty elusive. Weird…
Hashicorp finds that 8% of organizations qualify as Highly Mature, this results that the biggest benefits are cloud is only going to a small group of truly mature organizations.
- Justin wonders if this is part of the cloud repatriation push?
- Are other listeners seeing some of this, especially on places like LinkedIn? We’d love to hear.
Trailblazers are finding faster development speed, lower costs and reduced risks while others continue to struggle to create haves and have nots with enterprises getting different business outcomes.
Hashicorp collected responses from almost 1,200 technology practitioners and decision makers at organizations with more than 1000 employees.
66% of respondents report that they have increased cloud spending in the last year, but 91% believe they are wasting money in the cloud, and 64% are experiencing a shortage of skilled staff.
45% of low maturity organizations are still waiting for their cloud strategy to pay off!
One of the key takeaways from the survey is that the path to cloud maturity increasingly relies on platform teams to help automate and systemize cloud operations.
- However, only half the respondents 42% say they rely on centralized platform teams to standardize cloud operations throughout their organization.
Platform teams help manage cloud, but also help address the skills shortage that has long plagued enterprise cloud adoption.
If only they’d pay for training.

03:22 Jonathan – “The skill shortage thing really bugs me sometimes because there are plenty of skilled workers around and the reccs aren’t open for them. So I don’t think there aren’t qualified staff… yeah, it’s not a shortage because of the lac

266: AWS Billing Finally Comes into FOCUS Jul 03, 2024

Welcome to episode 265 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a full house this week – Matthew, Jonathan, Ryan and Justin are all here to bring you the latest in cloud news – including FOCUS features in AWS Billing, Magic Quadrants, and AWS Metis. Plus, we have an Andoid vs. Apple showdown in the Aftershow, so be sure to stay tuned for that!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Tech reports show Gartner leads in the BS quadrant
Oracle adds cloud and legal expenses to their FinOps hub
AWS Metis: Great chatbot, or Greek tragedy waiting to happen?
The cloud pod rocks Cargo Pants
A sonnet is written for FOCUSing on spend

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email, or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat!

General News

01:40 Finops X

Recently Justin attended FinOps in beautiful and sunny San Diego – and if you weren’t there, you really should plan on attending next year. This year’s topics included:
- Focus 1.0
- State of Vendors
Conference size – they will most likely outgrow this particular conference center, seeing as how they’re either selling out or pretty close to it.
Coolest thing about the conference – on stage all the biggies – TOGETHER.
- It’s great to see them all together talking about how they’re making Finops better, and introducing new things for Finops and not just saving them for their own conferences.
Next Year – Is Oracle going to be on stage next year?

08:22 Justin – “The shift left of FinOps was a big topic. You know, how do we get visibility? How do we show people what things are going to cost? How do we make sure that, you know, people are aware of what they’re doing? And so I think, you know, it’s just a recognition that is important and just as important as security is your cost. And in some ways security is part of your cost story. Because if you bankrupt your company, that’s a pretty bad security situation.”

10:17 Introducing Managed OpenSearch: Gain Control of Your Cloud with Powerful Log Analysis

Listen. We don’t really *care* about OpenSearch – but the reality is it’s taking over the world. Nobody is doing ElasticSearch anymore.
Digital Ocean is launching Managed OpenSearch offering, a comprehensive solution designed for in depth log analysis, simplifying troubleshooting, and optimizing application performance.
With Digital ocean you can Pinpoint and analyze log data with ease, customize log retention, enhance security and can scale with your business and receive forwarded logs from multiple sources including Digital Ocean droplets, managed databases, etc.
Interested in pricing? You can find that here. Or, if you’d like to take a product tour, you can do that

265: Swing and a WIF Jun 28, 2024

Welcome to episode 265 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin and Matthew are with you this week, and even though it’s a light news week, you’re definitely going to want to stick around. We’re looking forward to FinOps, talking about updates to Consul, WIF coming to Vault 1.17, and giving an intro to Databricks LakeFlow. Because we needed another lake product. Be sure to stick around for this week’s Cloud Journey series too.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The CloudPod lets the DataLake flow
Amazon attempts an international incident in Taiwan
What’s your Vector Mysql?

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email, or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat!

General News

01:40 Consul 1.19 improves Kubernetes workflows, snapshot support, and Nomad integration

Consul 1.19 is now generally available, improving the user experience, providing flexibility and enhancing integration points.
Consul 1.19 introduces a new registration custom resource definition (CRD) that simplifies the process of registering external services into the mesh.
Consul service mesh already supports routing to services outside of the mesh through terminating gateways. However, there are advantages to using the new Registration CRD.
Consul snapshots can now be stored in multiple destinations, previously, you could only snapshot to a local path or to a remote object store destination but not both.
Now you can take a snapshot of NFS Mounts, San attached Storage, or Object storage.
Consul API gateways can now be deployed on Nomad, combined with transparent proxy and enterprise features like admin partitions

01:37 Matthew- “What I was surprised about, which I did not know, was that console API gateway can now be deployed on Nomad. Was it not able to be deployed before? Just feels weird… you know, consoles should be able to be deployed on nomad compared to that. You know, it’s all the same company, but sometimes team A doesn’t always talk to team B.”

03:21 Vault 1.17 brings WIF, EST support for PKI, and more

Vault 1.17 is now generally available with new secure workflows, better performance and improved secrets management scalability.
Key new features:
- Workload Identify Federation (WIF) allows you to eliminate concerns around providing security credentials to vault plugins.
- Using the new support for WIF< a trust relationship can be established between an external system and va

264: AWS Audit Manager: Because even AI needs a Babysitter! Jun 21, 2024

Welcome to episode 264 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, Ryan (and eventually) Matthew are all on hand this week – and *announcement noise* this week it’s the return of the Cloud Journey Series! There’s also a lot of news from Re:inforce, a ground-breaking partnership between Oracle and Google Cloud, and updates to GKE. The guys also look ahead to Finops ‘24.

Titles we almost went with this week:

First, AI came for Writers/Artists, then it came for Developers, and now it comes for Security… What’s Next?
Amazon Reinforces my Lack of Interest in Attending – JPB rl
Object Storage Malware protection, everyone, please copy it!
Amazon is the last man out in Oracle next-gen partnerships
Dear Google, A partnership with Oracle is not Groundbreaking when Azure already did it
AWS Announces some “We finally got around to it feature updates”
Protect your S3 buckets from themselves with Amazon Guard Duty
The CloudPod and AI play Guess Who? with IAM Access Analyzer.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to reach a dedicated audience of cloud engineers? Send us an email, or hit us up on our Slack Channel and let’s chat!

AWS

01:04 Simplify risk and compliance assessments with the new common control library in AWS Audit Manager

AWS Audit Manager is introducing a common control library that provides common controls with predefined and pre-mapped AWS data sources.
This makes it easy for the GRC teams to use the common control library to save time when mapping enterprise controls into Audit Manager for evidence collection, reducing their dependence on IT teams.
You can view the compliance requirements for multiple frameworks such as PCI or HIPAA, associated with the same common control in one place, making it easier to understand your audit readiness across multiple frameworks simultaneously.
Interested in pricing? You can find that info here.

01:37 Ryan – “It’s the dream! Automated evidence generation. And now with the context of known frameworks. Yeah; because that’s always the challenge, you know, are the last step of the translation – this is the control. Hey, we need all these controls to do this level of compliance.”

04:36 Centrally manage member account root email addresses across your AWS Organization

2017 Justin is really digging all these quality-of-life features coming out, and we like to think that AWS has just finally gotten to our pile of feature requests from back then.
This week, it’s now easier for AWS Organizations customers to centrally manage the root email address of member accounts across their organization using the CLI, SDK and Organizations Console.

263: Ticketmaster Gets a Snow Job – MFA Matters Folks! Jun 12, 2024

Welcome to episode 263 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re diving into the world of Snowflake, including announcements from their latest conference and details about their recent breach. Seriously – MFA is important! Plus we look at updates to Terraform, Claude 3, and OCI pushing the IOPS limits and much more. Join us!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Snowflake Announces State-of-the-Art way for hackers to Talk to your Data
Ticketmaster gets a snow job – MFA matters!
The CloudPod wouldn’t use Oracle even for a million IOPS
Azure finally wakes up to hibernation support JJB
No one ever called a Bastion Host Premium until Today – JPB MK
I look forward to connecting Kinesis to Pub Sub to Event Hub in the most rube
goldberg eventing architecture ever
Hashicorp shows you the way
10 ways to say I want you Matt (I’m not bias with the name)
Can we just hibernate ourselves on AI announcements
Sus is how i feel about the new Susscanner from AWS
OCI has enough power to run Oracle databases with 1 MIllion IOPS
OCI wants 1 Million IOPS (dr evil voice)
Monday, Tuesday, Hashidays…

General News

Terraform AWS Cloud Control API provider is now generally available

The AWS Cloud Control Provider (AWSCC), built around the AWS Cloud Control API and designed to bring new services to Terraform faster, is now generally available.
- The 1.0 release represents a step in their effort to provide launch-day support of AWS services.
This service was put into tech preview in 2021.
Glad it’s finally here; although we thought this effort was abandoned, honestly.
Interesting that you can mix HCL Terraform and AWSCC, but specify the different resource types in the configurations.

00:53 New Vault and Boundary offerings advance Security Lifecycle Management at HashiDays 2024

Hashicorp held their “Hashidays” event in London this last week, and announced improvements to their Security Lifecycle Management (SLM) products: Vault and Boundary
Vault will be getting Workload Identify Federation, coming soon to Vault Enterprise which enables secretless configuration for vault plugins that integrate with external systems supporting WIF, such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
- By enabling secretless configuration, organizations reduce security concerns that can come with using long-lived and highly privileged security credentials.
- With WIF

262: I Only Aspire Not to Use and Support .NET Jun 06, 2024

Welcome to episode 262 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, and Ryan are your hosts this week, and there’s a ton of news to get through! We look at updates to .NET and Kubernetes, the future of email, new instances that promise to cause economic woes, and – hold onto your butts – a new deep sea cable! Let’s get started!

Titles we almost went with this week:

What is a vagrant when you move it into your cloud
I only Aspire not to use/support .NET
AI Is the Gateway drug to Cloudflare
Let me tell you about the future with MAIL ROUTING
AWS invents impressive ways to burn money with the U7i instances
Google Only wishes they could delete our podcast with an expiring subscription
AKS Automatic — impressive new attack weapon or an impressive way to make Ops Cry?

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Big thanks to Sonrai Security for sponsoring today’s podcast! Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod

General News

00:53 Vagrant Cloud is moving to HCP

What sort of feels like a “if you care about it, get it moved into HCP before the IBM acquisition is done” Vagrant Cloud is being migrated to the Hashicorp Cloud Platform (HCP) under the new name of HCP Vagrant Registry.
All existing users of Vagrant Cloud are now able to migrate their Vagrant Boxes to HCP.
Vagrant isn’t changing; HCP provides a fully managed platform to make using Vagrant easier.
- An improved box search experience
- A refreshed Vagrant Cloud UI
- No Fee for private boxes
Users who migrate can register for free with the same email address as their existing Vagrant cloud account.
Want to review the migration guide? You can find it here.

01:53 Justin – “I really think Vagrant would be a key pillar of the IBM future strategy for HashiCorp? Nope, I sure did not. I mean, I figured they’d probably just keep it open source and people would keep developing on it, but I didn’t really expect much. So, you know, to at least get this and an improved search experience is kind of nice because the old Vagrant cloud website, it was definitely a little stale. So I can have improved search and a new UI is always nice.”

AI Is Going Great (Or How ML Makes All It’s Money)

02:43 Snowflake Announces Agreement to Acquire TruEra AI Observability Platform to Bring LLM and ML O

261: Azure Will Continue Until Further Notice… Unfortunately May 29, 2024

Welcome to episode 261 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Matthew, and Ryan are your hosts this week, and there’s a ton of news to cover, including a slew of Azure and Oracle stories! This week the guys cover some new cost management strategies from FinOps, some Kubernetes updates, MS Build, and even fancy schmancy CoPilot PCs!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Azure woke up and announced things
AWS stops taking your IPv4 Money
Well now everything has copilot

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Big thanks to Sonrai Security for sponsoring today’s podcast! Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod

AWS

00:57 AWS plans to invest €7.8B into the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, set to launch by the end of 2025

Amazon is sharing more details about the AWS European Sovereign Cloud roadmap so that customers and partners can start planning.
The first AWS European Sovereign Cloud is planning to launch its first AWS Region in the state of Brandenburg, Germany by the end of 2025.
Available to all AWS customers, this effort is backed by a 7.8B Euro investment in infrastructure, jobs and skills development.
Customers will get the full power of the AWS architecture, expansive service portfolio and API’s that customers use today.
Customers can start building applications in any existing Region and simply move them to AWS European Sovereign Cloud when the first region launches in 2025.
And how exactly will they do that, you might be wondering? If you mean there will be an easy button that’s awesome… do it everywhere else.
if you mean update Terraform and redeployed Screw you, Amazon.

03:23 Ryan – “Yeah. It just seems so anti what they’re trying to set up with the sovereign region to begin with, right? Like, I guess copying data is fine in, but not out. Like it’s sort of, it’s like GovCloud, right? It’s completely separate. So strange.”

05:06 Application Load Balancer launches IPv6-only support for Internet clients

ALB’s now allow you to provision load balancers without IPV4 for clients that can connect using just IPv6. Woot.

05:25 Ryan – “So the trick is for internal, the reason why we’re starting to see this more and more is that because you can address these huge spaces in IPv6, they’re not doing the equivalent of RFC 1918 address space. So that’s why these things become super important because they’ll configure an internal sort of networking path that

TCP Talks: The evolution of Finops & Why you should attend Finops-X May 26, 2024

Summary – Finops X

In this conversation, Joe Daly and Rob Martin from the FinOps Foundation discuss the latest developments in the FinOps space and Finops-X. They talk about the evolution of FinOps practices, the growth of the FinOps community, and the importance of the Focus project, which aims to standardize billing data from different cloud providers. They also discuss the adoption of FinOps practices by SaaS companies and the future of the FinOps space. The conversation covers the updates and changes in the FinOps framework, including the addition of allied personas and the simplification of domains and capabilities. It also discusses the upcoming Finops-X conference and the value it provides for attendees, including deep and concrete content, networking opportunities, and career advancement.

Keywords

FinOps, FinOps Foundation, FinOps X conference, podcast, cloud providers, Focus project, billing data, cloud-agnostic, tool agnostic, open source project, SaaS companies, FinOps framework, allied personas, domains and capabilities, Finops-X conference, deep content, networking, career advancement, Finops-X Europe

Takeaways

FinOps practices have evolved to focus on making processes more operational and improving decision-making in businesses.
The FinOps Foundation has seen significant growth, with over 100 members, including major cloud providers.
The Focus project, an open billing standard, aims to consolidate billing data from different cloud providers and enable more effective cost allocation.
The adoption of FinOps practices by SaaS companies is increasing, with a focus on consumption-based licensing management.
The future of the FinOps space includes expanding the Focus project to include sustainability data and additional usage-based data. The FinOps framework has been updated to include allied personas and simplified domains and capabilities.
Finops-X conference provides valuable content, networking opportunities, and career advancement for attendees.
Finops-X Europe conference in Barcelona offers a focused event for the European market.
The conversation also mentions the importance of small businesses attending the conference and the success stories of attendees.

Sound Bites

“How do I make these processes much more operational? How do I affect the broader decision-making going on in my business?”
“The Focus project… will consolidate or specify how billing data should come from the different cloud providers.”
“The Focus project… essentially handles the data ingestion problem that has plagued a lot of organizations early on.”
“The two big changes that happened this year were the addition of a lot of allied personas.”
“We’ve simplified those down into four key domains.”
“What other things are you guys excited about for Finops-X?”

About Joe Daily & Rob Martin

Joe Daly is a Director of Community for the FinOps Foundation, which is kind of like sitting at the largest lunch table in Middle School, but with less vaping. He’s had illustrious careers as a CPA (the Statute of Limitations has past for all tax returns he prepared and he has let his CPA expire), Corporate Taxation, IT Finance & Accounting, IT Portfolio Management, a regrettable stint as

260: Amazon Dispatches AWS CEO Adam Selipsky with Prime 2-day delivery May 24, 2024

Welcome to episode 260 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan and Ryan are talking about changes in leadership over at Amazon, GPT-4.o and its image generating capabilities, and the new voice of Skynet, Amazon Polly! It’s an action packed episode – and make sure to stay tuned for this week’s after show.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Who eats pumpkin pie in May
Bytes and Goodbyes: AWS CEO Logs Off
AWS lets you know that you are burning money sooner than before
High-Ho, High-Ho, It’s GPT-4-Ohhh
The CloudPod pans for nuggets in the AI Gold rush

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Big thanks to Sonrai Security for sponsoring today’s podcast! Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod

General News

00:40 Terraform Enterprise adds Podman support and workflow enhancements

The latest version of Terraform Enterprise now supports Podman with RHEL 8 and above.
Originally, it only supported Docker Engine and Cloud Managed K8 services.
With the upcoming EOL of RHEL 7 in June 2024, customers faced a lack of an end-to-end supported option for running a terraform enterprise on RHEL.
Now, with support from Podman, this is rectified.

01:18 Ryan – “This is for the small amount of customers running the enterprise either on -prem or in their cloud environment. It’s a pretty good option. Makes sense.”

01:42 Justin – “You know, the thing I was most interested in at this actually is that Red Hat Linux 7 is now end of life, which this is my first time in my entire 20 some odd career that I’ve never had to support Red Hat Linux in production because we use Ubuntu for some weird reason, which I actually appreciate because I always like Ubuntu best for my home projects, but I didn’t actually know Red Hat 7 was going away.”

AI Is Going Great (Or, How ML Makes All It’s Money)

03:58 Hello GPT-4o

Open AI has launched their GPT-4o (o for Omni) model which can reason across audio, vision and text in real time.
The new model can accept input combinations of text, audio and image and generates any combination as output. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, similar to human response time in conversation.
It matches GPT-4 Turbo performance on text in English and OCDE, with significant improvements on text in non-english languages, while also being much f

259: If Only All My Disasters Could Be Managed May 15, 2024

Welcome to episode 259 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan and Ryan (yes, all 4!) are covering A LOT of information – you’re going to want to sit down for this one. This week’s agenda includes unnecessary Magic Quadrants, SecOps, Dataflux updates, CNAME chain struggles, and an intro into Phi-3 – plus so much more!

Titles we almost went with this week:

GKE Config Sync or the Auto Outage for K8 Feature
If only all my disasters could be managed
The Cloud Pod builds a Rag Doll
Understanding Dataflux has given me reflux
Oracle continuing the trend of adding AI to everything even databases
A new way to burn your money on the cloud which isn’t even your fault
Google Gets a Magic Quadrant Participation Trophy
We’re All Winners to Magic Quadrant
Don’t be a giant DNAME

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Big thanks to Sonrai Security for sponsoring today’s podcast

Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod

General News

00:33 Dropbox dropped the ball on security, hemorrhaging customer and third-party info

Dropbox has revealed a major attack on its systems that saw customers’ personal information accessed by unknown and unauthorized entities.
The attack, detailed in a regulatory filing, impacted Dropbox Sign, a service that supports e-signatures similar to Docusign.
The threat actor had accessed data related to all users of Dropbox Sign, such as emails and usernames, in addition to general account settings.
For a subset of users, the threat actor accessed phone numbers, hashed passwords and certain authentication information such as API keys, OAuth tokens and multi-factor authentication.
To make things *extra* worse – if you never had an account but received a signed document your email and name has also been exposed. Good times.
Want to read the official announcement? You can find it here.

03:06 Jonathan- “It’s unfortunate that it was compromised. It was their acquisition, wasn’t it – ‘HelloSign’ that actually had the defect, not their main product at least.”

05:44 VMware Cloud on AWS – here today, here tomorrow

Last week at recording time Matt mentioned the VMWare Cloud on AWS rumors on twitter that Broadcom was terminating.
Hock Tan, President and CEO of Broadcom wrote a blog post letting you know that VMWare Cloud on AWS is Here today, and here tomorrow.
He says the reports have been false, and contends that the offering would be going away forcing unnecessary concern for their loyal customers who have used the se

257: Who Let the LLamas Out? *Bleat Bleat* May 01, 2024

Welcome to episode 257 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, Ryan, and Jonathan are in the barnyard bringing you the latest news, which this week is really just Meta’s release of Llama 3. Seriously. That’s every announcement this week. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Meta Llama says no Drama
No Meta Prob-llama
Keep Calm and Llama on
Redis did not embrace the Llama MK
The bedrock of good AI is built on Llamas
The CloudPod announces support for Llama3 since everyone else was doing it
Llama3, better know as Llama Llama Llama
The Cloud Pod now known as the LLMPod
Cloud Pod is considering changing its name to LlamaPod
Unlike WinAMP nothing whips the llamas ass

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Check out Sonrai Securities‘ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at www.sonrai.co/cloudpod

Follow Up

01:27 Valkey is Rapidly Overtaking Redis

Valkey has continued to rack up support from AWS, Ericsson, Google, Oracle and Verizon initially, to now being joined by Alibaba, Aiven, Heroku and Percona backing Valkey as well.
Numerous blog posts have come out touting Valkey adoption.
I’m not sure this whole thing is working out as well as Redis CEO Rowan Trollope had hoped.

AI Is Going Great – Or How AI Makes All It’s Money

03:26 Introducing Meta Llama 3: The most capable openly available LLM to date

Meta has launched Llama 3, the next generation of their state-of-the-art open source large language model.
Llama 3 will be available on AWS, Databricks, GCP, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, Nvidia NIM, and Snowflake with support from hardware platforms offered by AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm
Includes new trust and safety tools such as Llama Guard 2, Code Shield and Cybersec eval 2
They plan to introduce new capabilities, including longer context windows, additional model sizes and enhanced performance.
The first two models from Meta Lama3 are the 8B and 70B parameter variants that can support a broad range of use cases.
Meta shared some benchmarks against Gemma 7B and Mistral 7B vs the Lama 3 8B models and showed improvements across all major benchmarks. Including Math with Gemma 7b doing 12.2 vs 30 with Llama 3
It had highly comparable performance with the 70B model against Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude 3 Sonnet scoring within a few points of most of the other scores.
Jonathan recommends using LM Studio to get start playing around with LLMS, which you can find at https://lmstudio.ai/

04:42 Jonathan – “Isn’t it funny how you go from an 8 billion parameter model to a 70 billion parameter model but nothing in between? Like you would have thought there would be some kind of like, some middle ground maybe? But, uh, but… No. But, um,

258: To Q or Not to Q – That is the Question (But, Will We Get a Good Answer?) Apr 30, 2024

Welcome to episode 258 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Jonathan dig into all the latest earnings reports, talk about the 57 announcements made by AWS about Q, and discuss the IBM purchase of HashiCorp – plus even more news.

Make sure to stay for the aftershow, where the guys break down an article warning about the loss of training data for LLM’s.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Terraform hugs to Big Blue (Bear)
The CloudPod hosts again forgets to lower their headphone volume
AWS fixes an issue that has made Matt swear many times
Google gets mad at open-source
Azure has crickets
HashiCorp’s Nomadic Journey to the IBM Oasis
It’s Gonna be Maaay!

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at https://sonrai.co/cloudpod

General News

01:48 It’s Earnings TIme!

Alphabet (Google)

Alphabet beat on earnings and revenue in the first quarter, with revenue increasing 15% from a year earlier, one of the fastest growth rates since 2022.
They also announced its first dividend and a $70 billion dollar stock buyback. Using layoff money for something other than a buyback? IN THIS ECONOMY?
Revenue was 80.54 Billion vs 78.59 expected, resulting in earnings per share of 1.89. Google Cloud Revenue was 9.57B vs 9.35 B expected.
Net income jumped 57% to 23.66 B up from 15.05B a year ago.
Operating income of the cloud business quadruped to 900M, showing that the company is finally generating substantial profits after pouring money into the business for years to keep up with AWS and Azure.

03:54 Justin – “Yeah, I mean, they’re doing pretty well… I think AI is helping them out tremendously in this regard. I believe it includes G Suite as well. But I mean, like I don’t know how much revenue that is comparatively, but your Google cloud is definitely the majority of it, I think at this point..”

04:20 Microsoft

MSFT fiscal third quarter results exceeded on the top and bottom line, but revenue guidance came in weaker than expected.
Consensus estimate said Q4 should be 64.5B but Microsoft CFO called for 64B.
Revenue grew 17% year over year in the quarter, net coming was 21.94B up from 18.30 billion.
Micosoft said that currently near term AI demand is higher than their available capacity, and is focusing on buying more Nvidia GPU

TCP Talks with Rackspace CTO of Public Cloud – Travis Runty Apr 26, 2024

For this special edition of TCP Talks, Justin and Jonathan are joined by Travis Runty, CTO of Public Cloud with Rackspace Technology. In today’s interview, they discuss being accidentally multi cloud, public vs private cloud, and cloud migration, and best practices when assisting clients with their cloud journeys.

Background

Rackspace Technology, commonly known as Rackspace, is a leading multi-cloud solutions provider headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, United States. Founded in 1998, Rackspace has established itself as a trusted partner for businesses seeking expertise in managing and optimizing their cloud environments.

The company offers a wide range of services aimed at helping organizations navigate the complexities of cloud computing, including cloud migration, managed hosting, security, data analytics, and application modernization. Rackspace supports various cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and GCP, among others.

Rackspace prides itself on its “Fanatical Experience” approach, which emphasizes delivering exceptional customer support and service. This commitment to customer satisfaction has contributed to Rackspace’s reputation as a reliable and customer-centric provider in the cloud computing industry.

Meet Travis Runty, CTO of Public Cloud for Rackspace Technology

Beginning his career with Rackspace as a Linux engineer, Travis has spent the last 15 years working his way through multiple divisions of the company, including 10 years in senior and director level positions. Most recently, Travis served as VP of Technical Support of Global Cloud Operations from 2020-2022.

Travis is extremely passionate about building and leading high performance engineering teams and delivering innovative solutions. Most recently, as a member of their technology council, Travis wrote an article for Forbes – Building a Cloud-Savvy Workforce: Empowering Your Team for Success – where he discussed best practices for prioritizing workforce enablement, especially when it comes to training and transformation initiatives.

Interview Notes:

In the main show, TCP has been talking a lot about Cloud / hybrid cloud / multi-cloud and repatriating data back to on prem, and today’s guest knows all about those topics.

Rackspace has had quite a few phases in their journey to public cloud – including building a data center in an unused mall, introducing managed services, creating partnerships with VMware, an attempt to go head to head with the hyperscalers, and then ultimately focusing on public cloud and instead partnering with the hyperscalers.

Rackspace has both a focus on private and public cloud; when it comes to private cloud they focus mainly on VMware and OpenStack, whereas in the public cloud side, Rackspace partners with the hyperscalers to assist clients with their cloud journey.

Quotes from today’s show

Travis: “We want to make sure that when a customer goes on their public cloud journey, that they actually have a robust strategy that is going to be effective. From there, we’re able to leverage our professional services teams to make sure that they can realize that transformation, and hopefully there *is* a transformation, and it’s not just a lift and shift.”

Travis: “A conflict that we continuously have to strike the balance of is when do we apply a cloud native solution, and where do we apply the Rackspace elements on top. The hyperscalers techno

256: Begun, The Custom Silicon Wars Have Apr 24, 2024

Welcome to episode 256 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin and Matthew are here this week to catch you up on all the news you may have missed while Google Next was going on. We’ve got all the latest news on the custom silicon hot war that’s developing, some secret sync, drama between HashiCorp and OpenTofu, and one more Google Next recap – plus much more in today’s episode. Welcome to the Cloud!

Titles we almost went with this week:

I have a Google Next sized hangover
Claude’s Magnificent Opus now on AWS
US-EAST-1 Gets called Reliable; how insulting
The cloud pod flies on a g6

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at www.sonrai.co/cloudpod

General News

Today, we get caught up on the other Clouds from last week, and other news (besides Google, that is.) Buckle up.

04:11 OpenTofu Project Denies HashiCorp’s Allegations of Code Theft

After our news cutoff before Google Next, Hashicorp issued a strongly worded Cease and Desist letter to the OpenTofu project, accusing that the project has “repeatedly taken code Hashi provided under the BSL and used it in a manner that violates those license terms and Hashi’s intellectual properties.”
It notes that in some instances, OpenTofu has incorrectly re-labeled Hashicorp’s code to make it appear as if it was made available by Hashi, originally under a different license.
Hashi gave them until April 10th to remove any allegedly copied code from the OpenTofu repo, threatening litigation if the project failed to do so.
OpenTofu struck back – and they came with receipts!
They deny that any BSL licensed code was incorporated into the OpenTofu repo, and that any code they copied came from the MPL-Licensed version of terraform.
“The OpenTofu team vehemently disagrees with any suggestions that it misappropriated, mis-sourced or misused Hashi’s BSL code. All such statements have zero basis in facts” — Open Tofu Team
OpenTofu showed how the code they accused was lifted from the BSL code, was actually in the MPL version, and then copied into the BSL version from an older version by a Hashi Engineer.
Anticipating third party contributions might submit BSL terraform code unwittingly or otherwise, OpenTofu instituted a “taint team” to compare Terraform and Open Tofu Pull requests.
If the PR is found to be in breach of intellectual property rights, the pull request is closed and the contributor is closed from working on that area of the code in the future.
Matt Asay, (from Mongo) writing for Infoworld, dropped a hit piece when the C&D was filed, but then

255: Guess What’s Google Next? AI, AI, and Some More AI! Apr 17, 2024

Welcome to episode 255 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are here to tackle the aftermath of Google Next. Whether you were there or not, sit back, relax, and let the guys dissect each day’s keynote and the major announcements.

Titles we almost went with this week:

How About Some AI?
“The New Way to Cloud” is a Terrible TagLine (and is what happens when you let AI do your copy)
Welcome Google Cloud Next Where There is No Cloud, Just AI
Ok Google, did your phone go off?
For 100 dollars, guess how many AI stories Google Has This Week
From Search to Skynet: Google Cloud Next’s Descent into AI Madness
‘Next’ Up from Google – AI!
Have Some Conference with Your AI

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’ve got a new sponsor! Sonrai Security

Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at sonrai.co/cloudpod

GCP – Google Next 2024

We’re jumping right into GCP this week, so we can talk about all things Google Next.

01:44 FIrst impressions: Vegas > Moscone, so take that Vegas.

Both Ryan and Justin agree that Vegas is much better than the Mosconoe center in San Francisco for Google Next
The Sessions were well organized, but Ryan is a little tired from walking back and forth between them. Exercise is tiring! \
Vegas infrastructure was well utilized, something Amazon didn’t do as well.
Folks staying at area hotels that *weren’t* Mandalay Bay had some issues with trying to get onto / off property at the beginning and end of the day.
Free coffee is still available. *If you can find it.
Expo hall felt cramped

08:22 Thoughts on the Keynote Address

Note: Not enough space in the arena for keynotes; the arena holds approx. 12k; numbers released by Google say there were 30k in attendance.

Thomas Kurian kicked off the keynote, introduced their new tagline “The New Way to Cloud”
Sundar: Months can feel like decades in the cloud… WORD.
36B revenue run rate
Kurian did a rapid fire announcement of all the things coming – which required Justin to rewatch just to get them all.
- A3 Mega Nvidia H100 GPUs
- Nvidia GB200 NVL72 (in early 2025
- TPU v5p GA
- Hyperdisk ML for Inference
- Cloud Storage Fuse Caching GA
- Parallel Store Caching
- AI Hypercomputer
- Dynamic Workload Scheduler
- Nvidia GPU Support for GDC Google Distributed Cloud
- GKE Enterprise for GDC
- AI Models on GDC
- Vector Search on GDC
- Vertex AI Solutions with GDC
- Secret and Top Secret

TCP Talks: Sandy Bird, Sonrai Security Apr 12, 2024

A bonus episode of The Cloud Pod may be just what the doctor ordered, and this week Justin and Jonathan are here to bring you an interview with Sandy Bird of Sonrai Security. There’s so much going on in the IAM space, and we’re really happy to have an expert in the studio with us this week to talk about some of the security least privilege specifics.

Background

Sonrai (pronounced Son-ree, which means data in Gaelic) was founded in 2017. Sonrai provides Cloud Data Control, and seeks to deliver a complete risk model of all identity and data relationships, which includes activity and movement across cloud accounts, providers, and third party data stores.

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Meet Sandy Bird, Co founder of Sonrai Security

Sandy is the co-founder and CTO of Sonrai, and has a long career in the tech industry. He was the CTO and co-founder of Q1 Labs, which was acquired by IBM in 2011, and helped to drive IBM security growth as CTO for global business security there.

Interview Notes:

One of the big questions we start the interview with is just how has IAM evolved – and what kind of effect have those changes had on the identity models? Enterprise wants things to be least privilege, but it’s hard to find the logs. In cloud, however *most* things are logged – and so least privilege became an option.

Sonrai offers the first cloud permissions firewall, which enables one click least privilege management, which is important in the current environment where the platforms operate so differently from each other. With this solution, you have better control of your cloud access, limit your permissions, attack surface, and automate least privilege – all without slowing down DevOps2.

Is the perfect policy achievable? Sandy breaks it between human identities and workload identities; they’re definitely separate. He claims, in workload identities the perfect policy is probably possible. Human identity is hugely sporadic, however, it’s important to at least try to get to that perfect policy, especially when dealing with sensitive information. One of the more interesting data pieces they found was that less than 10% of identities with sensitive permissions actually used them – and you can use the information to balance out actually handing out permissions versus a one time use case.

Sonrai spent a lot of time looking at new solutions to problems with permissions; part of this includes purpose-built integration, offering a flexible open GraphQL API with prebuilt integrations.

Sonrai also offers continuous monitoring; providing ongoing intelligence on all the permission usage – including excess permissions – and enables the removal of unused permissions without any sort of disruptions. Policy automation automatically writes IAM policies tailored to access needs, and simplifies processes for teams.

On demand access is another tool that gives on demand requests for permissions that are restricted with a quick and efficient process.

Quotes from today’s show

Sandy: “The unbelievably powerful model in AWS can do amazing things, especially when you get into some of the advanced conditions – but man, for a human to understand what all this stuff is, is super hard. Then you go to the Azure model, which is very different. It’s an allow first model. If you have an allow anywhere in the tree, you can do whatever is asked, but there’s this hierarchy to the whole thing, and so when you think you want to remove something you may not even be removing it., because something above may have that permission anyway. It’s a whole different model to learn there.”

Sandy: “Only like 8% of those identities

254: The Cloud Pod Offers Therapy Sessions to AIs With Trust Issues Apr 11, 2024

Welcome to episode 254 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re talking about trust issues with some security updates over at Azure, forking drama at Redis, and making all of our probably terrible predictions for Google Next. Going to be in Vegas? Find one of us and get a sticker for your favorite cloud podcast! Follow us on Slack and Twitter to get info on finding your favorite host IRL. (Unless Jonathan is your favorite. We won’t be giving directions to his hot tub.)

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod Hosts Fail To Do Their Homework
The Cloud Pod Now Has a Deadline
This Is Why I Love Curl … EC2 Shop Endpoint is Awesome
AI & Elasticsearch… AI – But Not Like That
Preparing for Next Next Week

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’ve got a new sponsor! Sonrai Security

Check out Sonrai Securities’ new Cloud Permission Firewall. Just for our listeners, enjoy a 14 day trial at www.sonrai.co/cloudpod

Follow Up

02:15 AWS, Google, Oracle back Redis fork “Valkey” under the Linux Foundation

In no surprise, placeholderKV is now backed by AWS, Google and Oracle and has been rebranded to Valkey under the Linux Foundation.
Interestingly, Ericsson and Snap Inc. also joined Valkey.

03:19 Redis vs. the trillion-dollar cabals

Anytime an open source company changes their license, AWS and other cloud providers are blamed for not contributing enough upstream.
Matt Asay, from Infoworld, weighs in this time.
The fact that placeholder/Valkey was forked by several employees at AWS who were core contributors of Redis, does seem to imply that they’re doing more than nothing.
I should point out that Matt Asay also happens to run Developer relations at MongoDB. Pot, meet kettle.

04:14 Ryan – “It’s funny because I always feel like the cloud contribution to these things is managed services around them, right? It’s not necessarily improvements to the core source code. It’s more management of that source code. Now there are definitely areas where they do make enhancements, but I’m not sure the vast majority makes sense to be included in an open source made for everyone product either.”

General News

07:01 What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world

The Open Source community was a bit shocked when a Microsoft Developer revealed a backdoor had been intentionally planted in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility available on almost all installations of Linux and Other Unix-Like OS.
The person – or people – behind this project like

253: Oracle Autonomous Database is the OG Dad Joke Apr 04, 2024

Welcome to episode 253 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Jonathan are your hosts this week as we discuss data centers, OCI coming in hot (and potentially underwater?) in Kenya, stateful containers, and Oracle’s new globally distributed database (Oracle Autonomous Database) of many dollars. Sit back and enjoy the show!

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod: Transitioning to SSPL – Sharply Satirical Podcast Laughs!
The Data Centers of Loudoun County
The Forks of Redis were Speedb
AWS, I’d Like to Make a Return, Please
See…Stateful Containers Are a Thing
Azure Whispers Sweet Nothings to You
I’m a Hip OG-DAD
Legacy Vendor plus Legacy Vendor = Profit $$
Wine Vendors >Legacy Vendors
I’m Not a Regular Dad, I’m an OG Dad

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.

Follow Up

02:25 Microsoft Agreed to Pay Inflection $650 Million While Hiring Its Staff

Listener Note: Payway article
Last week, we talked about Microsoft hiring the Inflection Co-Founder Mustafa Suleyman and their Chief scientist, as well as most of the 70-person staff.
Inflection had previously raised 1.5B, and so this all seemed strange as part of their shift to an AI Studio or a company that helps others train AI models.
Now, it has been revealed that Microsoft has agreed to pay a 620M dollar licensing fee, as well as 30M to waive any legal rights related to the mass hiring. As well as it renegotiated a $140M line of credit that aimed to help inflection finance its operations and pay for the MS services.

03:22 Justin – “…that explains the mystery that we talked about last week for those who were paying attention.”

General News

05:17 Redis switches licenses, acquires Speedb to go beyond its core in-memory database

Redis, one of the popular in-memory data stores, is switching away from its Open Source Three-Clause BSD license.
Instead it is adopting a dual licensing model called the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public Licensing (SSPLv1).
- Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis will need to enter into a commercial agreement with Redis. The first company to do so was Microsoft.
Redis also announced the acquisition of Speedb (speedy-bee) to take it beyond the in memory space.
This isn’t the first time that Redis has changed the licensing model.
- In 2018 and 2019, it changed the way it licensed Redis Models under the Redis Source Available License v1.

252: I have an InfluxDB of AI Related Stories Mar 27, 2024

Welcome to episode 252 of The Cloud Pod podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are talking about InfluxDB, collabs between AWS and NVIDIA, some personnel changes over at Microsoft, Amazon Timestream, and so much more! Sit back and enjoy – and make sure to hang around for the aftershow, where Linux and DBOS are on the docket. You won’t want to miss it.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Light a fire under your Big Queries with Spark procedures
All your NVIDIA GPU belong to AWS
Thanks, EU for Free Data Transfer for all*
Microsoft, Inflection, Mufasta, Scar… this is not the Lion King Sequel I expected
The Cloud Pod sees Inflections in the Timestream
The Cloud Pod is a palindrome
The Cloudpod loves SQL so much we made a OS out of it
Lets run SQL on Kubernetes on Top of DBOS. What could go wrong?
The Cloud Pod is 5 7 5 long

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel. Please. We’re not above begging. Ok. Maybe Ryan is. But the rest of us? Absolutely not.

AI Is Going Great (Or, How ML Makes All Its Money)

1:00 PSYCH! We’re giving this segment a break this week. YOU’RE WELCOME.

AWS

01:08 Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku model is now available on Amazon Bedrock

Last week Claude 3 Sonnet was available on Bedrock, this week Claude 3 Haiku is available on Bedrock.
The Haiku model is the fastest and most compact mode of the Claude 3 family, designed for near-instant responsiveness and seamless generative AI experiences that mimic human interaction.
We assume, thanks to how much Amazon is stretching this out, that next week we’ll get Opus.
Want to check it out for yourself? Head over to the Bedrock console.

02:02 Jonathan – “I haven’t tried Haiku, but I’ve played with Sonnet a lot for pre over the past week. It’s very good. It’s much better conversationally. I mean, I’m not talking about technical things. It’s like I ask all kinds of random philosophical questions or whatever, just to kind of explore what it can do, what it knows…If I was going to spend money on OpenAI or Anthropic, it would be on Anthropic right now.”

04:03 AWS Pi Day 2024: Use your data to power generative AI

3.14 just passed us by last week, and Amazon was back with a live steam on Twitch where they explored AWS storage from data lakes to High Performance Storage, and how to transform your data strategy to become the starting point for Generative AI.
As always they announced several new storage features in honor of

251: AI Is the Final Nail in the Coffin for Low Code Mar 20, 2024

Welcome to episode 251 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re looking at the potential end of low impact code thanks to generative AI, how and why Kubernetes is still hanging on, and Cloudflare’s new defensive AI project. Plus we take on the death of Project Titan in our aftershow.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod is Magic
Why is the Cloud Pod Not on the Board of the Director for OpenAI
The Cloud Pod wants Gen AI Money
The Cloud Pod Thinks Magic Networks Are Less Fun Than Magic Mushrooms
The Cloud Pod is Mission Critical so Give Us Your Money and Sponsor Us

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.

Follow-Up

00:50 Kubernetes Predictions Were Wrong — Redux

Last week Ryan and Justin talked about why Kubernetes hasn’t disappeared into the background during our after show, and now with Matt and Jonathan here I wanted to see if they had any additional thoughts.
If you missed this two weeks ago, it’s probably because you don’t know that there are regular after shows after the final bumper of the show… typically about non-cloud things or things that generally interest our hosts. There is one today about the death of the Apple Car.
To summarize the conversation, ChatGPT has provided us with a sort of CliffsNotes version.
- Ryan and Justin speculated on the reasons why Kubernetes (K8) persisted despite predictions of its decline:

Global Pandemic Impact: They acknowledged the global pandemic that unfolded since 2020 and considered its potential influence on Kubernetes. The pandemic might have shifted priorities and accelerated digital transformation efforts, leading to increased reliance on Kubernetes for managing cloud-native applications and infrastructure. Organizations might have intensified their focus on scalable and resilient technologies like Kubernetes to adapt to remote work environments and changing market dynamics.
Unforeseen Complexity: Despite expectations for a simpler alternative to emerge, Kubernetes has grown more complex over time. The ecosystem around Kubernetes has expanded significantly, with various platforms, services, and tools built on top of it. This complexity may have made it challenging for organizations to migrate away from Kubernetes, as they have heavily invested in its ecosystem and expertise.
Critical Role in Scalability: Kubernetes remains a fundamental technology for platform engineering teams seeking to achieve scalability and standardization in their operations. Creating a standardized, opinionated path for Kubernetes within organizations enables them to streamline deployment processes, manage resources efficiently, and support the growing demands of modern applications. This critical role in scaling infrastructure and applications might have contributed to Kubernetes’ enduring relevance.
Absence of Clear Alternatives: Despite predictions, no single service or platform has emerged as a clear, universally adopted alternative to Kubernetes. While other solutions exist, such as Tanzu, OpenShift, and others mentioned, none have achieved the same level of adoption or provided a compelling reason for orga

250: The Cloud Pod Goes Nuclear Powered Mar 15, 2024

Welcome to episode 250 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Well, we’re not launching rockets this week, but we ARE discussing the AI arms race, AWS going nuclear, and all the latest drama between Elon and OpenAI. You won’t want to miss a minute of it!

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Paradox of AI choice
Amazon just comes across super desperate on RACING to AI foundation model
support
Your new JR developer Test-LLM
If you can’t beat OpenAI, sue them

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.

General News

01:12 IT Infrastructure, Operations Management & Cloud Strategies: Chicago (Rosemont/O’Hare), Illinois

Want to meet cloud superstar Matthew Kohn in person? He’s going to be giving a talk in Chicago, if you’re going to be in the neighborhood. *Maybe* he’ll have some stickers.
11:30am – 12:30pm: Using Data and AI to Shine a Light on Your Dark IT Estate

AI Is Going Great (Or, How ML Makes All Its Money)

03:42 Anthropic claims its new models beat GPT-4

AI Startup Anthropics, has announced their latest version of Claude.
The company claims that it rivals OpenAI’s GPT-4 in terms of performance.
Claude 3, and its family of models, includes Claude 3 Haiku, Sonnet and Opus, with Opus being the most powerful.
All show “increased capabilities” in analysis and forecasting, Anthropic claims, as well enhanced performance on specific benchmarks versus models like GPT-4 (but not GPT-4 Turbo) and Googles Gemini 1.0 Ultra (but not Gemini 1.5 Pro)
Claude 3 is Anthropics first multi-modal model.
In a step better than rivals, Claude can analyze multiple images in a single request (up to 20). This allows it to do compare and contrast operations
However, there are limits to its image capabilities. It’s not allowed to identify people.
They admit it is also prone to mistakes on low-quality images under 200 pixels, and struggles with tasks involving spatial reasoning and object counting.

05:42 Justin – “Overall, this looks like not a bad model. I do see a little bit of chatter today actually. Some people say it’s not quite as good in some areas, but it’s pretty good in others. And it is not connected to the internet, this model. So it is dated only through August of 2023. So anything that happened after that, like the Israeli Hamas conflicts, it doesn’t know anything about those. So just be aware.”

06:08 Matthew – “You know, it’s actually interesting now. There’s so many models out there. You know, you have to start to look at what makes sense for your data and what you need, along with also price. You know, I look too closely at what the price is, but you might be able to get away

249: Google Gemini and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week Mar 06, 2024

Welcome to episode 249 of the CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, Justin and Ryan put on their scuba suits and dive into the latest cloud news, from Google Gemini’s “woke” woes, to Azure VMware Solution innovations, and some humorous takes on Reddit and Google’s unexpected collaboration. Join the conversation on AI, storage solutions, and more this week in the Cloud!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Gemini Has Gone Woke? Uhhh…ok.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.

General News

01:48 DigitalOcean beats expectations under the helm of new CEO Paddy Srinivasan

Quick earnings chat. Digital Ocean, under their new CEO Paddy Srinivasan reported earnings of 44 centers per share, well ahead of Wall Street’s target of 37 cents per share.
Revenue growth was a little sluggish at 11% more than a year earlier, but the companies 181 million in reported sales still beat analysts expectations.
Full year revenue was 693M for the year.
We’re really glad to see the business is still going, and instead of going back on-premise, we think it’s a viable option for many workloads so don’t sleep on them.

02:46 Ryan – “I like that, you know, while they are very focused on, you know, traditional compute workloads, you can still see them. Dip in their toes into managed services and, and, um, their interaction with the community and documentation of how to do things. I think it’s really impactful.”

03:34 VMware moves to quell concern over rapid series of recent license changes

As we have reported multiple times on the VMWARE shellacking they are doing to the customers, Vmware has released a blog post trying to convince you that they’re **not** screwing you.
Broadcom has realigned operations around VMWare Cloud Foundation private cloud portfolio and data center-focused VMWare Vsphere suite, and no longer sells discrete products such as vSphere hypervisor, vSAN virtual storage and NSX network storage virtualization software.
They also are eliminating perpetual licensing in favor of subscription-only pricing, with VCF users getting vSAN, NSX and the Aria Management and orchestration components bundled whether you want them or not.
Broadcom says this is about focusing on best-of-breed silos, and not disparate products without an integrated experience.

248: A Public Service Announcement on Shared VPCs in AWS: Don’t! Mar 01, 2024

Welcome to episode 248 of the CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s the return of our Cloud Journey Series! Plus, today we’re talking shared VPCs and why you should avoid them, Amazon’s new data centers ( we think they forgot about the sustainability pledge,) new threats to and from AI, and a quick preview of Next ‘24 programs – plus much more!

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod Isn’t a Basic Bitch
New AWS Data Solutions Framework – or – How You Accidentally Spent $100k’s
A PSA on Shared VPCs in AWS
Amazon Doesn’t Even Pay Attention to Climate When it’s on a Building
Vector Search I Hardly Know Her
Google Migs are Less Fun than Russian Migs AI Can Now Attack Us; Who Didn’t See That Coming
Who is Surprised That AWS is Using More Power Than the Rest of the State of Oregon
Spend all the Dinero in Spain

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.

AI is Going Great (or how ML Makes all Its Money)

01:24 Disrupting malicious uses of AI by state-affiliated threat actors

In this week’s chapter of AI nightmares, ChatGPT tells us how they are blocking the usage of AI by state-affiliated threat actors. Awesome; things went from bad to worse in one week. Cool. Cool cool cool.
In partnership with Microsoft Threat Intelligence, they have disrupted five state-affiliated actors that sought to use their AI service in support of malicious cyber activities
These actors generally sought to use OpenAI services for querying open-source information, translating, finding coding errors, and running basic coding tasks.
- Charcoal Typhoon (China affiliated) researched various companies and cybersecurity tools, debugged code and generated scripts, and created content likely for use in phishing campaigns.
- Salmon Typhoon (China affiliated) translated technical papers, retrieved publicly available information on multiple intelligence agencies and regional threat actors, assisted with coding, and researched common ways processes could be hidden on a system.
- Crimson Sandstorm (Iran affiliated) used OpenAI services for scripting support related to app and web development, generating content likely for spear-phishing campaigns, and researching common ways malware could evade detection.
- Emerald Sleet (North Korea affiliated) identified experts and organizations focused on defense issues in the Asia-Pacific region, to understand publicly available vulnerabilities, and used OpenAI services for help with basic scripting tasks, and drafting content that could be used in phishing campaigns.
- Forest Blizzard (Russia-affiliated) primarily for performing research on open-source data into satellite communication protocols and radar imaging technology, as well as for support with scripting tasks.
OpenAI says the capabilities of the current models are limited, they believe it’s important to stay ahead of significant and evolving threats.
To continue making sure their platform is used for good they have a multi-pronged approach:

247: ChatGPT Remembers? Oh No! Feb 24, 2024

Welcome to episode 247 of the CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Pepperidge Farm remembers – and now so does ChatGPT! Today on the pod we’re talking about the new “memory” function in ChatGPT, secrets over at OCI, and Firehose dropping Kinesis like its HOT. Plus plenty of other Cloud and AI news to get you through the week. Let’s get started!

Titles we almost went with this week:

I Don’t Think Anyone Wants to be “Good Enough” in AI
Oracle Can Rotate All My Secrets
Amazon Data Firehose – Not Without Kinesis

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.

Follow Up

00:57 C2C Event

Recently Justin was down at a 2gather event Google’s Cloud headquarters near Moffett Field in Sunnyvale. So to those new listeners who heard Justin there and just couldn’t get enough, welcome! We’re happy to have you.

Want to see what events are coming up, and hopefully near you? Check out the lineup here.

General News

08:25 Why companies are leaving the cloud

A recent study by Citrix, is saying that 25% of organizations in the UK have already moved half or more of their cloud-based workloads back to on-premises infrastructures.
The survey questioned 350 IT leaders on their current approaches to cloud computing.
93% of them had been involved in a cloud repatriation project in the last three years.
Surveyed said their reasons for moving from the Security Issues, High Project Expectations and unmet expectations, with most saying the cost was the biggest motivator, which definitely makes sense to us.
In general this isn’t my experience when talking to listeners, or folks at the recent C2C event; there’s always a few companies that probably shouldn’t have moved to the cloud in the first place, but those numbers don’t pan out to us in who we’re talking to.
We’re interested in listener feedback here – have any of you been involved in a repatriation project?

09:55 Ryan – “I think it’s kind of the same thing that happened in reverse a few years ago, where it’s like all the companies are moving to the cloud. The same reports were, you know, 50 % of companies are moving other entire workloads into the cloud. And now it’s sort of the pendulum swinging the other way.”

AI is Going Great (or how ML Makes all Its Money) – ChatGPT gets Reveries

12:37 Memory and new controls for ChatGPT

ChatGPT is adding a new “memory” feature; “remembering” allows you to ask the bot to remember things you have chatted about with ChatGPT in the past.
- So things like you love to travel, you have a daughter, etc.

246: The CloudPod Will Never Type localllm Correctly Feb 16, 2024

Welcome to episode 246 of The CloudPod podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re discussion localllm and just why they’ve saddled us all with that name, saying goodbye to Bard and hello to Gemini Pro, and discussing the pros and cons of helping skynet to eradicate us all. All that and more cloud and AI news, now available for your listening nightmares.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Oracle says hold my beer on Africa

The Cloud Pod Thinks the LLM Maturity Model has More Maturing To Do

There is a Finch Windows Canary in Fargate

New LLM Nightmares

The Cloud Pod Will Never Type localllm Correctly

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.

General News

It’s Earnings Time!

01:42 Microsoft issues light guidance even as Azure growth drives earnings beat

Microsoft shares were up after they reported earnings of 2.93 per share vs expectations of 2.73 per share.
- Revenue was 62.02 billion vs 61.12 billion.
This represents a 17.6% year over year in the quarter.
The intelligent cloud segment produced $25.88 billion in revenue, up 20% and above the $25.29 billion consensus among analysts surveyed by Streets Accounts.
Revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 30%, when analysts only expected 27.7%.
- Six points are tied to AI as Microsoft now has 53,000 Azure AI customers and 1/3rd are new in the past year (per Microsoft.)

02:46 Justin- “I don’t think the count the Open AI customers, do you? Because there’s way more people that have Open AI usage than 53,000. So I think this is legitimately Azure AI – which is Open AI under the hood – but specifically paying for that subscription.”

04:19 Alphabet shares slide on disappointing Google ad revenue

Alphabet reported better-than-expected revenue and profit for the fourth quarter, but ad revenue trailed analysts projections.
Earnings per share were 1.64 vs 1.59 expected.
- Revenue of 86.31 billion vs 85.33 billion expected
Google Cloud was 9.19 Billion vs 8.94 billion expected, according to Street.
That represents a 26% expansion in the fourth quarter.

04:51 Justin- “…which is interesting, because you would expect that they’d have similar growth being tied to Bard and Gemini to be close to what Microsoft is doing.”

12:02 Amazon reports better-than-expected results as revenue jumps 14%

Amazon also exceeded analysis expectations.
- Earnings per share 1.00 vs 80 cents expected.
Revenue

245: The CloudPod is the SBOM! Feb 07, 2024

Welcome to episode 245 of The CloudPod podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week is a real SBOM of an episode. (See what I did there?) Justin and Matthew have braved Teams outages, floods, cold, and funny business names to bring you the latest in Cloud and AI news. This week, we’re talking about Roomba, OpenTofu, and Oracle deciding AI makes money, along with a host of other stories. Join us!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Amazon Decides Roomba Sucks
AI Weapons: Will They Shift Cloud Supremacy
Oracle Realizes There is Money in Gen AI

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.

General News

REMINDER: 2gather Sunnyvale: Cloud Optimization Summit

On February 15, Justin will be onsite in Google’s #Sunnyvale office for the @C2C #2Gather Sunnyvale: #CloudOptimization Summit! Come heckle him, we mean JOIN him, to talk about all things #GenAI and #CloudOps. Consider this your invitation – he’d love to see you there! Sign up → https://events.c2cglobal.com/e/m9pvbq/?utm_campaign=speaker-Justin-B&utm_source=SOCIAL_MEDIA&utm_medium=LinkedIn

02:23 Amazon abandons $1.4 billion deal to buy Roomba maker iRobot

Amazon is no longer buying iRobot for 1.4 billion, as there is no path to regulatory approval in the European Union.
We’re not surprised this is the end result.
Of course, iRobot proceeded to lay off 350 employees, or around 31 percent of its workforce.
In addition CEO Colin Angle, who co-founded the company, stepped down from his CEO position and his chair position.
Amazon gets to pay 94 Million in a termination fee to iRobot, which will help pay off a loan iRobot took the year prior.

04:02 Terraform fork OpenTofu launches into general availability

OpenTofu has moved into General Availability.
The milestone is after a four month development effort, with hundreds of contributors and over five dozen developers.
Now that they have a stable version separated from the main Terraform product, they are promising a steady set of new features and enhancements.
The GA version is OpenTofu 1.6, which includes hun

244: CoPilot For the People! Feb 02, 2024

Welcome to episode 244 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! We’ve got a ton of news for you this week, including a lot of AI updates, including new CoPilot Pro and updates to ChatGPT, including the addition of a GPT store. Plus, we discuss everyone’s favorite supernatural axis, MagicQuadrants.It’s a jam packed episode you won’t want to miss.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Switching from Google is Finally Easier
Cheaper AI Doesn’t Mean Better AI
Is the Cloud Pod Better Than Microsoft at Containers?
AWS is the Leader in Containers – Because You Can Run Them in Cloudshell
The Cloud Pod is Connecting to the World With Some Undersea Cables

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.

General News

2gather Sunnyvale: Cloud Optimization Summit

On February 15, Justin will be onsite in Google’s #Sunnyvale office for the @C2C #2Gather Sunnyvale: #CloudOptimization Summit! Come heckle him, we mean JOIN him, to talk about all things #GenAI and #CloudOps. Consider this your invitation – he’d love to see you there! Sign up → https://events.c2cglobal.com/e/m9pvbq/?utm_campaign=speaker-Justin-B&utm_source=SOCIAL_MEDIA&utm_medium=LinkedIn

AI is Going Great (or how ML Makes all Its Money)

01:20 Introducing ChatGPT Team

ChatGPT has added a new self-serve plan called Chat GPT team.
Chat GPT team offers access to their advanced models like GPT-4 and DALL-E 3 and tools like advanced data analysis.
It additionally includes:
- A dedicated collaborative workspace for your team and admin tools for team management.
- Access to GPT-4 32K context window
- Tools like Dall-E 3, GPT-4 with Vision, Browsing, Advanced Data Analysis with higher message caps
- No training on your business data or conversations
- Secure workspace for your team
- Create and share custom GPTs with your workspace
- Admin console for workspace and team management
- Early access to new features and improvements.

03:00 Introducing the GPT Store

ChatGPT has also launched their AI Marketplace, which will get you access to over 3 million custom versions of Chat GPT. Yes, 3 MILLION versions.

243: WHOIS The Cloud Pod? We’ll Never Know Jan 17, 2024

Welcome to episode 243 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a bit of a slow new week, but we’re not hitting the snooze button! This week Justin, Matthew and Ryan are discussing more changes over at Broadcom after VMware buyout last year, HPE buying out Juniper Networks, why all the venture capital money seems to be going into trying to take down Nvidia, and changes to WHOIS lookup over at AWS certificate manager. Plus we’ll find out exactly what that special something is that makes Justin the perfect executive.

Titles we almost went with this week:

New Years Happened and there is no Good New News
The Cloud Pod Was Always Security Challenged
Azure Shows the Health of Their Business by Springing into Discounts
Network Gear Powers AI – Who Knew?

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very niche market of cloud engineers? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel.

Follow Up

01:48 More news from Broadcom – and this time they’re coming after the cloud. Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers

Remember in November when Broadcom bought VMware for $61 billion dollars? Well, the reorganization from that purchase is continuing.
Broadcom is reportedly ditching the majority of their VMware Cloud Service Providers as part of the shakeup of the partner program.
Notable companies in the CSP program include Oracle, Azure, Rackspace, and Google. These larger companies most likely won’t be impacted (yet.)
It’s suspected that they will get moved over to a new partner program, but Broadcom is culling it down to only the largest partners to remain in the program.
There are lots of smaller cloud players who are in the CSP who will likely be impacted and should keep an eye on this over the next few months.
- https://cloud.vmware.com/providers/search-result
It’s a bad look for Broadcom, as they told the EU that acquiring VMware would increase competition in the cloud space – but cutting partners out of the program seems to be a consolidation to me.

03:29 Ryan – “I wonder if this is just going to be like new sales or something. Cause that seems very short notice if you’re on VMware as on one of these smaller cloud providers, that seems incredibly risky.”

03:45 Matthew – “I feel like they have to have something lined up. Or let me rephrase that. I would assume slash hope they have something lined up because otherwise they’re gonna really piss off a lot of people.”

General News

04:40 Hewlett Packard Enterprise buying Juniper Networks in deal valued at about $14 billion

HPE is buying Juniper Networks in an all cash deal valued at $14B, which will double the HPE networking business.
HPE will be paying $40 per share, prior day close was 30.19.
The transaction will strengthen HPE’s position at the nexus of accelerating ma

242: DoH: DNS over HTTPS – or One More Way For It To be DNS Fault Jan 12, 2024

Welcome to episode 242 of the The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy. This week your hosts Justin, Ryan, Matthew, and Jonathan are talking about DoH – or DNS over HTTPS, the Digital Ocean, CISO issues, and whether employee issues over at Amazon will impact user experience. It’s a quiet week, but some interesting conversations you’re not going to want to miss.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Tired of the Winter of Other Announcements, The Cloud Pod Hits the Digital Ocean
Breaking Through the Chill: The CloudPod Dives into Digital Ocean’s Latest
Fed Up with the Winter of Other Announcements? Dive into Digital Ocean with the CloudPod!
The Cloud Pod Almost Didn’t Bother with an Episode This Week
The Cloud Pod Starts the Year Off Slow
The Cloud Pod is Silently Slacking Off
Running DNS over https Does Not Mean You Can’t Blame DNS for Always Breaking
DNS over HTTPS, One More Way DNS Will Break

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

AI is Going Great – Or how ML Makes Money

7:20 OpenAI’s Annualized Revenue Tops $1.6 Billion as Customers Shrug Off CEO Drama

Listener Note: paywall article, but worth reading.
According to two people interviewed by the Information, Open AI’s revenue has grown to 1.6B from its ChatGPT product, up from 1.3b as of mid-October.
- That’s a 20% growth over two months.
As this happened during the period of the leadership crisis, it seems to not have had much impact.
This roughly means OpenAI is making $130M a month from the sales of subscriptions. And yes, that includes us. You’re welcome, OpenAI.

8:28 Justin – “I’m sure this is a ‘it made 1.3 billion or $1.6 million in revenue’ and they spent $25 billion. I’m pretty sure that’s the current scenario.”

AWS

9:23 The AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region is now available

Ca-west-1 has opened the thirty-third AWS region with 3 AZ’s.
70 services available at launch.
According to the announcement, “This second Canadian Region allows you to architect multi-Region infrastructures that meet five nines of availability while keeping your data in the country.”
We apologize for Justin’s terrible Canadian accent.

11:09 DNS over HTTPS is now available in Amazon Route 53 Resolver

HTTPS continues to take over the world, coming for your Route 53 Resol

241: A Reflection on 2023: Clouded by the Fog of AI Jan 03, 2024

Welcome to episode 241 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Can you believe we’ve reached the end of 2023? Neither can we! Join us today for a look back at 2023 and all of the announcements that excited, befuddled, and confused us – as well as a slew of predictions for 2024. Make sure to share your own predictions (after listening, of course) with us on socials.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Wait, How is it 2024?
Thank God 2023 is Over
Thank God 2020 is Over… Finally?
The Cloud Pod Breaks the Crystal Ball when Trying to Predict 2024
2023: A Snarky Saga of Disappointment
2023: A Snarky Saga of AI
2023… Was Anything Announced Besides AI
How Cloudy Was It? A Whimsical Look Back at 2023 and Forecasting the Fluff in 2024 The 2023 Cloud Recap and 2024 Foggy Forecasts
2023’s Cloudiest Moments and 2024’s Forecasted Fun
Cache & Carry: Storing Up 2023’s Memories and Downloading 2024’s Dreams
Even AI can’t help us find the best announcements of 2023
Even AI can’t help us predict the announcements of 2024

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General Podcast News

00:23 Lot’s of changes around these here parts!

- As we reflect on 2023, we would love to hear your general thoughts on the podcast. 2023 was a big year of changes for us.
  - Peter left as host, and we replaced him with Matt.
  - We dropped the lightning round, and reduced the number of stories we covered; going for more depth and discussion. (I think we could still improve here.)
  - We added the Cloud Journeys and did a segment on CCOE, Containers, Kubernetes, Cloud Platform, etc.
  - We added the aftershow to talk about tech adjacent things that interest us as hosts.
Absolutely do get on our Slack channel and let us know what you all would like to hear or your general thoughts on the show.

2023 Predictions

Also known as “things we’re always wrong about.”

Jonathan: Microsoft will release in preview of an Azure branded Chat GPT
Justin: Data Sovereignty will drive single panes of glass against multi-cloud
- Totally missed on this on panes of glass, but OUT OF THE PARK when it comes to data sovereignty. That was a big deal this year.
Ryan: An influx of all of the AI and No-Code solution convergence.
- We’re closer…but not quite there yet. Maybe another year or two.
Peter: Recession will drive significant developer layoffs, and drive automation solutions for ops and deployment..
- So, layoffs were a thing. But not because of recession, but because of corporate greed. So that’s fun.

06:50 Ryan – “I also think Microsoft will get there’s no matter which way it goes, right? Because they’re either gonna sell it directly, or their investment in Open AI will pay off through shareholder price of stocks.”

11:26

240: Secure AI? We Didn’t Train for That! Dec 30, 2023

Welcome to episode 240! It’s a doozy this week! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan and Matthew are your hosts in this supersized episode. Today we talk about Google Gemini, the GCP sales force (you won’t believe the numbers) and Google feudalism. (There’s some lovely filth over here!) Plus we discuss the latest happenings over at HashiCorp, Broadcom, and the Code family of software. So put away your ugly sweaters and settle in for episode 240 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Why run Kubernetes when you can have a fraction of the functionality from Nomad and Podman?
The CloudPod hopes for a Microsoft buyout before we shut down
The CloudPod looks forward to semantic versioning now Mitchell has left Hashicorp
Amazon Fiefdoms, Microsoft Sovereignty… I look forward to Google Feudalism
Sovereign Skies vs. Feudal Fiefdoms: Who Owns the Cloud’s Crown?*
Cloud Fiefdoms, Feudal Futures: Battling for Data Sovereignty*
Fiefdoms Fall, Sovereigns Rise: The Cloud’s Feudal Flaws*

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Follow Up

01:09 Broadcom is killing off VMware perpetual licenses and strong-arming users onto subscriptions

Broadcom is wasting no time pissing off the VMware community after the closure of their purchase of Vmware. They moved quick!
With absolutely no warning, Broadcom is killing VMWares on-premise perpetual licenses, and forcing you to move onto subscriptions. According to Broadcom, this is “simplifying” their lineup and licensing model. Sure.
- They are doing this by ending the sale of support and subscriptions effective immediately.
This impacts the Vsphere family of products, Cloud Foundation, SRM and the Aria suite.
You may continue to use your existing perpetual licenses until your current contract expires.
- They will most likely provide a one time incentive of some kind for the transition to subscription. Then, you get to pay FOREVER. Insert Mr. Burns laugh here.
You will also be able to “bring your own subscription” for license portability to Vmware validated hybrid cloud endpoints running VMware Cloud foundation.
They are also sweetening the deal by offering 50% off Vmware Cloud Foundation, and including higher support service levels including enhanced support for activating the product and lifecycle management.
Competitors are rapidly raising their hand to fill the gap mainly led by Nutanix, who points out the entire business model for Broadcom is to maximize the acquired asset within 2 to 3 years and as a VMWare customer you will *feel* it.
There are also other altern

239: The Cloud Pod Sees the Irony of Using AI to Assist with Climate Change Dec 14, 2023

The Cloud Pod Sees the Irony of Using AI to Assist with Climate Change

Welcome to episode 239 of The Cloud Pod podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are your hosts this week as we talk about all things AI and Climate Change – and Google’s assertion that their AI is going to fix it all. Also on today’s agenda: updates to Google Next’s new dates, Azure’s chips, Defender, and all the shenanigans over at OpenAI. Join us!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Microsoft Ignites my dislike for their conferences

Google keeps using that Sustainability word….

The gift of no cost learning

The CloudPod has an advent calendar for AI

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News

00:50 Broadcom announces successful acquisition of VMware

Broadcom has completed its acquisition of VMware… and apparently it’s a new and exciting era! (Hopefully more exciting than Tanzu has been.)
Broadcom is mostly known for networking communication chips, but has been diversifying their portfolio for a while now.
Vmware joins companies such as:
- Rally Software
- CA Products
- Plex (not *that* plex)
- Appneta
- Clarity
- Symantec
- Siteminder

01:58 Matthew – “I feel like whenever you get acquired, a lot of the duplicated admin services and like HR, finance, some of those kind of naturally – like whenever a company gets acquired, I feel like there’s always layoffs within the first six months, and it’s really just a lot of those overlapping services now that the parent org has. But I know that they own Symantec. That was news to me.”

04:36 Ryan – “I think that the big value prop was for a lot of these things was, you know, being able to run that virtualized infrastructure and then the partnerships are, you know, to be able to run that with the same skill sets and the same people running both without having to get into the specifics of, you know, AWS or Azure cloud specifics. And so offering that as sort of a generalized compute… I think as cloud has become more prevalent and popular and there’s more people that know it, not enough, but still more. I think that value really goes down where you no longer need that sort of UI driven cloud management service that VMware provided for years.”

AI is Going Great!

06:11 **See Aftershow**

AWS

06:17 If you haven’t already, go listen to ep 238!

That’s our AWS re:Invent recap show; there really isn’t any AWS news outside of that for this week.

GCP

06:28 Early Registration Now Open for Google Cloud Next ’24 (April 9-11) in Las Vegas

You may think Google Next just happened… and you would be ri

238: AWS Joins the Q Continuum – Reinvent Recap Dec 06, 2023

Welcome to episode 238 of the Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re bringing you a preview of Amazon re:Invent 2023. We’re talking all things AWS, Bedrock, Q, and frugal architecture, and – you guessed it – AI.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Amazon Builds on Bedrock with Q

You Need to Be All Frugal Architects

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

“Pre”:Invent

Is it just us, or is a lot of the stuff released during pre-invent stuff that would have been main stage just a few years ago?

01:48 Major Items

Introducing Amazon CloudFront KeyValueStore: A low-latency datastore for CloudFront Functions

03:43 Ryan – “I found this being announced pre-invent to be kind of shocking, because this is one of those announcements where you could re-architect your entire app for better performance using this type of solution, and it’s not even big enough for the main stage. But there’s huge potential in doing that edge transformation so that you can directly serve at the edge at much lower latency. So it’s awesome.”

Announcing AWS Console-to-Code (Preview) to generate code for console actions

*No Terraform yet, but hopefully that will come soon!

05:18 Jonathan – “I think it’s great for learning too, actually. I mean, I use this in the Google console all the time because I try and put together a command line to do something and it fails miserably. And so I go and do it in the console and it generates the command line coding thing. Ah, I missed that thing, which isn’t documented anywhere.”

07:23 Storage

Optimize your storage costs for rarely-accessed files with Amazon EFS Archive

FlexGroup Volume Management for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is now available

New – Scale-out file systems for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

Introducing shared VPC support for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

Announcing on-demand data replication for Amazon FSx for OpenZFS

New – Amazon EBS Snapshot Lock

Automatic restore testing and validation now available in AWS Backup RL(Maybe?)

08:56 Ryan – “that’s the main reason why I flagged this is that I’ve just done so many tabletop exercises and so many, you know, compliance e

237: Clean Your Crystal Balls – The Clod Pod Makes its re:Invent Predictions / Wishlist Nov 25, 2023

Welcome to episode 237 of The Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s the most wonderful time of the year – it’s almost time for re:Invent! That means it’s also time for our wishlist and predictions. Follow along, and see which ones you think have the greatest likelihood of coming to fruition.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

AWS Predictions

Jonathan

GPU Support for Lambda functions
Chat Bot integration for the support portal that pulls from documentation
New Baremetal Instance with more GPU’s for AI Training

Justin

Graviton AI Chip Capabilities
Olympus with a bigger data set than Open AI and publicly available
Major Improvements to Quicksight

Ryan

AppMesh will support serverless workloads
Data Sovereignty on stage
Just in time IAM Permissions powered by AI

Matthew

AI Chat feature in the AWS Console
Carbon Emissions and Green Technology talked about during the keynote.
Predictive typing thing integrated into AWS Shell (cloud 9).

Tie Breaker: Number of times the word Artificial Intelligence and/or AI.

Matt – 72

Ryan – 563

Justin – 142

Jonathan – 90

Honorable Mentions:

Reinvent announcement of Clippy/Mascot (Jonathan)

Chip Fab (Jonathan)

Astro Bot upgrade (Ryan)

Astrobot Robot Wars (Ryan)

Extra effort/hardware on energy usage (Jonathan)

IAM Permissions reducer (Matt)

Security/Guardduty/SOC AI (Justin)

DuckDB (Justin)

AI for Opensearch (Justin)

Werner masterclass on AI (Justin)

Simulated worlds (Jonathan)

236: We Now Measures the Largest Chips Used to Generate an LLM – or a 21st century #$%& Measuring Contest Nov 23, 2023

Welcome to episode 236 of the Cloud Pod Podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! Are you wandering around every day wondering just who has the biggest one? Chips, we mean. Of course. Get your mind out of the gutter. Did you know Azure was winning that battle for like 8 whole minutes? Join us for episode 236 where we talk about chip size, LLM’s, updates to Bedrock, and Toxicity Detection – something you will never find applied to the podcast. Not on purpose, anyway.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Titles we almost went with this week:

You Can Solve All Your AI Problems by Paying the Cloud Pod 10 million Dollars.
Cloud Pods Interest in AI Like Enterprises is Also Shockingly Low
Llama Lambda Llama Llama Lambda Lambda… or How I Went Crazy
Comprehends Detects Toxicity with the Cloud Pod
You Didn’t Need Comprehend for Me to Tell You I’m Toxic
The Cloud is Toxic, Run!

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

AI is Going Great!

00:39 OpenAI’s New Weapon in Talent War With Google: $10 Million Pay Packages for Researchers (listeners note: paywall article)

The battle for AI talent is heating up between open AI and Google. With compensation packages but also promises of access to more hardware, better chips and more.
Open AI depends on Microsoft for its cloud resources, whereas Google owns its cloud and is manufacturing their own AI chips.
Salaries are crazy with stock compensation with Open AI saying their stock compensation could be worth as much as 5-10m.
Of course assuming that recruits start before the company goes public or gets completely acquired by MS.
So, bottom line? Money. Are you shocked? We’re shocked.

01:30 Jonathan – “I guess it’s quite a concern actually that since Google bought DeepMind they have pretty much two-thirds of the entire global AI talent at their own disposal. So I guess this is a desperate needs, call for desperate measures kind of thing.”

01:49 Nvidia Unveils New AI Chip, Upping Ante with AMD (listeners note: paywall article)

Nvidia on Monday announced a new graphics processing unit, the H200, which next year could become the most advanced chip on the market for developing AI.
The chip’s memory capacity has been significantly upgraded compared to the H100, which has been in high demand and boosting NVIDIA stock 240% since Jan 1. The increased memory allows LLM models powered by H200 chips to generate results nearly twice as fast as those running on H100s
Cloud companies should have the new chips available in 2nd quarter 2024 and will put these in tight competition with AMD’s MI300X gpu’s slated for release later this year.

02:29 Matthew – “ I feel like we’re seeing the speed curve of processors and now we’re just watching the same things that happened in the 90s and 2000s happen with GPUs. It’s like, it will double every 18 mo

235: The Cloud Pod Explores Looker for Mobile: Ruining One Vacation at a Time Nov 16, 2023

Welcome to episode 235 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week a full house is here for your listening pleasure! Justin, Jonathan, Matthew, and Ryan are talking about cyberattacks, attacks on vacations (aka Looker for mobile) and introducing a whole new segment just for AI. You’re welcome, SkyNet.

Titles we almost went with this week:

AI is worth investing in – says leading AI service provider, Microsoft
Join The Cloud Pod for the ‘AI Worth Investing In’ Eye-Roll Extravaganza
The Cloud Pod: Breaking News – Microsoft Discovers Water is Wet, AI Worth Investing In
Jonathan finally wins the point for predicting ARM instances in Google Cloud
Looker for Mobile: Ruining vacations one notification at a time
Microsoft helps bring cloud costs into FOCUS
Focus only on the path forward… not the path behind you.
GPT-4 Turbo… just be glad its not Ultra GPT-4
I can only flinch at the idea of Finch
The Cloud Pod finally accepts AI is the future

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

New Segment – AI is Going Great!

01:24 New study validates the business value and opportunity of AI

You may be shocked to find out that there is value in AI for your business!
To help you understand, Microsoft paid IDC to make a study that provides unique insights into how AI is being used to drive economic impact for organizations.
2000 business leaders and decision makers from around the world participated in the survey.
- 71% of respondents say their companies are already using AI, and 22% said within 12 months they would be using it.
- 92% of AI deployments take 12 months or less
- Organizations are realizing a return on their AI investment within 14 months
- For every $1 a company invests in AI, it is realize an average return of $3.5x
- 52% report that a lack of skilled workers is their biggest barrier to implement and scale AI. We assume that’s prompt engineering or model builders.
IDC projects that generative AI will add nearly $10 trillion to global GDP over the next 10 years.
Key areas where businesses are finding value:
- Enrich employee experiences
- Reinvent customer engagement
- Reshape business processes
- Bend the curve on innovation.

02:33 Ryan – “There were some questions that they didn’t ask that I wanted them to, like how many respondents are already using AI but wish they weren’t, or how many

234: The Cloud Pod Decrees I’m not a Good Cloud – but I’m not a Bad Cloud Either Nov 10, 2023

Welcome to episode 234 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin and Ryan are bringing you all the latest news from the cloud, including latest earnings news (you know you want it), a discussion about whether cloud is “bad” from one of repatriation’s biggest advocates, Oxide’s new cloud computer (it’s SO pretty) and a look at some of latest updates on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod is Sovereign

We Avoid the Oxide Rust at TCP

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Pre-Show

01:00 Follow Up: Wait – Is Cloud Bad?

We’ve talked previously on the show about DHH – David Heinemeier Hansson – who is the one big example of cloud repatriation.
- Well, maybe not the biggest but the most vocal for sure when it comes to advocating for a return to on-prem.
Forrest Brazel wrote in his recent newsletter about the back and forth between pro-cloud people and those who support DHH’s move from AWS back to his DC. I think his rebuttal is the best one out there.
He basically broke down the decision on cloud or datacenter to a 2×2 box… Low IT Competence with Low Growth or High Growth, and High IT Competency with Low Growth or High Growth.
- He basically says Basecamp falls into High IT Competency with low growth, which makes datacenter more attractive.

03:43 Justin- “Kelsey Hightower pointed out rightfully the 15 years of cloud helped DHH even be able to do this, because being able to do a cloud exit of the size and the complexity of what he does have without cloud technologies that enabled some of those things, it would have been difficult for him to do this going back. Declarative infrastructure, containerization – all that stuff is big cloud advances that were brought to the world that he’s not benefiting from in his data center…”

General News this Week:

06:30 Oxide Launches the World’s First Commercial Cloud Computer

If you’re looking at the infrastructure you should run your repatriation on, we would like to suggest you take a look at Oxide Computers.
Founded by Steve Tuck, Jessie Frazelle, and Bryan Cantrill, they have officially launched their first product, which has been in development for the last 4 years.
While Major cloud providers have built their own cloud computing services, Oxide is the first company to be selling a commercial version of an ou

233: Replicator Isn’t a Real Product Because it isn’t Spelled with a K Nov 02, 2023

Welcome to The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Matthew, and Ryan are here to fill you in on all the latest and greatest happenings in the cloud, including news about your SSL & TLS certificates, MSK Replicator, and the Azure Incubations Team. Did you know about them? Neither did we!

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod Replicator… Replicating Snark to all the Kafkas
Mirror Mirror on the wall, Which Events? We Want Them All.
The Radius of my Patience for my Developer Portals is Shrinking
Oracle Java Plugin for VSCode… it’s a trap!

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News this Week:

AWS

01:20 Rotate Your SSL/TLS Certificates Now – Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora Expire in 2024

If you want to have some “fun” you need to update the RDS SSL certificate for your db instances before they expire in 2024.
This impacts really any DB created before 2020.
- You can choose CA certificates that expire in 40 years or 100 years.
This was more complicated than we realized when we did this on a database instance recently, and this step-by-step guide would have been great when we did it a month or so ago.
- Step 1: Identify your impacted DB’s
- Step 2: Update your database client and apps… this was the trickiest part for us.
- Step 3: Test CA rotation on a non-production RDS instance
- Step 4: Rinse and Repeat on Production.

01:45 Justin- “I definitely went for the 100 years to fake because I never want to do this again… This is not for the faint of heart, if you’re not familiar with how your database apps work, and do proceed with caution.”

05:48 Justin- “Well, so the 40 year one is a 2048 bit RSA certificate. The 100 year one is an RSA 4096 or an ECC 384 compiled. So it’s pretty high level encryption on both of those CAs. And the fun thing about that is if you do choose the 100 year certificate and you have like a T3 class system, all of a sudden now you’re processing a lot of stuff to calculate the cipher. So you may have some use cases where you don’t want to use the 100 year certificate because it does require some more CPU to process.”

07:07 Introducing Amazon MSK Replicator – Fully Managed Replication across MSK Clusters in Same or Different AWS Regions

Cross Cluster

232: The CloudPod Is Tired of Talking About New Instance Types Oct 25, 2023

Welcome to The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Jonathan and Ryan, are talking all about EC2 instances, including changes to AWS Systems Manager and Elastic Disaster Recovery. And speaking of disasters, we’re also taking a dive into the ongoing Google DDOS attacks. Plus, we’ve even thrown a little earthquake warning into the podcast, just for effect.

Titles we almost went with this week:

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News this Week:

01:08 Why AMD’s Upcoming Chips Won’t Be the Savior AI Startups Are Hoping For

A few weeks ago many got excited about the new AMD chips coming to help with AI workloads.
The Instinct MI300A has often been touted as an alternative to Nvidia’s H100.
But… it’s not as easy to use those chips.
- The startup that tweeted about using the new AMD chips has been working on it for multiple years, and most startups who would want to switch would have to throw out their code and start from scratch. We’re not super sure about that claim, but we shall see…
- Plus, Nvidia has a 20 year head start when it comes to Cuda and other development tools for AI.
It’s not all bad news though – AMD does have some advantages that may make it worth it, including a chip that combines the GPU, which performs multiple computations simultaneously, and a CPU which executes more general instructions and manages the systems broader operations.
- (Nvidia plans to do the same with the Grace Hopper Superchip).
The AMD chips also have more memory than the H100 at 128gb vs 80gb.

02:20 Ryan – “Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting how complex these have become, right? When it used to just be – sort of – you had optimized at the computer level and maybe at the OS level, but now the workloads are so specific because they’re so demanding, and then power is also very challenging. So that’s kind of neat. I’m kind of glad I don’t have to deal with it much.”

03:38 Report: Amazon will use Microsoft 365 cloud productivity tools in $1B ‘megadeal’

Amazon has reportedly committed 1B to license M365 cloud productivity software for 1 million of its corporate and frontline workers in a surprise megadeal.
Amazon will upgrade from traditional MS office software to the cloud productivity suite, (Probably because MS stopped supporting it? But we digress) according to the report, which notes that Amazon had been reluctant to do so previously.

04:40 Jonthan – “I’m surprised they haven’t worked on their own office suite. They could have taken some open-source

231: The CloudPod Takes the Highway to the Datazone Oct 19, 2023

Welcome to The Cloud Pod episode 231! This week Justin and Matthew are discussing updates to Terraform testing for code validation, some new tools from Docker, look into the now generally available AWS DataZone, and dig into the evolution of passkeys over at Google. Slide into the passenger seat and let’s check out this week’s cloud news.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod wants to validate your code
The Cloud Pod can now test in parallel

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News this Week:

01:17 Terraform 1.6 adds a test framework for enhanced code validation

At Hashiconf this week, they announced Terraform 1.6 is now available for download.
The most exciting feature? We’re so glad you asked!
- The new terraform test framework that deprecates and replaces the previous experimental features added in 0.15.
Terraform test allows authors to consistently validate the functionality of their configuration in a safe environment. Tests are written using familiar HCL syntax, so there is no need to learn a new language to get started.
Config-Driven import introduced in Terraform 1.5 gets improvements to support variable driven ID attributes. Making it easier than ever to import existing items.
Cli Improvements
Several changes are coming to the S3 Backend remote state in this release to better align with the SDK and the official terraform AWS provider.
- It should still work but you may receive warnings about deprecated attributes. May the odds be ever in your favor.
You can check out the Testing Terraform overview page here, or the Write Terraform tests tutorial here.

03:22 Justin – “ One of the interesting things that, you know, that wasn’t part of this particular announcement is that they’re also adding an ability to use AI to help you with your test cases. And so basically the model, they built an LLM model to specifically trained on HCL and the Terraform test framework to help model authors begin testing their code.”

04:55 Docker debuts new tools for developing container applications

Docker has released two new offerings: Docker Build and Docker Debug
- These tools will help software teams develop containers faster.

230: If I Ever Own a Sailboat, I Will Name it Kafka… and Sail it on a Data Lake Oct 11, 2023

Welcome to The Cloud Pod episode 230, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re sailing our pod across the data lake and talking about updates to managed delivery from Kafka. We also take a gander at Bedrock, some new security tools from our friends over at Google. We’re also back with our Cloud Journey Series talking security theater.Stay Tuned!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Security and Delivery Within an Hour… Sacrilegious!
Unlock Global Innovation with Sovereign Cloud
Microsoft… What in the World Are You Doing?
If I ever own a sailboat, I will name it Kafka.
And the Oscar for Security Theater goes to…

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News this Week:

01:15 Microsoft fans… This isn’t going to be pretty. You were warned.

Microsoft Warns of Cyber Attacks Attempting to Breach Cloud via SQL Server Instance

Microsoft…The Truth Is Even Worse Than You Think

Microsoft comes under blistering criticism for “grossly irresponsible” security

In what has turned out to be a not so great week for Microsoft (and their customers) the software giant has released an urgent warning for SQL server instances running on Azure. **Insert meme of dog saying it’s fine surrounded by fire here**
Microsoft has detailed a new campaign in which attackers unsuccessfully attempted to move laterally to a cloud environment through a SQL server instance.
The attacker initially exploited a SQL injection vulnerability in an app, and then was able to gain access and elevated permission on MS SQL instance deployed in Azure VM.
The threat actor than attempted to move horizontally by abusing the server’s cloud identity, which could possess elevated permissions (least privilege folks)
MS says it found no evidence that the attacker successfully moved.
Considering the recent criticism by Tenable CEO who threw them under the bus for not fixing a major vulnerability for over 90 days, this warning and confirmation seems like a step in the right direction.

04:37 Matthew- “I mean, also just the scale of these hypervisors, sometimes it just takes time. Like – you don’t want to quickly roll out a hotfix to something, realize you caused another problem, and now you’re playing whack-a-mole because you’re moving too fast and not taking a step back and fixing the root cause of it.”

AWS – Kafka Managed Delivery

07:07

229: The CloudPod Guide to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Container Chaos Oct 09, 2023

Welcome episode 228 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan are taking a look at Magic Quadrant, Gemini AI, and GraalOS – along with all the latest news from OCI, Google, AWS, and Azure.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The CloudPod wonders if Anthropic’s Santa Clause will bring us everything we want in an AI Bot.
The Cloud Pod recommends protection to achieve Safer
Google rides the gemini rocket to AI JPB
The only Copilot I need Azure, is Booze
GraalOS, or what we now call ‘the noise our CFO makes when he receives the Oracle audit bills’
The hosts of the Cloud pod would like to understand how to properly pronounce GraalOS
Is Oracle even on the magic quadrant for cloud?
RedHat Puts lipstick on the pig and calls it OpenStack

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News this Week:

00:56 Red Hat rebrands OpenStack Platform for building and managing private clouds

- Red Hat is rebranding the Red Hat OpenStack Platform, which will now be known as Red Hat OpenStack services on OpenShift. You know, because let’s add containers. What could go wrong?
- We didn’t know anyone was still trying to openstack at this point – did you?

“By integrating Kubernetes with OpenStack, organizations see improved resource management and scalability, greater flexibility across the hybrid cloud, simplified development and DevOps practices and more,” said Sean Cohen, director of product management in Red Hat’s Hybrid Platforms organizations.
Per Holger, Mueller openstack has gotten a lot of popularity in the Telecommunications industry where they use it to build private clouds to run their networks… *adds to the list of don’t work there… telecommunications companies*

02:32 Justin – “I mean, OpenShift is just like Convox. It’s a platform on top of Kubernetes and a fancy developer portal. And so then you get, now you add to that OpenStack.”

AWS

03:51 Expanding access to safer AI with Amazon

Amazon is investing up to $4 billion in Anthropic. The agreement is part of a collaboration to develop the most reliable and high-performing foundation models in the industry.
As part of the agreement, AWS will become Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, providing our team with access to leading compute infrastructure in th

228: Microsoft and Oracle Unite Their Legal Departments to Bring You… Sep 27, 2023

Welcome episode 228 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts are Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan –

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod gets scanned for a malware infection
The Cloud Pod gives up on security
The Cloud Pod burns cash on a new Mac instance
Copilot’s Copyright Crusade – Microsoft’s Got Your Back in Copyright Battles
The Cloud Pod loves it when the clouds come together
The Cloud Pod doubts 90 day account expirations are a good idea
Matt brings a bit of class to the Cloud Pod

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News this Week:

AWS

02:56 Amazon EC2 R7a Instances Powered By 4th Gen AMD EPYC Processors for Memory Optimized Workloads AND New Amazon EC2 R7iz Instances are Optimized for High CPU Performance, Memory-Intensive Workloads

Amazon has a couple of new instances for us this week, including Amazon R7a, which is powered by the 4th generation AMD EPYC (Genoa) processors with a maximum frequency of 3.7ghz – this has 50 percent higher performance compared to the previous generation instances.
The R7a supports the AVX-512, Vector Neural Network Instructions and Brain Float Point (bfloat16https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bfloat16_floating-point_format).
It also supports Double Data rate 5 (DDR5) memory.
From 1 vcpu and 8gb of ramp to 192 vcpu 1.5tb of memory
Not excited for AMD? Would you rather pay more money for an Intel version? Well fear not! Also available is the new R7iz instances – which are the fastest 4th generation scalable-based (sapphire rapids) instances with 3.9ghz sustained all-core turbo frequency.
The R7iz has four built in accelerators including the advanced matrix extensions (AMX), intel data streaming accelerator (DSA), intel in-memory analytics accelerator (IAA) and intel quickassist technology (QAT).
Listeners take note: you may need to use a specific kernel version, driver or compiler to take advantage of these.
You can get these in 2 vcpu /16gb configurations up to 128 vcpu/1024gb of memory.

04:39 Matthew – “I’m just more impressed it’s still DDR5. I feel like 20 years ago I built a computer with DDR3 or 4. So I really feel like…”

04:49 Justin – “DDR4 was very long in the tooth.DDR4 lasted a very long time. DDR5 is actually pretty new, I think. I don’t know when you can kin

227: The Cloud Pod Peeps at Azure’s Explicit Proxy Sep 13, 2023

Welcome episode 227 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts are Justin, Jonathan, Matthew and Ryan – and they’re REALLY excited to tell you all about the 161 one things announced at Google Next. Literally, all the things. We’re also saying farewell to EC2 Classic, Amazon SES, and Azure’s Explicit Proxy – which probably isn’t what you think it is.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Azure announced a what proxy?
The Cloud Pod would like you to engage with our email.
Oracle Rover to Base… Come In Rover
A snarky look at 160 Google Next Announcements
Google Next’s got 161 Announcements and AI ain’t one
How high can you count, Google can count to 161
The cloud pod would like to get consensus on the definition of light weight

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News this Week:

AWS

00:36 Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell

Werner has a blog post talking about the end of Ec2-classic, with the final EC2-Classic instance being turned off on August 15th, 2 years after the announcement.
He points out that the reason it was “classic” is because of the network architecture. All instances launched on a giant 10.0.0.0/8 flat network shared between all customers.
The process for end users was simple, but it was highly complex for AWS at the time.
The m1.small that launched was equivalent of 1 virtual CPU powered by a 1.7ghz Xeon processor with 1.75gb of ram, and 160gb of local disk, and 250mb/s of network bandwidth. For the low price of $0.10 per clocked hour.
Werners blog even ran on the m1 small for 5+ years before he moved it to the Amazon S3 website feature.
VPC’s introduced in 2013, allows AWS customers to have their own slice of the cloud.. But classic still lived for another decade.
The EC2 team kept classic running until every instance was retired or migrated, providing the necessary documentation, tools and support from engineering and account management through the process.
Werner shows that this is one of the best examples of delivering cloud for today’s workloads as well as tomorrow, and how AWS won’t pull the rug out from under you.

02:08 Ryan – “I think most people know who he was referring to there. But it is cool. I mean, the fact that they were able to actually retire a thing and not just turn it off on people is pretty amazing.”

03:38 Amazon SES now offers email delivery and engagement history for every email

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) has launched a new deliverability feature that helps customers troubleshoot individual email delivery problems, confirm delivery of critica

226: Duet, Co-Pilot, and a Code Whisperer Walk into a bar in San Francisco Sep 08, 2023

Welcome episode 226 of the Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Matt and Ryan chat about all the news and announcements from Google Next, including – surprise surprise – the hot topic of AI, GKE Enterprise, Duet, Co-Pilot, Code Whisperer and more! There’s even some non-Next news thrown into the episode. So whether you’re interested in BART or Bard, we’ve got the news from SF just for you.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The cloud pod sings a duet, guess who was singing
You get AI, you get AI, Everyone Gets AI
Does a Mandiant Hunt, Or does a Hunter mandiant?
The Cloud Pod goes into ROM Mode
Does a mandalorian Hunt, Or does a Hunter a mandalorian?

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News this Week:

01:23 Introducing Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding

So you know Github Copilot, Duet AI, and Codewhisperer…. But do you know Code LLama? (Meta you better get good stickers on this)
Meta has released the source code for the Llama 2 based Code Specialized LLM in three sizes 7B, 13B, and 35B parameters.
Each model is trained with 500b tokens of code and code-related data.
The 7B and 13b base and instructor models have also been trained with fill-in-the-middle capability allowing them to insert code into existing code.
The 7B model can run on a single GPU, the 34B model however returns the best results and for the best for coding assistance… while the 7b and 13b are great for real-time code completions.
Training recipes for Code Llama are available on the Github Repository.

04:08 Matthew – “It’s interesting; if you go deep into the article there, they start to digress into like ‘Hey, this 7 and the 13 billion are better for near real time response back’ and the 34 billion… is better for fine tuning for yourself. So they really go into a little bit more detail of how to do it. And, you know, I think they also put out some code snippets if you kind of dive into it a little bit more, which I thought was very nice.”

05:32 OpenTF Announces Fork of Terraform

Remember when we talked about Open TF’s manifest begging HashiCorp to backtrack on adopting a BSL license? Well guess what?
HashiCorp didn’t listen. Insert sad sound effect.
In response, OpenTF has officially forked Terraform.
They hope to have the repository available to you within the next 1-2 weeks, with their goal to have an OpenTF 1.6 release.
Want to keep up with their progress? They’ve created a public repository whe

225: The Cloud Pod Proclaims: Merry Google Next Eve! Aug 28, 2023

Google Next Eve!

Welcome episode 225 of The CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan are your hosts this week as we discuss all things Google Next! We talk schedule offerings, make our predictions about announcements, and prepare to be generally wrong about everything. Also – do you like stickers? Everyone likes stickers! Be on the lookout for us, and maybe you can have one.

Titles we almost went with this week:

None! Google Next is the next big thing, so of course it’s the title.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Pre-Show

01:23 Following up on some HashiCorp News:

HashiCorp updates licensing FAQ based on community questions

Hashicorp has responded in their FAQ to some of the concerns we brought up when we talked about them moving to the BSL license in our last show.
- Question: Can I host the HashiCorp products as a service internal to my organization?
- Answer: Yes. The terms of the BSL allow for all non-production and production usage, except for providing competitive offerings to third parties that embed or host our software. Hosting the products for your internal use of your organization is permitted. HashiCorp considers an organization as including all of its affiliates. This means one division can host a HashiCorp product for use by another internal division.
- Q: What is a “competitive offering” under the HashiCorp BSL license?
- A: A “competitive offering” is a product that is sold to third parties, including through paid support arrangements, that significantly overlaps the capabilities of a HashiCorp commercial product. For example, this definition would include hosting or embedding Terraform as part of a solution that is sold competitively against our commercial versions of Terraform. By contrast, products that are not sold or supported on a paid basis are always allowed under the HashiCorp BSL license because they are not considered competitive.
- Q: What does the term “embedded” mean under the HashiCorp BSL license?
- A: Under the HashiCorp BSL license, the term “embedded” means including the source code or object code, including executable binaries, from a HashiCorp product in a competitive product. “Embedded” also means packaging the competitive product in such a way that the HashiCorp product must be accessed or downloaded for the competitive product to operate.
- Q: What if HashiCorp releases a new product or feature in the future that makes my project competitive?
- A: If HashiCorp creates an offering in the future that is competitive with a product you are already offering in production, your continued use of the hosted or embedded HashiCorp product will not be considered a violation of the HashiCorp BSL license.

03:43 Ryan – “I think this is the right response, right? And I know that I’m probably in the minority of being sort of appeased by this in the community; because I think that the torches and pitchforks will not go away. But what this does is allow – if there’s

224: The Cloud Pod Adopts the BS License Aug 24, 2023

Welcome to episode 224 of The CloudPod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, your hosts Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan discuss some major changes at Terraform, including switching from open source to a BSL License. Additionally, we cover updates to Amazon S3, goodies from Storage Day, and Google Gemini vs. Open AI.

Titles we almost went with this week:

None! This week’s title was chef’s kiss

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Pre-Show

General News this Week:

00:41 AWS and HashiCorp announce Service Catalog support for Terraform Cloud

AWS is catching up with GCP, with now native support for Terraform in Service Catalog.
The new integration is expanding on the previous support for Open Source; they now support the Terraform Cloud service.
This new feature is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Service Catalog is available.

02:07 HashiCorp adopts Business Source License

Do you use tools like N0 or ScaleSet? Or perhaps some of the other Terraform-adjacent things? You **may** be in some trouble.
Despite being ok with Amazon and GCP integrating their open source – and now Terraform cloud offering – Hashicorp is mad at companies adopting their technology and productizing it, forcing them to move to the new BSL (Business Source License) model.
This covers all Hashicorp products, not just Terraform.
HashiCorp points out that their approach has enabled them to partner closely with cloud providers to enable tight integrations for their joint users and customers, as well as hundreds of other technology partners.
There are vendors who take advantage of pure OSS models, and the community work on OSS projects, for their own commercial goals, without providing material contributions back. (GASP!)
- Hashi doesn’t think this is “the spirit of open source.”
As a result, they believe commercial open source models need to change, as Open Source has reduced the barrier to copying innovation and selling it through existing distribution channels.
- They point out they’re in good company; pointing to other OSS projects that have closed source or adopted similar BSL models.
They are officially moving from the Mozilla Public License v2.0 to the BSL v1.1 on all future releases of HashiCorp products.
- The APIs, SDKs and almost all other libraries will remain MPL 2.0

223: Get an AWS Spin on Savings with Cost Optimization Flywheel Aug 18, 2023

Welcome episode 223 of The CloudPod Podcast! It’s a full house – Justin, Matt, Ryan, and Jonathan are all here this week to discuss all the cloud news you need. This week, cost optimization is the big one, with a deep dive on the newest AWS blog. Additionally, we’ve got updates to BigQuery, Google’s Health Service, managed services for Prometheus, and more.

Titles we almost went with this week:

I swear to you Mr. Compliance Man, Mutator is not as bad as it sounds
Oracle Cloud customer – or how we let Oracle Audit us internally at will
We are all confused by the lack of AWS news
The CloudPod copies other Podcast’s Features
Get AWS spin on savings with Cost Optimization Flywheel

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News this Week:

AWS

No AWS news – so that should tell you we’re DEFINITELY getting close to announcement season.

GCP

01:35 Introducing new SQL functions to manipulate your JSON data in BigQuery

Enterprises are generating data at an exponential rate, spanning traditional structured transactional data, semi-structured like JSON and unstructured data like images and audio.
Beyond the scale, the divergent types present processing challenges for developers, sometimes requiring a separate processing flow for each.
BigQuery supported semi structured JSON at launch eliminating the need for processing and providing schema flexibility, intuitive querying and the scalability benefits afforded to structured data.
Google is now releasing new sql functions for Bigquery JSON, extending the power and flexibility of their core JSON support. These new functions make it easier to extract and construct JSON data and perform complex data analysis.
- Convert JSON values into primitive types (INT64, FLOAT64, BOOL and STRING)
  - Is anyone else insulted that STRING is considered primitive?
- easier and more flexible way with new JSON LAX functions
- Easily update and modify existing JSON values in BigQuery with new JSON Mutator functions.
- Construct JSON objects and JSON arrays with SQL in BigQuery with new JSON Constructor functions.

03:58 Justin – “Well, you only know that a NoSQL solution makes it once it gets a SQL interface. That’s how you know it’s truly become web scale.”

06:25 Introducing Personalized Service Healt

222: Even AWS is Hit by Inflation, and is Passing that on to you – the Customer Aug 09, 2023

Welcome episode 222 of The Cloud Pod Podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we take an in depth look at the latest earnings reports from all the major players, changes to IPv4 costs (inflation), Healthscribe, and all the news (in cybersecurity) that’s fit to print.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The CloudPod can finally read the doctors notes with HealthScribe
Amazon Healthscribe it’s like transcription, but for doctors who use big words
You get an LLM, you get an LLM; apparently EVERYTHING at Amazon gets an LLM
Should The Cloud Pod rename itself C?
Musk Flips Twitter the Bird (just for Jonathan)

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Pre-Show

00:49 Follow up: Public Preview: Customer Managed Failover for ADLS Gen2

The guys didn’t talk about this when it came up, as it didn’t get a full blog post and we killed lightning round – but Matt has **thoughts!**
Azure storage strives to give you an effective disaster recovery offering and are now supporting customer-managed failover for ADLS Gen 2 accounts.
Whether you are performing testing or facing a true disaster your primary endpoint can now initiate a failover from our primary endpoint to your secondary endpoint.

01:40 Matt – “It’s just one of those features that I’m just dumbfounded that didn’t exist day one. You know, encryption, DR – these things should just be there. And the fact that it’s ADLS has been around for a decent amount of time.”

General News this Week:

03:06 The big news this week is EARNINGS:

MSFT – Microsoft’s stock falls as demand for cloud services cools

- - Microsoft beat expectations, both for the last quarter and for when they were going to announce. It was early!
  - Net income of 20.1 billion for Fiscal 4th quarter 2023; which is up 20% from a year earlier.
  - Revenue rose to 56.19 Billion, ahead of Wall Street’s expectation of 55.47 billion
  - Stock still dropped 3% in after hours trading and is basically down 5% since the announcement on July 25th.
  - Despite all of this, the future doesn’t look super great per MS COF Amy Hood, who said that first quarter revenue is only going to be between 53.8 and 54.8 billion, implying growth of only about 8%.
  - This is tied to revenue growth of less than 10% by three consecutive quarters.
  - Microsoft Intelligent cloud was up 15% (Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, Github, Nuance, Visual Studio and Enterprise services) overall was up 15%.
  - Micro

221: The Biggest Innovator in SFTP in 30 Years? Amazon Web Services! Aug 06, 2023

Welcome episode 221 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew look at some of the announcements from AWS Summit, as well as try to predict the future – probably incorrectly – about what’s in store at Next 2023. Plus, we talk more about the storm attack, SFTP connectors (and no, that isn’t how you get to the Moscone Center for Next) Llama 2, Google Cloud Deploy and more!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Now You Too Can Get Ignored by Google Support via Mobile App
The Tech Sector Apparently Believes Multi-Cloud is Great… We Hate You All.
The cloud pod now wants all your HIPAA Data
The Meta Llama is Spreading Everywhere
The Cloud Pod Recursively Deploys Deploy

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

00:33 HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey 2023: The tech sector perspective

We didn’t find anything in the survey particularly interesting, until they broke it down by respondents who are actively in the tech industry.
Despite strong Macro pressure and recent earnings reports about slowness in growth, 48% of respondents increased their cloud spend in the last 12 months
94% of tech industry respondents indicated that multi-cloud works, citing that it has advanced or achieved their company’s business goals.
- Sure, Jan.
91% of tech companies rely on platform teams.

01:37 Justin – “The thing about that is, I could see the value for Saas vendors, right? Especially if you’re dealing with large data ingestion. I think we were talking to New Relic, for example, when they launched a New Relic on Azure.It saves their customers a bunch of money because they’re not doing egress charges out to the internet to AWS to basically get the New Relic data in. And they see that as a strategy that helps customers reduce money and also helps increase adoption as well as partnership opportunities.”

AWS

05:11 AWS Summit New York just happened, and there were a lot of announcements (and protests.) We won’t spend a lot of time going over each of these in the show, but the link are available for you to peruse at your leisure.

Introducing AWS HealthImaging — purpose-built for medical imaging at scale
- AWS is very excited to announce the general availability of AWS HealthImaging, a purpose-built service that helps builders develop cloud-native applications that store, analyze, and share medical imaging data at a petabyte scale. HealthImaging ingests data in the DICOM P10 format. It provides APIs for low-latency retrieval and purpose-built storage.

220: The Cloud Pod Read Llama Llama Red Pajama Jul 26, 2023

Welcome episode 220 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week your hosts, Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew discuss all things cloud, including virtual machines, an AI partnership between Microsoft and Meta for Llama 2, Lambda functions, Fargate, and lots of security updates including the Outlook breach and WORM protections. This and much more in our newest episode.

Titles we almost went with this week:

Too Many Bees died for Honeycode
Microsoft announces that AI will only cost you 3 arms and a leg.
The Cloud Pod also detects Recursive Loops in cloud news
The cloud pod disables health checks bc who needs them

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

AWS

02:02 Detecting and stopping recursive loops in AWS Lambda functions

Do you utilize AWS Lambda? Here’s an update for you.
AWS Lambda is introducing a recursion control to detect and stop lambda functions running in a recursive or infinite loop.
This supports Lambda Integrations with SQS, SNS or directly via the Invoke API.
Lambda defects functions that appear to be running in a recursive loop and drops the request after exceeding 16 invocations
This can help reduce costs from an unexpected lambda invocation because of recursion.
You’ll receive notification that this action was taken through the AWS Health Dashbboard, email or by configuring Amazon Cloudwatch Alarms.
You can turn this off by reaching out to AWS support, if you have a valid use-case where recursion is intentional, or if you need to loop something through more than 16 times.
This is also the trap – if you say turn it off and then cry about a ridiculous bill due to your runaway recursion – they will now force you to pay it. So, listeners beware.

03:50 Matt- “I can definitely say I’ve caused an ‘in the hundreds of dollars’ very rapidly by this in the past in a dev account. So it’s definitely something that’s easy to do if you are doing recursion and you make an ‘if’ statement the wrong way.”

04:28 AWS Fargate Enables Faster Container Startup using Seekable OCI

Are you a Fargate user who has been jealous of all those folks using ECS who have been able to utilize the seekable OCI or Sochi capability of lazy loading of containers? Well pine away no m

219: The Cloud Pod Proclaims: One Does Not Just Entra into Mordor Jul 20, 2023

Welcome episode 219 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Today your hosts are Justin and Jonathan, and they discuss all things cloud, including clickstream analytics, databricks, Microsoft Entra, virtual machines, Outlook threats, and some major changes over at the Google Cloud team.

Titles we almost went with this week:

TCP is not Entranced with Entra ID
The Cave you Fear to Entra, Holds the Treasure you Seek
Microsoft should rethink Entra rules for their Email

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

AWS

00:47 Clickstream Analytics on AWS for Mobile and Web Applications

Want some solutions? Don’t we all! Well, for clickstream analytics at least, Amazon has released an update that has pre built solutions using Amazon components.
Covers iOS and Android
You can now deploy an end-to-end solution to capture, ingest, store, analyze and visualize your customers’ clickstreams inside your web and mobile applications.
This solution is built using standard AWS services to allow you to keep your data in the security and compliance perimeter of your AWS account and customize the processing and analytics as you require, giving you the full flexibility to extract value for your business.
The new solution leverages ECS+Kafka/Kineses/S3, EMR, Redshift and Quicksight
You can use plugins to transform the data during processing via EMR< AWS has provided you to build in ones for User Agent enrichment and IP address enrichment.
- You can also export your source server inventory list to a CSV file and download it to your local disk.
- You can always continue leveraging the previously launched import and export functionality to and from an S3 bucket if you’re so inclined.
- Additional Post launch actions, adds four predefined post launch actions.
  - Configure Time Sync
  - Validate Disk Space
  - Verify HTTP(S) response
  - Enable Amazon Inspector
If only this had been written 9 months ago when everyone was trying to run away from Google analytics…

02:45 Justin- “I believe they have cloud cost optimization opportunities and solutions, but I would appreciate maybe some additional of those. More dashboards, more pretty pictures for

218: The Cloud Pod is a Sucker and Shifts Left Jul 14, 2023

Welcome to episode 218 of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Today your hosts Justin, Ryan, and Matt discuss all things cloud – including migration services, AppFabric, state machines, and security updates, as well as the idea of shifting left versus (or in addition to) shifting down.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod Prefers to be Bought by Anyone but IBM
What Does the F(in)O(ps)X say?
The Cloud Pod Leverage appFabric for your SaaS Security

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

01:21 IBM acquires hybrid cloud software company Apptio for $4.6B

- IBM is acquiring software company Apptio Inc for 4.6B in cash.
- THe move comes five years after Vista Equity bought the firm for 1.94B
- Apptio was created in 2007, and was notable as the first company Andreeson Horowitz invested in. Apptio owns Cloudability, among other features.
- Apptio offers cloud-based technology and hybrid business management software for managing business in the IT field.
- IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said in a statement “Technology is changing business at a rate and pace we’ve never seen before. To capitalize on these changes, it is essential to optimize investments which drive better business value, and Apptio does just that. Apptio’s offerings combined with IBM’s IT automation software and watsonx AI platform, gives clients the most comprehensive approach to optimize and manage all of their technology investments.”

2:30Ryan – “The last time I played with Apptio was very early in my cloud experience and Apptio was struggling to understand how to sort of port their methodologies into cloud. It worked really well in the data center and for IT shops, for tracking assets and managing visibility into cost and financials there, but it really struggled with stuff like dynamically changing instance groups and that sort of thing. It made sense when they bought Cloudability, and I haven’t played with it since.”

04:39 Justin goes to FinopsX!

06:10Justin – “I did have an opportunity to talk to some startups. they’re on the floor and they’re thinking about kind of the next generation and what that looks like and you’re really talking about bringing AI and LLM technology into FinOps and how do you get beyond the basics of it. I think we’re at this kind of cusp of the end of the Gen 1 era… I suspect that we’re in for a bunch of FinOps and capabilities coming out of these vendors as they try to figure out what their v2 is, and potentially new startups that are going to come in and be disruptive to the Gen 1 players, because I think it’s a commodity, which was my big takeaway from the conference in general. It was good. It was a nice time. I definitely recommend going if you’re in the FinOps space.”

08:07 Ryan – “I’m waiting for the first one of these players to really get the data enrichments, like AI generated data enrichment of your resources. The

217: The Cloud Pod Whispers Its Secrets to Azure Open AI Jul 07, 2023

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Today your hosts Justin, Jonathan, and Matt discuss all things cloud and AI, as well as some really interesting forays into quantum computing, changes to Google domains, Google accusing Microsoft of cloud monopoly shenanigans, and the fact that Azure wants all your industry secrets. Also, Finops and all the logs you could hope for. Are your secrets safe? Better tune in and find out!

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod Adds Domains to the Killed by Google list
The Cloud Pod Whispers it’s Secrets to Azure OpenAI
The Cloud Pod Accuses the Cloud of Being a Monopoly
The Cloud Pod Does Not Pass Go and Does Not collect $200

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

01:27 Vault 1.14 brings ACME for PKI, AWS roles, and more improvements

HashiCorp recently announced the general availability of ACME for PKI.
Vault 1.14 focuses on Vault’s core secrets workflows as well as team workflows, integrations, and visibility.
This allows you to use Vault to manage your TLS certificates, using the ACME protocol.
This allows you to use Vault to manage your AWS IAM roles, making it easier to grant access to your applications.
Vault has also been optimized for better performance, especially for large deployments.
A number of bugs have been fixed, improving the stability and security of Vault.
The Vaults Secrets Operator connects Vault secrets directly into native Kubernetes secrets.

Overall, Vault 1.14 is a significant release with a number of new features and improvements. If you are using Vault, I recommend upgrading to the latest version.

AWS

03:36 Announcing the AWS Amplify UI Builder Figma Plugin

Finally! A plugin that makes Amplify work natively with Figma! (Any UI builders out there in our audience? Bueller? Bueller?)
AWS Amplify now offers you the UI Builder Figma plugin
This new plugin makes it easier to empower your design and development teams to seamlessly collaborate within a Figma file.
With the Amplify UI kit, easily theme your components, upgrade to new UI Kit

216: The Cloud Pod is Feeling Elevated Enough to Record the Podcast Jun 29, 2023

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Today your hosts are Jonathan and Matt as we discuss all things cloud and AI, including Temporary Elevated Access Management (or TEAM, since we REALLY like acronyms today) FTP servers, SQL servers and all the other servers, as well as pipelines, whether or not the government should regulate AI (spoiler alert: the AI companies don’t think so) and some updates to security at Amazon and Google.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod’s FTP server now with post-quantum keys support
The CloudPod can now Team into your account, but only temporarily
The CloudPod dusts off their old floppy drive
The CloudPod dusts off their old SQL server disks
The CloudPod is feeling temporarily elevated to do a podcast
The CloudPod promise that AI will not take over the world
The CloudPod duals with keys
The CloudPod is feeling temporarily elevated.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

No general news this week! Probably because no one wanted to talk to us.

AWS

00:49 Amazon EC2 Instance Connect supports SSH and RDP connectivity without public IP address

You can now connect via SSH and RDP to EC2 instances without using public IP addresses. With EIC endpoints, customers have remote connectivity to their instances in private subnets, eliminating the need to use public IPv4 addresses for connectivity.
Previously you would have needed to create bastion hosts to tunnel SSH/RDP connections to instances with private IP addresses, but that created its own set of problems because bastion hosts would have to be patched, managed and audited as well as incur additional costs.
EIC endpoint combines AWS IAM-based access controls to restrict access to trusted principles with network-based controls such as security group rules.
It provides an audit of all connections via AWS cloud trail, helping customers improve their security posture.

01:31 Matt- “It’s nice to see Amazon still coming up with more solutions to not have things be public; and really try to get their customers to not use all the older-school technology.”

03:02 RDS Custom for SQL Server Lets you Bring Your Own Media

RDS Custom for SQL Server now allows customers to use their own SQL server installation media when creating an instance. By using BYOM, customers may leverage their existing SQL server licenses with Amazon RDS for SQL Server. Amazon RDS custom is a managed database service that allows customization of the underlying operating system and database environment. Managed features include Multi-AZ, point in time recovery, and more.
Previously when using RDS custom for SQL Server, customers used a license that

215: The Cloud Pod Breaks Into the Quantum Safe Jun 22, 2023

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast – where the forecast is always cloudy! Ryan, Jonathan, and Matt are your hosts this week as we discuss all things cloud, including updates to Terraform, pricing updates in GCP SCC, AWS Blueprint, DMS Serverless, and Snowball – as well as all the discussion on Microsoft quantum safe computing and ethical AI you could possibly want!

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

00:57 Terraform AWS provider updates to V 5.0

Announced this week from Hashicorp, Terraform AWS provider updates to version 5.0
The updates include support that they say will help them “focus on improving the user experience.”
Support & improvements for general tags was added, which can now be set at the provider level – applying them across all resources.
Thanks to new features in Terraform plugin SDK and the Terraform plugin framework issues related to inconsistent final plans, identical tags, and perpetual diffs are now solved.
More information on the default tags can be found on the changelog.

04:11 Jonathan – “It’s kind of cool – it’s a neat hack as well as a way of AWS providing a really useful feature without having to do any work on the cloud platform itself. Just implement the tool that does the deploying rather than having a service which could do it for you.”

AWS

05:28 **NEW** AWS DMS Serverless

Recognizing that many organizations were migrating to cloud platforms due to huge amounts of data, AWS has launched their cloud Database Migration Service back in 2016.
To make the migration even more seamless, AWS has now announced DMS Serverless.
AWS DMS Serverless will automatically set up, scale, and manage migration resources – all to make your migrations easier and (hopefully) more cost effective.
Supports a variety of databases and analytics services, including Amazon Aurora, RDS, S3, Redshift, and DynamoDB among others.

06:36 Matt- “I was thinking about it at the end of the migration – we finally got it all replicated; now we’re gonna wait a month before we actually cut over. We need this very small change rate, vs. lets go replicate everything at the very beginning. It just kind of keeps it in sync. So in theory, it goes up and down, and you’re not p

214: The Cloud Pod Loves Inspector Gadget Jun 05, 2023

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, Matthew are your hosts this week as we discuss all things cloud and AI, as well as Amazon Detective, SageMaker, AWS Documentation, and Google Workstation.

Titles we almost went with (and there’s a lot this week)

The Cloud Pod becomes the cloud docs The Cloud Pod loves inspector gadget The Cloud Pod documents the documentation The Cloud Pod bangs its shin, since geospatial abilities are lacking The Cloud Pod bangs its shin, since we lack geospatial abilities The Cloud Pod bangs its shin, if only we had geospatial abilities Unlike the Cloud Pod, Alibaba Cloud exits the stage Retiring AWS Documents on Github… or how we laid off too many people in our document team and can’t support this albatross anymore Microsoft Builds AI tools at its Build Conference and Wants you to Build More

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

01:29 Alibaba to Exit Cloud Business After Beijing Undercuts Potential

Alibaba is apparently planning to spin out its $12 Billion dollar cloud business.
It’s unclear if Alibaba is bowing to market pressures or political pressures; in 2020 Beijing became increasingly suspicious of cloud services operated by private firms, and started cracking down on internet services.
Alibaba Cloud drew regulatory ire in 2021 for discovering and sharing a flaw before informing authorities (there goes their citizenship score), and was investigated for its role in China’s largest cybersecurity leak.
Analysts value it at 30B, and was a once thriving operation that harbored the potential to AWS level of market control in China.
“This full spinoff plan involving AliCloud is both bold and puzzling, “Nomura Holdings Inc analysts Jialong Shi and Thomas Shen wrote in a note. “Their current valuation for the unit stands at about $31 billion. AliCloud is BABA’s organic business and is still deemed as one of the long-term drivers for the group even though its growth temporarily slowed down in recent quarters due to macro headwinds. That is why we find it puzzling that BABA has decided to fully spin off this business instead of retaining a minority stake at least.

04:30 Justin – “We’re basically entering a very Cold War period between the US and Chinese. And so that’s gonna be interesting to see how that continues to shake out. I saw some articles this week as well, like in the information about VC firms trying to exit their investments in China and just realizing that it’s not gonna be the growth engine they expect it to be. I mean, we talked about here on the show even some of the supply chain issues with China, with the cloud providers and how it’s impacted them. And now, I just saw this week, Apple just announced that they were making chips with Broadcom on US soil for some things. So, there’s definitely an undercurrent in our politics about China in general.”

05:46 Matt – “On the flip side, I’m kind of curious to see how taking this business unit out of the general Alibaba is going to work, especially with everyone starting to yell that the

213: The Cloud Pod Sings a Duet About AI May 24, 2023

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, Matthew are your hosts this week. Join us as we discuss all things cloud, AI, the upcoming Google AI Conference, AWS Console, and Duet AI for Google cloud.

Titles we almost went with this week:

You can finally lock yourself out of the AWS Console!
Google IO delivers the AI… hopefully soon to be renamed Google AI Conference
Azure announces major MySQL upgrade!
Azure can now update mysql without taking itself offline

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

01:10 – Terraform is in the news!

Terraform Cloud updates plans with an enhanced Free tier and more flexibility
A bunch of new updates are coming to Terraform Cloud
These update will provide access to **premium** features, up to 500 resources in the free tier
There are also new paid offerings for management capabilities, scaling currency, and enterprise support.
Consistent billing metrics based on managed resources, scaling concurrency, and enterprise support area available across all tiers. But let’s be honest – who needs consistent billing metrics? Half the fun is in the guessing!
New Features Include:
- Premium security features such as SSO and Policy as Code on all tiers (yes, even the free ones for the poors like us.)
- Make it “easy and frictionless” for smaller teams and organizations to get started with their first use cases.
- And -finally- updated paid tiers provide easy upgrade paths for organizations as their usage scales, and they have more advanced use cases.
Consumer Advice Time! The updated pricing models include a “per resource” charge. That has the potential to get REAL messy over 500 devices.
Of course, it’s an option to stay on the legacy models, but the “carrots” – like SSO and Sentinel/OPA support – are pretty good, so you really just need to do a cost benefit analysis for your particular situation.

02:35 Ryan – “Yeah, I mean, the licensing for Terraform products for cloud and both enterprises always been rough, right? Like starting off per users for cloud makes sense. And at some point for enterprise, they had switched to per project, not users, because they figured out very quickly that what everyone did was just sort of link it together behind automation pane.”

04:48 ”Justin – the devil’s in the details of what they consider a resource, right? And it’s every single thing. I mean, 10 cents per EC2 instance, hmm. Like, yeah, I get 10 cents worth of value out of Terraform, not having to manually do that stuff. So, like, yeah, but then like you get into S3 buckets and like, I’m definitely not gonna get 10 cents of value out of an S3 bucket every month.”

212: The Cloud Pod Wades into Microservices vs. Monoliths May 17, 2023

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, Matthew and Peter are your hosts this week as we discuss all things cloud and AI,

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod is better than Bob’s Used Books
The Cloud Pod sets up AWS notifications for all
The Cloud Pod is non-differential about privacy in BigQuery
The Cloud Pod finds Windows Bob
The Cloud Pod starts preparing for its Azure Emergency today

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

00:40 – News this week starts out with TCP’s own news – Peter’s podcasting career is riding off into the sunset. He claims he’ll actually start listening, but we’ll see…we’re always happy for more listeners though, no matter how we get them.

02:18 – FinOps Foundation debuts new specification to ease cloud cost management

Have we mentioned the FinOps User Conference? I can’t remember if we’ve mentioned that at all… In any event, join the fun June 27th through the 30th in beautiful and sunny San Diego, and be immersed in all things FinOps. It’s a dream vacation opportunity!
In the meantime, the Finops foundation has announced FOCUS, an open-source initiative designed to help companies more easily track their cloud costs, which will initially launch at the conference.
The goal of the initiative is to develop a standard specification for organizing cloud spending and usage data.
According to FinOps, FOCUS will also provide a number of related data management capabilities, MS and Google will join the steering committee tasked with managing the project.
“FOCUS will solve problems that organizations maturing their cloud adoption now face,” said Udam Dewaraja, the chair of the FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS working group. “Today, there’s no clear way to unify cost and usage data sets across different vendors.”
FOCUS introduces standardized terminology for describing cloud expenses and usage metrics, provides a standardized schema, or a data format in which financial information can be organized. A schema specifies technical details such as the maximum number of expenses that should be included in each database row.

AWS

04:18 New Storage-Optimized Amazon EC2 I4g Instances: Graviton Processors and AWS Nitro SSDs

AWS is launching the new I4g instances powered by Graviton2 processors – delivering up to 15% better performance than their storage-optimized instances. Whoo!
Shapes come in 2 VCPU, 16gb Memory and 468gb of Storage up to 64 vcpu, 512gb of ram, and 15 tb of storage.

211: The Cloud Pod finally Groks observability May 12, 2023

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan, Jonathan, and Matthew are all here this week to discuss the latest news and announcements in the world of cloud and AI – including New Relic Grok, Athena Provisioned Capacity from AWS, and updates to the Azure Virtual Desktop.

Titles we almost went with this week:

None! This week’s title was SO GOOD we didn’t bother with any alternates. Sometimes it’s just like that, you know?

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

01:27 – Quick reminder – Finops X Foundation Conference is almost here!

This is the annual FinOps Foundation Annual User Conference, and it is taking place June 29th through the 31st in Beautiful San Diego, California.
Hundreds of your fellow practitioners will be sharing their FinOps knowledge, collaborating in chalk talks and networking together.
Why should you attend? Great question. Let me tell you. 1) There’s a party on an aircraft carrier. Need more? You got it. 2) You can learn best practices when it comes to FinOps and save your company lots of money – you’ll be a hero! (Look at the economy and current interest rates. Heroic is an understatement.) Need another reason? Look no further! Justin will be there! We know you’ve always wanted to chat with him in person. No? How about free stickers? Free stuff is good. Everyone loves stickers.

02:47 New Relic is back on the pod – and they’ve got something new

New Relic just launched Grok, their new AI observability assistant

- If you remember a few weeks ago, we had someone from New Relic on the pod, and they told us **something** was coming, but weren’t quite ready to tell us what it was – and now, it’s here!
- New Relic is throwing their hat into the AI ring – Grok.
- Grok will allow engineers to use large language models to help utilize natural language when performing many of the routine tasks in New Relic, like setting up instrumentation, building reports, or managing accounts.
- Engineers can sift through the data more easily and come through their unified telemetry data without having to write complex queries.
- From New Relic: “Observability tools exist to serve the DevOps and DevSecOps movements. Engineers use observability tools to get the data they need to operate and secure the software they build,” said New Relic Chief Product Officer Manav Khurana. “The reality, howeve r, is that it’s hard for every engineer to translate a question they have into a data model, sift through their tools to find the right data, and then translate data back to an insight in natural language. That’s why DevSecOps practices are lagging behind all the innovation in Observability tooling. Now with Generative AI, there will be an explosion of new software developed in a completely different way, creating even more complexity t

210: The Cloud Pod Deep Inspects Itself May 03, 2023

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan and Matthew are your hosts this week as we discuss all the latest news and announcements in the world of the cloud and AI – including what’s new with Google Deepmind, as well as goings on over at the Finops X Conference. Join us!

Titles we almost went with this week:

The Cloud Pod DeepMinds bring you the Cloud News
The Cloud Sounds Better When Tuned Properly
The Cloud Pod Delegates Itself to Multiple Organizations
The Cloud is Flush with Cash but Still Raining on Employees.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

00:43 – Finops X Foundation Conference is just around the corner

This is a great opportunity to meet with other Finops users and share knowledge, collaborate on Chalk Talk, and network in beautiful San Diego, CA. There will even be an awards ceremony on an aircraft carrier, and you KNOW you want to be there for that.
Do you like stickers? Of course you do. Everyone likes stickers! Be on the lookout for Justin – he’ll be there! And if you ask nicely (or even just sort of nicely) he’ll give you a TCP sticker, so that right there is a great reason to attend.
The conference is June 29th – 31st, and registration can be found on the Finops Foundation website. See you there!

02:51 It’s earning season. Listener discretion is advised.

Let’s start with Microsoft

- At their earnings report on Tuesday, Microsoft is reporting $52.9 billion revenue, up 7% from the previous year. Expectations were set at $51 billion. Much of this is driven by AI (because what isn’t driven by AI these days.)
- Overall profits were up 9% from last year, coming in at $18.3 billion.
- Microsoft Azure helped with these numbers by recording a 22% increase, vs. a 34% increase seen last year.

03:51 Ryan- I’m surprised with some of the numbers, just because I wasn’t expecting – after so many years of growth – that it would continue to rise despite the economic dip.”

Moving on to Google Earnings…

- Google earnings were recorded at $69.79 billion, which was higher than analysts expected, thanks partly due to Google cloud revenue and an increase in Youtube advertising (all of it aimed at my kid, apparently.)
- Google cloud (GCI) revenue came in at $7.45 billion, which was slightly lower than expectations, but the good news is that Google finally recorded a profit in their cloud computing sector! This means everyone using GCI won’t be left in the dust, since we all know Google loves to kill off anything that isn’t profitable.

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209: The Cloud Pod Whispers Sweet Nothings To Our Code (**why wont you work**) Apr 28, 2023

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan and Jonathan are your hosts this week as we discuss all the latest news and announcements in the world of the cloud and AI – including Amazon’s new AI, Bedrock, as well as new AI tools from other developers. We also address the new updates to AWS’s CodeWhisperer, and return to our Cloud Journey Series where we discuss insert dramatic music – Kubernetes!

Titles we almost went with this week:

I’m always Whispering to My Code as an Individual
Azure gets an AI, Google gets an AI… and Amazon finally gets an AI
You can now creep out your copilot by whispering to your code
AI fails to generate an interesting show title this week

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

AWS News

@01:36 – Codewhisperer is now generally available – and includes a free tier!

-Besides just the availability, this new real-time AI coding companion also includes a FREE individual tier open to all developers. This is a (good!) surprise to us.
-The free tier works with many popular IDEs, including VS Code and Intellij IDEA among others.
-Codewhisperer can assist in productivity by creating code for repetitive or routine tasks
– Cost wise, Codewhisperer is pretty much in line with other products like GitHub Copilot.
– Python, Java, Javascript, Typescript, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell Scripting, SQL and Scala
-The downside: security is fairly limited (Python and Java, for instance)
02:50 Jonathan: “I’m super happy that they’ve launched with so many languages supported, and so much support for different IDE’s. It’s a great launch. It’s definitely a time saver, and I’d pay the $20 a month for the service even if there wasn’t a free tier.”
(But maybe we don’t say that too loudly, or the free tier will disappear…)
And speaking of that free tier –
04:49 Jonathan: “I expect the reason there’s a free tier is so that they get much more data from user experiences, and can retrain the model based on people’s feedback.”
05:24 Ryan: “It’s edging us closer to code writing code.”
-One of the things that is important to point out from our discussion today is that you can get a bit more for your money from Copilot, which also has a free tier for individuals.

@09:10 Amazon is excited to announce the Simple Database Archival Solution

-SDAS is an open source solution, available under the Apache License, and can be deployed directly from your AWS account
-Do you have a problem with being able to safely archive data from your databases? According to Amazon this is a wide ranging problem for many folks, and since storing data on-premises can be extremely costly, this may be a great alternative.
-It automates a lot of the logistics of archiving data and leverages Step Funct

208: Azure AI Lost in Space Apr 21, 2023

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast! Justin, Ryan and Matthew are your hosts this week as we discuss all the latest news and announcements in the world of the cloud and AI. Do people really love Matt’s Azure know-how? Can Google make Bard fit into literally everything they make? What’s the latest with Azure AI and their space collaborations? Let’s find out!

Titles we almost went with this week:

Clouds in Space, Fictional Realms of Oracles, Oh My.
The cloudpod streams lambda to the cloud

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

News this Week:

General News

@00:57 – Interesting article – What is Open AI doing that Google Isn’t

(Besides making a usable product, obviously.)
-Google AI lab is separate, meaning researchers are separate from the engineers, versus Open AI where they are one combined team, which – go figure – works out better. -The article goes on to question whether Google is “losing their edge” which, as the number 3 player in the AI industry, is pretty evident. The guys discuss the two services, as well as how Bard can be crammed into every product Google makes.
02:49 Ryan: “I find it kind of fascinating that Open AI, because they were first to market, gets to dictate what AI is.”

@07:01 Are you an AI developer? Are you looking to build out your own models? -Good luck. Finding the hardware to do that continues to be an issue.

The Information put out an article about a shortage of servers at all the major cloud companies, including AWS, Azure, GPC, and OCI. The biggest issue is a shortage of GPUs and GPU processors, which was one of the first and main resources to have supply chain issues.
Desktop computer GPUs are having less issues with supply. Some of that is thanks to the bottom falling out of the Bitcoin market (no need for mining anymore.)
07:57 Ryan – “It’s a run on a limited resource, and GPU’s – they were the first to hit supply chain issue… it’s always been sort of a scarce resource. When I first heard of GPU’s being used for machine learning and those types of workloads, there weren’t enough of them, and it wasn’t really embedded in the type of hardware you need to run in a data center.
09:07Justin – “A lot of GPU returns and GPU availability in the desktop market, which those GPU’s are better suited for doing high computational work of 3D and things that are required for getting to bitcoin… so you could use desktop GPUs but your experience won’t go as far.”
Unfortunately the smart British guy isn’t here to tell us all the ins and outs of the differences between types of GPUs, so do tune in for that next week!

@10:37 FinOps slack channels had some chatter in regards to the Amazon spot market pricing increases.

For the past couple weeks prices have continued to grow in US East 1, US AP Southeast 1A, and European servers (which are always more expensive anyway) among others. Justin discusses his ideas for why this is the case. Surprisingly (or not surprisingly at all) most of his theoretical reasons for these prices increases are pretty cynical – but they include capacity constraints in the supply chain, Amazon limiting additional buying because they’re going into e

207: AWS Puts Up a New VPC Lattice to Ease the Growth of Your Connectivity Apr 14, 2023

AWS Puts Up a New VPC Lattice to Ease the Growth of Your Connectivity

AKA Welcome to April (how is it April already?) This week, Justin, Jonathan, and Matt are your guides through all the latest and greatest in Cloud news; including VPC Lattice from AWS, the one and only time we’ll talk about Service Catalog, and an ultra premium DDoS experience. All this week on The Cloud Pod.

This week’s alternate title(s):

AWS Finally makes service catalogs good with Terraform
Amazon continues to believe retailers with supply chain will give all their data to them
Azure copies your data from S3… AWS copies your data from Azure Blobs… or how I set money on fire with data egress charges

News this Week:

AWS

@00:56 – Lots from AWS – Terraform and Service Catalog, Supply Chain and its crazy pricing, and VPC Lattice

–Self-service provisioning of Terraform open source configured with AWS Service Catalog. This means you can define your service catalog resources with either cloud formation *or* Terraform. And yes, Service Catalog inception is potentially a viable thing.

Matt: “It’s useful when you want to give people who don’t know what they’re doing very specific things; if you’re in a large organization, really just defining exactly what people can do…but to me it really starts to remove a lot of the innovation… but if you really want your teams to leverage the cloud and innovate I feel like it does start to limit some of the different aspects of the cloud.”

Justin: “Don’t drink the ITSM kool-aid on Service Catalog.”

@ 04:32 – AWS Supply Chain is now generally available; and yes, this is the same Supply Chain that was introduced at re:Invent. AWS says it will help mitigate risks, lower costs, increase visibility and help give actual insights on the supply chain.

-Honestly, we’re talking about Supply Chain because the pricing is all over the place. For example, the first 100,000 Supply Chain insights are .40/each; the next 900,000 are .13/each, and over 900,000 its .065/each.

@ 09:26 – VPC Lattice is finally here! Also announced at re:Invent, this gives you the ability to connect, secure, & monitor communications between services. It also gives the ability to refine policies for both traffic management and network access.

-Since the announcement, a few new capabilities have been added, including the ability to use custom domains, deploy open source AWS gateway API controllers to use Lattice with a Kubernetes-native experience, as well as giving the ability to configure SSL/TLS certificates when using HTTPS that matches the custom domain.

You can also:

use the Kubernetes gateway API to connect services across multiple clusters
use an ALB or an NLB as a target for service
support IPv6 connectivity with IP address target type
-be confused by pricing

Justin: “Their examples of Lattice pricing hurts my brain just a little bit.”

@ 13:36 – Guard Duty now supports Amazon EKS Runtime monitoring, which lets you detect Runtime threats from over 30 security findings via an EKS add on, which gives increased visibility on individual container Runtime activity. Guard Duty can tell you which potenti

TCP-Talks: Security & Observability with DataDog’s Andrew Krug Apr 12, 2023

Andrew Krug from Datadog

In this episode, Andrew Krug talks about Datadog as a security observability tool, shedding light on some of its applications as well as its benefits to engineers.

Andrew is the lead in Datadog Security Advocacy and Datadog Security Labs. Also a Cloud Security consultant, he started the Threat Response Project, a toolkit for Amazon Web Services first responders. Andrew has also spoken at Black Hat USA, DEFCON, re:Invent, and other platforms..

DataDog Product Overview

Datadog is focused on bringing security to engineering teams, not just security people. One of the biggest advantages of Datadog or other vendors is how they ingest and normalize various log sources. It can be very challenging to maintain a reasonable data structure for logs ingested from cloud providers.

Vendors try to provide customers with enough signals that they feel they are getting value while trying not to flood them with unactionable alerts. Also, considering the cloud friendliness for the stack is crucial for clients evaluating a new product.

Datadog is active in the open-source community and gives back to groups like the Cloud native computing foundation. One of their popular open-source security tools created is Stratus-red-team which simulates the techniques of attackers in a clean room environment. The criticality of findings is becoming a major topic. It is necessary when evaluating that criticality is based on how much risk applies to the business, and what can be done.

One of the things that teams struggle with as high maturity DevOps is trying to automate incident handling or response to critical alerts as this can cause Configuration Drift which is why there is a lot of hesitation to fully automate things. Having someone to make hard choices is at the heart of incident handling processes.

Datadog Cloud SIEM was created to help customers who were already customers of logs. Datadog SIEM is also very easy to use such that without being a security expert, the UI is simple. It is quite difficult to deploy a SIEM on completely unstructured logs, hence being able to extract and normalize data to a set of security attributes is highly beneficial. Interestingly, the typical boring hygienic issues that are easy to detect still cause major problems for very large companies. This is where posture management comes in to address issues on time and prevent large breaches.

Generally, Datadog is inclined towards moving these detections closer to the data that they are securing, and examining the application run time in real-time to verify that there are no issues. Datadog would be helpful to solve IAM challenges through CSPM which evaluates policies. For engineering teams, the benefit is seen in how information surfaces in areas where they normally look, especially with Datadog Security products where Issues are sorted in order of importance.

Security Observability Day is coming up on the 18th of April when Datadog products will be highlighted; the link to sign up is available on the Datadog Twitter page and Datadog community Slack. To find out more, reach out to Andrew on Twitter @andrewkrug and on the

206: The TCP Podcast Ponders Security Copilot or Vaporware – You Decide! Apr 05, 2023

This week on the podcast, Justin, Jonathan and Ryan are joined by Matt Kohn and can be found chatting about all things microservices and containers – including new Security Copilot features. In our cloud journeys, we discuss just what defines a microservice (spoiler: the guys actually agree for once) and whether or not those microservices require containers. Also on the agenda, IS Kubernetes the new Monolith?

News this Week:

@4:00 – HashiCorp has announced quite a few updates for Terraform, including a number of innovations for the cloud version. This includes:

-A *new version of the UI (*not actually new if you use the cloud version) and a new cross organizational provider, which will allow users to share via a private registry across an organization.

-They introduced Projects, which will give the ability to organize workspaces and ownership boundaries within Terraform.

-An Auth update will give enhanced integration between Terraform and GitHub.com

-But wait, there’s more from HashiCorp! Among the updates is a new and improved pipeline model called the TFE Taskworker. This will let Terraform offer features like OPA support, dynamic provider credentials, and drift detection.

From Justin: “And OPA is exactly what you thought – they’re getting rid of Sentinel. No. They’re not. They’re giving you OPA AND Sentinel so you can use either/or or both of them.”

Terraform Enterprise adds projects, drift detection, and more

AWS

@7:57 In AWS News – We discussed a few weeks ago the new app migration service from AWS; well, they’ve added three new features!

-Import/Export: You can use the App Migration Service to import source environment inventory list from a CSV file (snazzy!) as well as exporting that same data for reporting purposes, offline reviews, and update integration.

– New dashboard for server migration metrics and added 8 additional predefined actions, such as converting licenses to Amazon licensing.

– ALB’s now support TLS 1.3 (Did anyone else realize they hadn’t already offered that update?)

Matt: “I think what scares me more is the Windows update version; they have a runbook that will just do the upgrade for you. I feel like that **definitely** will never end well.”

AWS Application Migration Service Major Updates: Import and Export Feature, Source Server Migration Metrics Dashboard, and Additional Post-Launch Actions

GCP

@14:04 – Nothing of interest from GCP this week. Still trying to get Bard to work, go figure. Google recently discussed their “shared agenda for sensible AI progress” which is essentially an “if you can’t beat ‘em – regulate ‘em” ideology.

SIDENOTE: Weird Amazon returns policies

SIDENOTE: AI Startup Replika – it goes where you think it does. (Hint: Where the internet ALWAYS goes.)

Azure

@ 20:19 – Moving on to Azure – Microsoft’s inaugural Security event says they are “bringing the power of AI to security” but *are* they? The announcement doesn’t tell us much, but it essentially marries GPT to Security Copilot. But is this really a product they need to be selling? The guys discuss what GOOD AI integration would look like for InfoSec.

Ryan: “I can’t get the image out of my head of Clippy wearing a badge saying ‘Would you like to open a Sev1 incident’?”

Justin: “Just because you have the big partnership with Open AI for billions of dollars doesn’t mean every one of your products has to get

205: The Cloud Pod decides to Bard or not to Bard. What’s the question? Mar 27, 2023

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the new Amazon Linux 2023, Google Bard, new features of Google Chronicle Security Operations, GPT-4 from Azure Open AI, and Oracle’s Kubernetes platform comparison. They also talk about cloud-native architecture as a way to adapt applications for a pivot to the cloud.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS: Amazon announces General Availability of Amazon Linux 2023.
GCP: New capabilities available on Google Chronicle Security Operations
Azure: Azure announces preview of GPT-4 in Azure Open AI Service.
Oracle: Oracle compares its Kubernetes platform with that of Hyperscalers.

Top Quotes

“The goal of Cloud Native architecture is to develop scalable resilient ports of applications that you can easily deploy and manage in a modern Cloud environment”
“You maximize the benefits of the platform you’re on and you minimize the weaknesses of it when you design for that platform”
“There’s nothing that prevents you from going to the cloud if you’re not cloud-native, I just think you don’t get the advantages of the cloud native and what the cloud brings to you”

AWS: Amazon announces General Availability of Amazon Linux 2023.

Amazon Linux 2023, a Cloud-Optimized Linux Distribution with Long-Term Support
This third generation of Amazon Linux Distributions includes security policies to apply the common industry guidelines.

GCP: New capabilities available on Google Chronicle Security Operations.

0⃣ Chronicle Security Operations Feature Roundup
These New features enable a speedy response to threats.

Azure: Azure announces preview of GPT-4 in Azure Open AI Service.

0⃣ Introducing GPT-4 in Azure OpenAI Service
As billing starts on the 1st of April, customers can begin harnessing Open AI’s most advanced model.

Oracle: Oracle compares its Kubernetes platform with that of Hyperscalers.

0⃣ Kubernetes cloud cost comparison: Who provides the best value?
They highlight both serverless and managed K8 services and compare some specific services offered by both.

The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Native Architecture.

Cloud-Native architecture is an approach to building and running applications that use Cloud computing principles and technologies.
Some benefits are scalability, reduced time to market, better utilization of resources, integrated management and monitoring as well as efficiency with large or small-scale work.
While it is possible to move to the cloud without being cloud-native, the benefits may be reduced and there are no provisions for the typical challenges in the cloud sp

204: Amazon eats Pi with their own version of S3FS Mar 22, 2023

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team discusses Amazon Pi Day, Google’s upcoming I/O conference, the agricultural data manager by Microsoft, and the downturn in net profits of Oracle. They also round up cloud migrations by highlighting tools from different cloud service providers that are useful for the process.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS: Amazon celebrates Pi Day with live twitch streams.
GCP: Google announces their I/O conference to take place near their headquarters in Mountain View.
Azure:To increase global food production, Microsoft has created an agricultural data manager.
Oracle: Net income for Oracle this quarter dropped to 1.9 billion.

Top Quotes

“It’s been the thorn in the side of every migration I’ve been a part of… ‘how are we going to operate FTP securely in the cloud?”
“It is not about where you are in the future to Amazon, it’s about where you are today… that’s why Google and Azure have some success seen as Amazon because they come in and they realize the true long-term value of the customer not the immediate short-term value of the Amazon approach”

AWS: Amazon celebrates Pi Day with live twitch streams.

Celebrate Amazon S3’s 17th birthday at AWS Pi Day 2023
They also announced 7 new capabilities across their data services.

GCP: Google announces their I/O conference to take place near their headquarters in Mountain View.

0⃣ G oogle I/O 2023 developer conference to kick off on May 10
The full agenda will be published in the next few weeks.

Azure: To increase global food production, Microsoft has created an agricultural data manager.

0⃣ Announcing Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture: Accelerating innovation across the agriculture value chain
With the rising rate of hunger, this manager will provide solutions by maximizing agricultural data.

Oracle: Net income for Oracle this quarter dropped to 1.9 billion.

0⃣ Oracle’s stock heads south on revenue shortfall
Despite the drop, and the gap from other cloud providers, they only slightly missed Wall Street expectations.

The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Migration Tools.

The final part of Cloud Migrations Migrations; cloud tools to help with your migration.
AWS has the highest amount of tools for cloud migrations; GCP and Azure also have some useful tools, but the least is OCI
Foghorn Consulting can help clients with planning out their migration program.

TCP-Talks: Evolution of NoSQL with Couchbase CTO, Ravi Mayuram Mar 21, 2023

In this episode, Ravi Mayuram highlights the functionality of Couchbase as an evolutionary database platform, citing several simple day-to-day use cases and particular advantages of Couchbase.

Ravi Mayuram is CTO of Couchbase. He is an accomplished engineering executive with a passion for creating and delivering game-changing products for startups as well as Fortune-500 industry-leading companies.

Notes

Couchbase set out to build a next-generation database. Data has evolved greatly with IT advancements. The goal was to build a database that will connect people to the newer technologies, addressing problems that relational systems did not have to solve. The fundamental shift is that earlier systems were internally focused, built for trained users but now the systems are built directly for consumers. This shift also plays out in the vast difference in the number of consumers now interacting with these systems compared to the fewer trained users previously interacting with the systems.

One of the key factors that sets Couchbase apart is the No-SQL Database. It is a database that has evolved by combining five systems; a Cache and Key-value store, a Document store, a Relational document store, a Search system, and an Analytical system. Secondly, Couchbase performs well in the geo-distributed manner such that with one click, data is made available across availability zones. Lastly, all of this can be done at a large scale in seconds.

Regarding the global database concept that Google talks about, a globally consistent database may not be needed by most companies. The performance will be the biggest problem as transaction speed will be considerably low. Couchbase does these transactions locally within the data center and replicates them on the other side. The main issue of relational systems is that they make you pay the price of every transaction no matter how minor, but with Couchbase, it is possible to pay only the cost only with certain crucial transactions.

Edge has become a part of the enterprise architecture even such that people now have edge-based solutions. Two edges are emerging; the Network edge and the Tool edge where people are interfacing. Couchbase has built a mobile database available on devices, with sync capability.

As a consumer, the primary advantage of bringing data closer to the consumer is the latency issue. Often, data has to go through firewalls and multiple steps which delays it but this is the benefit of Couchbase. The user simply continues to have access to the data while Couchbase synchronizes the data in the back.

One of the applications of Couchbase in healthcare is insulin tracking. With many devices that monitor insulin which must work everywhere you go, Couchbase Lite does the insulin tracking, keeps the data even in the absence of a network, and later syncs it for review by healthcare professionals. This is also useful in operating rooms where the network is not accessible. The real benefit is seen when the data eventually gets back to the server and can be interpreted to make decisions on patient care.

The Couchbase Capella Service runs in the cloud and allows clients to specify what data should be sent to the edge and what should not be. This offers privacy and security measures, such that even in the loss or damage of a device, the data is secure and can be recovered. To effectively manage edge in devices, a lot of problems must be addressed to make it easier.

One of the concerns for anyone coming into Couchbase Capella is the expense of data extraction from the cloud, however, Couchbase is available on all three cloud providers. Also, with Couchbase, there is no need to keep replicating data as you can work on the data without moving it, which largely saves costs.

Other use cases for Couchbase inclu

203: From vaporware to visual apps – AWS App Composer Generally Available Mar 15, 2023

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team talks about the new AWS region in Malaysia, the launch of AWS App Composer, the expansion of spanner database capabilities, the release of a vision AI by Microsoft; Florence Foundation Model, and the three migration techniques to the cloud space.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS: AWS announces upcoming region in Malaysia.
GCP: Google launches new capabilities to Spanners regional and multi-regional capabilities
Azure: The Florence Foundation Model from Microsoft..

Top Quotes

“I think that these migration projects end up getting sort of pigeonholed over time into things that they’re not”
“The reality is like ‘What are you really trying to get out of your migration for the business?”
“The hybrid migration model lets you realize the benefits of cloud incrementally as you go”

AWS: AWS announces upcoming region in Malaysia.

AWS Region in Malaysia
This region is expected to have 3 AZ’s but there is no timeline for when it will come online

GCP: Google launches new capabilities to Spanner’s regional and multi-regional capabilities.

0⃣ Rapidly expand the reach of Spanner databases with read-only replicas and zero-downtime moves
These include Configurable read-only replicas, Spanner’s zero-downtime instance, and the more affordable cost of multi-regional configurations.

Azure: The Florence Foundation Model from Microsoft.

0⃣ Announcing a renaissance in computer vision AI with Microsoft’s Florence foundation model
This new vision AI helps customers connect their data to natural language interactions to gain insights from their image and video resources.

The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Migration Techniques

There are three Migration Techniques; Hybrid, Cloud Native, and VMWare Migrations.
One common mistake people make is believing they won’t get value from the migration till it is completed.
Generally, it may be hard to decide which is the most successful because this depends on the definition of success as applied to individual businesses.

Other Headlines Mentioned:

202: The Bing is dead! Long live the Bing Mar 10, 2023

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team talks about the possible replacement of CEO Sundar Pichai after Alphabet stock went up by just 1.9%, the new support feature of Amazon EKS for Kubernetes, three partner specializations just released by Google, and how clients have responded to the AI Powered Bing and Microsoft Edge.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS: The new Amazon EKS release: the “combiner”.
GCP: Google rolls out new partner specializations
Azure: Microsoft releases AI-Powered Bing and Microsoft Edge.

Top Quotes

“It’s always going to be a race for these cloud providers to manage every software, in general, to stay up to date because it’s challenging”

AWS: The new Amazon EKS release: the “combiner”..

Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.25
The most notable change in version 1.25 is the removal of Pod Security Policies PSPs.

GCP: Google rolls out new partner specializations.

0⃣ Three new Specializations help partners digitally transform customers
These new specializations are Datacenter modernization services, DevOps services and Contact Center AI services.

Azure: Microsoft releases AI-Powered Bing and Microsoft Edge.

0⃣ The new Bing preview experience arrives on Bing and Edge Mobile apps; introducing Bing now in Skype
With positive feedback, they will be launching the Bing and Edge mobile apps.

Other Headlines Mentioned:

TCP-Talks: Revolutionizing Observability with New Relic featuring Daniel Kim Mar 02, 2023

Revolutionizing Observability with New Relic

In this episode, Daniel explains a new strategy towards observability aimed at contextualizing large volumes of data to make it easier for users to identify the root cause of problems with their systems.

Daniel Kim is a Principal Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic and the founder of Bit Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to making tech accessible to under-served communities. His job is basically to get developers excited about Observability, and he hopes to inspire students to maximize their potential in tech through inclusive, accessible developer education. He is passionate about diversity and inclusion in tech, good food, and dad jokes.

Show Notes

First, it is important to differentiate between monitoring and observability. Monitoring is basically when a code is instrumented to send data to a backend, to give answers to preconceived questions. With Observability, the goal is to monitor your system so as to later ask questions that were not in mind during the instrumentation of the system. Hence, if something new comes up you can find the root cause without modifying the code. There are so many levels of things to check when troubleshooting to find the cause of a problem, and this is where observability comes in.

There are different use cases for logs, metrics, and traces; Logs are files that record events, warnings, or errors however logs are ephemeral which means there is increased risk of losing a lot of data. A system needs to be in place to move logs to a central source. Another issue with logs is that it is poorly structured data. Logs are good to have as the last step of observability. Metrics and traces can however help to narrow down where to search in the logs to solve an issue.

Metrics are measurements that reflect the performance or health of your applications. They give an overview of how the systems are doing but tend to not be very specific in finding the root cause of a problem; other forms of data have to be adopted to get a clear picture. This is where Traces come in.

Traces are pieces of data that track a request as it goes through the system. Because of this, they can identify the root cause of an error or bottlenecks slowing down the system. However, they are very expensive and as such sampling is used when tracing but this reduces the accuracy of traces. Correlating information from logs, metrics, and traces gives a full clear picture for debugging to be carried out successfully. A lot of New Relic customers strive to get more pieces of data to get errors faster.

To balance the right data at the right time with the right cost, the first step when collecting large amounts of data is to find out how your organization is leveraging the data. A quick audit of the data to identify useful data is helpful. This can be done monthly or quarterly. Unstructured logs are difficult to aggregate

In the cloud native space, being able to be compatible with as many people as possible will determine the winners because there are many projects people use in production. Projects that are compatible with many other projects are the way forward.

APM is still very useful to understand application performance and in the future, data from all sources will be correlated to figure out the cause of a problem. Getting value very early from the system involves having a solid infrastructure and installing APM. The real power of full stack observability is getting data from different parts of your stack so you can diagnose what part of your system is going wrong. Leveraging AI to make sense of large amounts of data for engineers is going to be a huge plus.

A lot of vendors claim that their alert systems will automatically generate all alerts for you but this is not true because they would not know your

201: The CloudPod is assimilated and joins the Azure Collective Feb 27, 2023

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the AWS systems manager default enablement option for all EC2 instances in an account, different ideas from leveraging innovators plus subscription using $500 Google credits, the Azure Open Source Day, the new theme for the Oracle OCI Console, and lastly, different ways to migrate to a cloud provider.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS: AWS systems manager has a new default enablement option for all EC2 instances.
GCP: Leveraging the innovators plus subscription to create ideas on how to use Google cloud credits.
Azure: About Azure Open Source Day
Oracle: Oracle redesigns OCI Console UI

Top Quotes

“There’s a lot to understand about your product and the way it works before you can even think about a cloud migration”
“In the cloud, we always tell to plan for failure”
“If you’re selling to your business the need to innovate… and you’re going to move on a cloud journey, then you need to actually deliver on those things”

AWS: AWS systems manager has a new default enablement option for all EC2 instances

Announcing the ability to enable AWS Systems Manager by default across all EC2 instances in an account
Using DHMC, core system manager capabilities are now available to all EC2 instances in an account.

GCP: Leveraging the innovators plus subscription to create ideas on how to use Google cloud credits

0⃣ What would you build with $500 in Google Cloud credits included with Innovators Plus
The innovators plus subscription offers $500 in credits and vouchers for certification.

Azure: About Azure Open Source Day

0⃣ 7 reasons to join us at Azure Open Source Day
This virtual event will take place on the 7th of March from 9 to 10:30.
Join the Azure Collective on Stack Overflow

Oracle: Oracle redesigns OCI Console UI

0⃣ Introducing Redwood Theming for Oracle Cloud
Although the changes are cosmetic, usability enhancements are expected. .

The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Migrations

Cloud migration means moving your workload to a cloud provider, and the first part of this journey is the discovery phase.
After inventory and assessment, the next step is to decide exactly how to move to the cloud which can be any one of five methods.
It is imperative to consider your products and existing operational processes when migrating to a cloud provider..

Other Headlines Mentioned:

200: Now you can make bad cloud decisions like running EKS on SNOW Feb 21, 2023

EKS on Snow Devices

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team highlights the new Graviton3-based images for users of AWS, new ways provided by Google to pay for its cloud services, the new partnership between Azure and the Finops Foundation, as well as Oracle’s new cloud banking, and the automation of CCOE.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS: Users now have access to the new Graviton3-based images.
GCP: Google provides new ways to pay for Google Cloud Service.
Azure: Microsoft becomes a premier member of the Governing board at the Finops Foundation.
Oracle: Oracle introduces Oracle Banking Cloud Services

Top Quotes

“It’s important to sort of have that structure; even if you’re starting with a single account or project, you want to make sure you’re building something that can grow to multiples as you keep it”
“There’s lots of things that you want to probably be automating; all the policies, all the governance, how you validate membership… that should all be really thought about from an automation perspective from day one”

AWS: Users now have access to the new Graviton3-based images.

New Graviton3-Based General Purpose (m7g) and Memory-Optimized (r7g) Amazon EC2 Instances
The new M7g and R7g come in medium to 16xlarge.

GCP: Google provides new ways to pay for Google Cloud Service.

0⃣ Introducing new cloud services and pricing for ultimate flexibility
Flex Agreements and Flexible Cuds were also announced in relation to this.

Azure: Microsoft becomes a premier member of the Governing board at the Finops Foundation.

0⃣ Microsoft joins the FinOps Foundation
Azure hopes to define specifications and help evolve best practices globally

Oracle: Oracle introduces Oracle Banking Cloud Services.

0⃣ Redefining Banking SaaS—Introducing Oracle Banking Cloud Services
Their approach is defined by 9 core elements related to security, resilience, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and others. .

The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE)

This final installment of CCOE focuses on automating the CCOE and tracking CCOE metrics for adoption.
Tagging is a crucial part of the security, access, or cost management strategy, which should be developed early, and as such cloud resources should be retrofitted for it and older ones should be tagged.
One of the ways for a CCOE to demonstrate its value through automation is the metrics of adoption.

Other Headlines Mentioned:

199: All AI Products Agree, Earnings are down Feb 17, 2023

AI Products & Earnings

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team talks about the announcement of Amazon VPC resource map, Google’s new AI product, the new Bing AI-powered search engine, and why multiple accounts are necessary for data centers to carry out work seamlessly in the cloud.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS: AWS announces Amazon VPC resource map
GCP: Sundar introduces Google’s new AI product, Google Bard.
Azure: Microsoft announces the resurgence of Bing now powered by Open AI and Edge browser.

Top Quotes

“How was Google the first one to start looking into AI and still be late to the market?”
“That’s why you have a center of excellence; they’re positioned centrally to be able to orchestrate all the different moving parts and be able to facilitate the communication between all the different projects and parts of not only your business but also your cloud provider’s business as well”
“I think it’s important to not try to answer the next ten years of problems but also to try to build in circuit breakers or flexibility into your designs so that you can quickly adapt”

AWS: AWS announces Amazon VPC resource map.

New – Visualize Your VPC Resources from Amazon VPC Creation Experience
This feature shows users their existing VPC resources and routing on a single page in order to simplify VPC creation on AWS.

GCP: Sundar introduces Google’s new AI product, Google Bard.

0⃣ An important next step on our AI journey
It is a conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, being made available to trusted testers before the public.

Azure: Microsoft announces the resurgence of Bing now powered by Open AI and Edge browser.

0⃣ Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge, your copilot for the web
The new Bing search engine will include a new chat experience and better search with complete answers, as well as other features.

The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE)

The complexity of the workload being managed at data centers makes multiple accounts imperative for ease of processing.
Despite the evolution in projects and accounts, there are some poorly thought out aspects, for example, shared VPC.
The onus is on cloud users to identify what they need to communicate intrasystem and what they can have in complete isolation.

Other Headlines Mentioned:

Google suffered ‘pullback’ in ad spending over holidays, Alphabet stock falls after earnings

TCP-Talks: A New Approach to Spatial Simulations with Rahul Thakkar Feb 15, 2023

Spatial Simulations with AWS SimSpace Weaver

In this episode, Peter sits with Rahul Thakkar to discuss the revolutionary AWS SimSpace Weaver, highlighting its unique function and applications across several industries.

Rahul Thakkar is the Director and General Manager of Simulation Technologies at Amazon Web Services. Before AWS, he held multiple executive roles at Boeing, Brivo, PIXIA, and DreamWorks Animation. He is an inventor, and global technology executive with a background in cloud computing, distributed and high-performance computing, media and entertainment, film, television, defense and intelligence, aerospace, and access control.

His film credits include Shrek, Antz, and Legend of Bagger Vance. In 2002, he was part of the team that won an Academy Award for Shrek as the Best Animated Feature. Again in 2016, at the 88th Annual Academy Awards, Thakkar received a Technical Achievement Award.

Notes

AWS SimSpace Weaver enables customers to run extremely large-scale spatial simulations without having to manage any of the underlying infrastructure. It also removes the complexity of state management of entities as they move about the simulation. Previously, carrying out such simulations would be done sequentially, in a cumbersome manner over years but now it can be done in parallel in weeks. Different organizations have tried out this functionality for several scenarios and the results have been amazing. This value was largely made possible due to the approach of working with customer feedback.

Rahul’s interest in the cloud came much later in his career which started initially in the R&D department of the Motion Picture industry where he created many of the complex graphics in movies. He later moved into a small start-up that was developing technologies for satellite imagery and mapping, and from here he moved to aerospace. Generally, he observed the problem that it is very expensive for companies to maintain their infrastructure when dealing with simulations. It also would drain resources and distract from the main focus of the company. Eventually, knew he had to use AWS, and now he works with them.

All the other primitive tools within AWS are being consumed to build the service. There is also the ability to write to S3 so that customers can write the simulations out. This helps customers to remember how the simulation played out.

Relating this new service to the metaverse, Rahul believes that when it comes to the metaverse, each organization has its vision of what it should be. However, AWS built the tools to empower these organizations to build their metaverses. Despite the possibility of having competition from Azure or GCP, the focus of AWS would remain on the customer and their needs, innovation on their behalf.

Identifying new problems that the service would be very applicable for is a great challenge that AWS relies on customers for, to help AWS envision where they want to go with the service. There are definitely many companies running simulations but it is hard to predict how many would migrate to the AWS SimSpace Weaver because it is still a new product. Nonetheless, a lot of industries are interested in this new service. These include smart cities, organizations ranging from local to federal or international, logistics and supply chains, large-scale event planning, or any situation where there is a need to simulate a large problem with digital replicas of the real world.

Top Quotes

“The fact that we worked from the customer backwards is something that allowed us to deliver the kind of value that they’re getting right now with AWS SimSpace Weaver”

TCP Talks: Applying and Maximizing Observability with Christine Yen Feb 14, 2023

Applying and Maximizing Observability

In this episode, Christine talks about her company, Honeycomb which runs on AWS, with the goal of promoting observability for clients interested in the performance of their code or those trying to identify problem areas that need to be corrected.

Christine Yen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Honeycomb. Before founding Honeycomb, she built analytics products at Parse/Facebook and loved writing software to separate signals from noise. Christine delights in being a developer in a room full of ops folks. Outside of work, Christine is kept busy by her two dogs and wants your sci-fi & fantasy book recommendations.

Notes

Honeycomb is an observability platform that helps customers understand why their code is behaving differently from what they expected. The inspiration behind this software came after Christine’s previous company was acquired by Facebook and they realized how software made it very easy to identify problems in large code data within a short time. This encouraged them to build the tool and make it available to all engineers.

If the first wave of DevOps was Ops-people learning how to automate their working code, the second wave would be helping developers learn to operate their code. Honeycomb is designed intentionally to ensure that all types of engineers can make sense of the tool.

Honeycomb has always come up with ways for customers to use AWS products and get the data reflected in Honeycomb to be manipulated. Over the last few months, they have ensured that it is possible for clients to plug into CloudWatch Log and CloudWatch metrics, and redirect data directly from AWS products into Honeycomb instead. Clients can also use Honeycomb to extract data based on what their applications are doing. This applies to performance optimization, experimentation, or any situation where a company wants to try a code to see how it performs on production. The focus remains on the application layer. Before Honeycomb, no one was using observability in this context.

The pricing of Honeycomb is based on the volume of data, which makes it predictable and understandable. Unlike when the pricing scale is based on the fidelity of the data, which can be quite expensive.

Challenges within the observability space: The question is how to help new engineers learn from the seasoned engineers on the team through paper trails left by the seasoned engineers. This is a problem that can only be solved by enabling teams to orient new engineers on their systems without having to create another question as part of the code.

Building an AI Approach in Honeycomb may not be suitable because of the context involved, since training effective machine learning models relies on a vast amount of easily classifiable data and this does not apply in the world of software; every engineering team’s systems are different from every other engineering team’s systems. Honeycomb is interested in using Al to build these models in order to help users know what questions to ask.

With Honeycomb, usage patterns are much more dependent on the curiosity and proficiency of the engineering team; while some engineers who are used to getting answers directly may just leave the software, those who have a culture of asking questions will benefit more from it.

Top Quotes

“Not having to predict ahead of time what matters, is making such a difference in our ability as engineers to get ahead of issues, identify them quickly, resolve them”
“We’re out of a world where any individual engineer holds the entire system in their head”
“Observability is the only way forward as we make our worlds ever less predictable”

198: Cloudtrail ingests activity events, CloudPod ingests Pizza Feb 09, 2023

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the upcoming 2023 in-person Google Cloud conference, the accessibility of AWS CloudTrail Lake for non-AWS activity events, the new updates from Azure Chaos studio, and the comparison between Oracle Cloud service and other Cloud providers. They also highlight the application and importance of VPCs in CCOE.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS: AWS CloudTrail Lake now allows users to consolidate, immutably store, and analyze activity events from non-AWS sources.
GCP: Google Cloud 2023 Next conference will be in-person.
Azure: New updates are available in the Azure Chaos studio.
Oracle: Oracle creates a page comparing its cloud services with AWS and others.

Top Quotes

“A transit gateway effectively is saying we’re going to let you make multiple VPCs into one VPC, which is awesome”
“When you’re designing VPC networking, make sure you’re aware of the cost involved in cross-zone communication because it’s not free and it can be quite significant”

AWS: AWS CloudTrail Lake now allows users to analyze activity events from non-AWS sources.

New – AWS CloudTrail Lake Supports Ingesting Activity Events From Non-AWS Sources
Initially, AWS cloud lake was a service to access, analyze and store user and API activity from AWS as a source, but now users can set up custom events or integrate with other providers.

GCP: Google Cloud 2023 Next conference will be in-person.

0⃣ Google Cloud Next
This will be the first in-person Next conference since 2019.

Azure: New updates are available in the Azure Chaos studio.

0⃣ Chaos studio – Public preview updates for January 2023 
These updates include the availability of dynamic targeting, enabling service tags, VMSS SHutdown 2.0, and others.

Oracle: Oracle creates a page comparing its cloud services with AWS and others.

0⃣ Compare cloud services across OCI and other cloud providers, highlighting its equivalents to AWS, Azure and GCP

The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE)

VPC means Virtual Private Cloud and is a service tied to almost every aspect of the cloud, especially in AWS.
Security requirements are crucial to consider with VPCs which would include ACLs and VPC Flow Logs.
Another consideration for VPCs is connectivity back to your private data center which may be through a VPN connection or a direct connect point-to-point from a third party or your data center into the cloud provider itself.

Other Headlines Mentioned:

197: AWS throws another $35B on the tire fire in us-east-1 Feb 02, 2023

196: The Cloud Pod plays with all the stuff it found in the cleanroom Jan 27, 2023

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team sits to talk about AWS’s new patching policies, the general availability of Azure OpenAI, and the role of addressing IM or access management challenges in ensuring the seamless transition to the Cloud.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS announces new patching policies,
Azure OpenAI service is now generally available.
IM/Access Management in CCOE…

Top Quotes

“I think it(access management) should be the first challenge that’s tackled, and I usually try to approach it as such but it’s also sort of hard to do when it starts off as an experiment…and you have to retrofit it in”

AWS: Announcement of new patching policies

AWS Systems Manager announces Patch Policies, enabling cross account and cross Region patching
This allows users to deploy policies to enforce patch compliance across their AWS accounts and regions…

Azure: Azure OPN AI service is now generally available.

0⃣ General availability of Azure OpenAI Service expands access to large, advanced AI models with added enterprise benefits
0⃣ This is Close to Jonathan’s prediction that Azure will launch a ChatGPT service, and more businesses can now access the most advanced AI models with pricing based on the mode of use..

The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE)

IM or Access management should be the first area people look at and the first challenge to be tackled, while also defining data protection boundaries.
CCOE also provides the opportunity to identify activities in production that are unnecessary and should be changed.
Permissions are the least important part of your IM journey; permissions change and would need to be evaluated continually.

Other Headlines Mentioned:

195: The Cloud Pod can’t wait for Azure Ultra Fungible Storage (Premium)! Jan 20, 2023

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon announces massive corporate and tech lay offs and S3 Encrypts New Objects By Default, BigQuery multi-statement transactions are now generally available, and Microsoft announces acquisition of Fungible to accelerate datacenter innovation.

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News:

Amazon to lay off 18,000 corporate and tech workers. [1:11]

Episode Highlights

Top Quote

“And it’s interesting that, you know, the way they’re phrasing this where it’s, you know, it’s it’s moving these traditional things that have been in relational databases for a long time, but it’s the it’s the, the analytical, sort of big data sort of offerings, and it’s interesting to see how that transforms over time.” [15:16]

AWS

GCP

Announcing the GA of BigQuery multi-statement transactions. [13:04]

Azure

194: The Cloud Pods New Years Resolution: Change everything! Jan 10, 2023

For our New Years Resolution, we decided to change some of our show. First, we have cut the lightning round in favor of our new Cloud Journey series, where we will talk about core cloud concepts over several episodes. We are also covering only the larger stories from the cloud providers, we still want to provide you with all of the news, so you’ll find it in the show notes; if you enjoy the aggregation, subscribe to our newsletter to get the show notes to get your mailbox weekly. Share your feedback through our website or join our slack team.

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team follows up on the news from Salesforce’s last episode, as workforce cuts ensue as a fallout of the noted decline in productivity, with more on 2023 predictions from Peter, including general expectations in the tech space, while also highlighting the new Graph-explorer tool by Amazon Neptune, GCP security trends for the coming year, the CES Conference and CCOE from the new Cloud Journey Series.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions focused on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS: Amazon Neptune announces a new open-source low-code visual exploration tool, the Graph-explorer.
GCP releases an article on security trends to expect in 2023.
The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE)

Top Quotes

“A lot of traditional security operations has been at the infrastructure level; tracking packets and using the header information of those packets for identification, and none of that really works on cloud anymore”
“It’s not just how to use cloud technology, which is what the IT teams were focused on, it’s how do you provide the value of cloud into your business and succeed?”
“Understanding the advantages of why you want to adopt Cloud is really important for a business, even before they start the CCOE”

Follow up:

After discussing Salesforce and their “less productive” employees a few weeks ago, Salesforce has followed up by laying off 10% of their workforce.
After missing last week’s episode, Peter shares his 2023 prediction; The recession will be more severe than expected, resulting in significant layoffs as companies are forced to get more competitive with automated solutions.
Peter’s favorite announcement for 2022; Aurora Serverless V2

5 things to look out for in tech

Five Things to Watch in Tech 2023
Big Changes ahead in 2023 for big tech with poor valuations, justifying their software against slashing budgets and the next big thing; is it AI, AR, VR?

AWS: Amazon Neptune announces Graph-explorer

193: The cloud pod was less productive in 2022 Dec 29, 2022

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team wraps up 2022 so far, comparing predictions made with the events so far while projecting into 2023 as the year comes to a close. They discuss the S3 security changes coming from Amazon, the new control plane connectivity options with GCP, and Microsoft’s achievement, finally topping a list within the cloud space.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Starting in April, Amazon will change defaults around S3 security.
The new control plane connectivity and isolation options are coming to GKE clusters
Finally, Microsoft is Number #1 In a Cloud Thing.
Salesforce Founder, Marc Benioff says employees hired during the pandemic are facing much lower productivity.
Open AI’s new chat AI and AI playground create much buzz but with high compute costs, it will be monetized soon.
A lookback at 2022 predictions by our hosts, none of which came true.
The team gives 2023 predictions surrounding Microsoft, data Sovereignty and AI and No-code solution convergence

Top Quotes

“The problem with low-code No-code… is that the gap between those solutions and the bespoke development that you typically would meet is mountains of distance but with this [Open AI’s new chat AI] ..now I just have to tell the computer what I’m trying to do…and then the computer can determine what type of code to write for that”

2023 Predictions

Jonathan: Microsoft will release in preview of an Azure branded Chat GPT
Justin: Data Sovereignty will drive single panes of glass against multi-cloud
Ryan: An influx of all of the AI and No-Code solution convergence

Favorite Announcements

Ryan

Justin

Jonathan

192: The Empire strikes back and picks all the clouds for DOD Contract Dec 22, 2022

On The Cloud Pod the team reviews the multi-billion-dollar DOD contract formerly known as Jedi awarded to big tech companies; Microsoft buys a stake in LSE, raising questions; Werner shares his 2023 tech predictions and posts the Distributed Computing manifesto to his blog; and lastly, at Azure, Bell hits bumps while trying to make Microsoft safer.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

The Pentagon awards a cloud-computing contract that can reach up to $9 billion in total through 2028 to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.
Microsoft buys 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange
AWS: Werner posts the Distributed Computing Manifesto to his blog All Things Distributed and shares his 2023 tech predictions.
GCP: Break down data silos with the new cross-cloud transfer feature of BigQuery Omni
Azure: Bell hits obstacles in his push to make Microsoft more secure as feedback suggests the bar is being set too high.

Top Quotes

“The long and the short of it is that slowly over time, the ship date when buying something on Amazon or anywhere else gets closer to real-time and the cost to get it to you gets lower”
“All software has defects since it’s created and configured by humans, [But] the pattern of security incidents [and] defects in Azure reported by third parties and the related severity suggests that even Microsoft is challenged in adopting proper security controls in cloud-native development pipelines, like many enterprises.”

AWS: ALL THINGS DISTRIBUTED – WERNER VOGELS’ BLOG

Werner posted the Distributed Computing Manifesto to his blog “All Things Distributed”.
The manifesto highlights the challenges Amazon was facing at the end of the 20th century, and hints at where it was headed.
He also shared his 2023 tech predictions on the blog involving cloud technology, simulated worlds, silicone chips supply chain transformation, and smart energy..

GCP: Break down data silos with the new cross-cloud transfer feature of BigQuery Omni

0⃣ GCP launched big query Omni in 2021 to help customers break down data silos.
They have now added support for SQL-supported Load Statements that allowed AWS/Azure Blob data to be brought into big query as a managed table for advanced analysis.
Feedback confirms improvements in usability, security, latency, and cost audibility.

Azure: Bell hits obstacles in his push to make Microsoft more secure.

After spending 23 years at Amazon, Charlie Bell, the most senior cybersecurity executive now at Microsoft, faces resistance to preventing and responding to software vulnerabilities believing that he was setting the bar too high.
If there are flaws in the software they write that leads to vulnerabilities for downtime, developers in bell’s unit can expect to be paged and asked to fix it. This is long-standing practice at AWS but a new concep

191: The Cloud Pod Reinvents the Recap Show Dec 14, 2022

The Cloud Pod recaps all of the positives and negatives of Amazon ReInvent 2022, the annual conference in Las Vegas, bringing together 50,000 cloud computing professionals. This year’s keynote speakers include Adam Selpisky, CEO of Amazon Web Services, Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Data and Machine Learning at AWS and Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO. Attendees and web viewers were treated to new features and products, such as AWS Lambda Snapstart for Java Functions, New Quicksight capabilities and quality-of-life improvements to hundreds of services. Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, Peter and Special guest Joe Daly from the Finops foundation talk about the show and the announcements.

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Episode Highlights

AWS Pricing Calculator now supports modernization cost estimates for Microsoft workloads.
AWS Re:Invent 2022 announcements and keynote updates.

Top Quote

“But if I’m putting my business data into another data lake, and I want to use the business data to inform my security data, I now have to cross the lakes to even make this connection to get that data set. So I agree with you on a pure security basis in the open schema for security data is really great. My issue is that you’re putting borders around these lakes, when you really want to bring the data together and be able to hydrate across. That’s why we have enterprise data, we analyze data warehouses, where we have all these things to bring this data together, add context to data. And I feel like this is just more removing context.” [37:20]

AWS: Amazon Goes to India

REINVENT RECAP

DAY 1 KEYNOTE: Peter DeSantis [19:11]

Compute [19:42]

Announcing AWS Lambda SnapStart for Java functions.

190: Finally a Crowdsourced re:Invent Prediction Show Nov 22, 2022

RE:INVENT NOTICE

Jonathan, Ryan and Justin will be live streaming the major keynotes starting Monday Night, followed by Adam’s keynote on Tuesday, Swami’s keynote on Wednesday and Wrap up our Re:Invent coverage with Werner’s keynote on Thursday. Tune into our live stream here on the site or via Twitch/Twitter, etc.

On The Cloud Pod this week, a new AWS region is open in Spain and NBA and Microsoft team up to transform fan experiences with cloud application modernization.

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News [0:04]

CDK for Terraform 0.14 Makes it Easier to Use Providers

Episode Highlights

Top Quote

“When we set this up, they still called you by voice and you had to validate when it took up to an hour to support case. And yeah, it would take forever. Like, not only did it take you to an hour, there’s like 10 things you needed to do with a root account that you couldn’t do with an im account. Yeah, it was brutal back then.” [9:27]

AWS: Amazon Goes to Spain

189: The CloudPod Celebrates AWS Becoming a New Time Lord Nov 22, 2022

RE:INVENT NOTICE

Jonathan, Ryan and Justin will be live streaming the major keynotes starting Monday Night, followed by Adam’s keynote on Tuesday, Swami’s keynote on Wednesday and Wrap up our Re:Invent coverage with Werner’s keynote on Thursday. Tune into our live stream here on the site or via Twitch/Twitter, etc.

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon Time Sync is now available over the internet as a public NTP service, Amazon announces ECS Task Scale-in protection, and Private Marketplace is now in preview.

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Episode Highlights

Top Quote

“And then those companies say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to performance tests and regression tests and load tests.’ Or, or, ‘It’s not broken, I don’t want to fix it.’ You know, and so they just sit there paying more money because it’s not worth the risk.” [10:37]

AWS: Time for Amazon

188: The CloudPod thinks the AWS Switzerland region is a big plus Nov 15, 2022

On a slow news week, we talk about the new AWS Switzerland region, Googles 2022 State of Devops report and GCP gets those flexible committed use discounts!

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News [4:02]

Announcing the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report: A deep dive into security.

Episode Highlights

Top Quote

“Back when you only had the option of on demand or reserved instances, and you do the math… And if you run the thing, basically more than 40 hours a week, you might as well buy the Ri. You’re not getting any benefit of scaling anyway, at that point. So this is this is so much better, you get the benefit of committing to an aggregate use and the discount to that with the benefit of turning stuff off when you’re not using it.” [32:24]

AWS: Amazon Isn’t Neutral About Switzerland

AWS opens a new region–its 28th– in Switzerland. [19:29]
Quickly find resources in your AWS account with new Resource Explorer. [21:55]

GCP: Google Is Committed To Their Flexibility

Announcing MongoDB connector for Apigee Integration. [24:40]
GCP unveils flexible committed use discounts. [28:15]

Azure: Azure Needs No Downtime

0⃣ Zero downtime migration for Azure Front Door—now in preview. [33:57]

TCP Lightning Round (Justin 8, Ryan 7, Jonathan 4, Peter 0) [35:09]

187: Google Blockchain Engine – A Day Late and a Bitcoin Short Nov 10, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon announces Neptune Serverless, Google introduces Google Blockchain Node Engine, and we get some cost management updates from Microsoft.

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

General News [1:24]

Episode Highlights

Amazon announces Neptune Serverless.
Google introduces Blockchain Node Engine
Cost management updates from Microsoft.

Top Quote

“Google Cloud is an important partner to HashiCorp, and our enterprise customers use HashiCorp Terraform and Google Cloud to deploy mission critical infrastructure at scale. With 70 million downloads of the Terraform Google Provider this year and growing, we’re excited to collaborate closely with Google Cloud to offer our joint customers a seamless experience which we believe will significantly enhance their experience on Google Cloud.” – Burzin Patel, HashiCorp VP, Global Partner Alliances. [39:38]

AWS: Amazon Goes to Neptune

Announcing Amazon Neptune Serverless – A fully managed

186: Google Cloud Next, More Like Google Cloud Passed Oct 31, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances for high-performance model training are now available, 123 new things were announced at Google Cloud Next ‘22, Several new Azure capabilities were announced at Microsoft Ignite, and many new announcements were made at Oracle CloudWorld.

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Episode Highlights

Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances for high-performance model training are now available.
123 new things were announced at Google Cloud Next ‘22.
Several new Azure capabilities were announced at Microsoft Ignite.
Many new announcements from Oracle CloudWorld.

Top Quote

“We are pleased to have co-designed the first ASIC Infrastructure Processing Unit with Google Cloud, which has now launched in the new C3 machine series. A first of its kind in any public cloud, C3 VMs will run workloads on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors while they free up programmable packet processing to the IPUs securely at line rates of 200Gb/s. This Intel and Google collaboration enables customers through infrastructure that is more secure, flexible, and performant.” – Nick McKeown, Senior Vice President, Intel Fellow and General Manager of Network and Edge Group. [35:26]

AWS: Increasing Your Large-Scale Distribution

Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances for high-performance model training are now available. [1:55]
AWS launches new local zones in Taipei and Delhi. [3:29]
A new cost explorer console experience was just announced, and it’s Justin approved. [4:26]
Amazon Connect Cases is now generally available. [6:40]

GCP: What Will They Announce Next?

You can now manage storage costs by automatically deleting expired data using Firestore Time-To-Live (TTL). [9:23]
123 new things were ann

185: The Cloud Pod is flush with cache! Oct 14, 2022

Episode 185: The Cloud Pod is flush with Cache!

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon introduces their new file cache for on premises systems, Google introduces GKE Autopilot, and Azure helps you strengthen your security even more.

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Episode Highlights

Top Quote

“I get the feeling that the multiple tenancy, in a way is probably the selling point here. That as you acquire new companies, or as you bring on new partners dynamically, it’s easier to integrate those IDPs. Whereas previously, it’s been pretty difficult to to have multiple sources of identity, I guess it sort of abstracts those and provides a single layer to the Google identity service.” [22:07”

General News:

We will not be recording during the week of Google Cloud Next, so our episodes will be slightly delayed–fear not, we’re recording an episode immediately after Next so we can deliver your weekly dose of cloud news ASAP.

AWS: All About the Cache

I ntroducing Amazon File Cache, the new AWS cache for on-premises file systems. [1:28]
Amazon WorkSpaces introduces Ubuntu Desktops, with per month or per hour pricing. [5:35]
AWS announces Amazon WorkSpaces Core, their new fully managed VDI service. [11:00]

GCP: Put Your Work on Autopilot?

Azure: Budget Updates on the Go!

Strengthen your security with Polic

184: The CloudPod Explicitly trusts itself Sep 28, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS announces an update to IAM role trust policy behavior, Easily Collect Vehicle Data and Send to the Cloud with new AWS IoT FleetWise, now generally available, Get a head start with no-cost learning challenges before Google Next ‘22.

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Episode Highlights

AWS announces an update to IAM role trust policy behavior.
Easily Collect Vehicle Data and Send to the Cloud with new AWS IoT FleetWise, now generally available.
Get a head start with no-cost learning challenges before Google Next ‘22.

General News:

Google Next is coming up in two weeks. [0:56]
Next week’s show will be sans Justin. [1:02]

AWS: More like “Announcement” Web Services

Easily Collect Vehicle Data and Send to the Cloud with new AWS IoT FleetWise, now generally available. [1:48]
AWS announces an update to IAM role trust policy behavior. [7:00]
Sticking with the theme of granularity, Amazon Route 53 announces support for DNS resource record set permissions. [16:29]
Amazon announces AWS DataSync Discovery in preview. [18:30]
Cloudwatch container insights now provides lifecycle events for ECS. [21:38]

GCP: Google Next Is Almost Here!

182: There Is a Wild Mandoogle Loose In the Theater Sep 23, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon SWF launches a new console experience, Google acquires Mandiant, and Azure Space has some new products coming your way soon.

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Episode Highlights

Amazon SWF just launched a new console experience for building distributed applications.
The Google acquisition of Mandiant (Mandoogle!) is finished.
Azure Space announced their next wave of products.

Top Quote

“The new certification is sort of interesting, because it’s a little bit more like the, the content isn’t new, right? But the certification is new. And so it’s an interesting metric. Like how do you, how do you ensure people are reviewing the content? You have these certifications that you measure on the completion of that? So like, it’s, I can see how it’s a little bit of like, weaponizing, you know, those metrics in order to like drive culture change, maybe within an org where there’s division over private cloud or public cloud? Or, you know, it just depends on what you want to do. But very interesting.” [17:04]

General News:

Hashi Corp announced that Consul Terraform Sync is generally available at the 0.7 release. [1:12]

AWS: More Like Amazon SWTF?

You’ve never heard of it, but Amazon SWF just launched a new console experience for building distributed applications. [4:20]
Amazon SNS launches a public preview of message data protection. [6:53]
Your containers will now be launching faster, thanks to Seekable OCI for lazy loading container images. [10:00]

GCP: Hey Siri, What Is a Mandoogle?

Google Cloud Next is less than one month away. Have you registered yet? [12:16]
The Cloud Digital Leader certification is bringing Cloud training to those of us who aren’t technically inclined. [14:56]
BeyondCorp Enterprise is giving you more ways to protect your corporate applications. [18:45]
The

183: The Cloud Pod competes for the Google Cloud Fly Cup Sep 22, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS Enterprise Support adds incident detection and response, the announcement of Google Cloud Spanner, and Oracle expands to Spain.

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Episode Highlights

Top Quote

“A very large percentage of MySQL HeatWave customers are AWS users who are migrating off Aurora. However, there are still some AWS customers who are not able to migrate to OCI. This is a service where the data plane, control plane and console are natively running on AWS. We have taken the MySQL HeatWave code and optimized it for AWS infrastructure.”

–Nipun Agarwal, senior vice president of MySQL, Database and HeatWave at Oracle.

General News:

Moving from Ruby to Go, Vagrant 2.3 Introduces Go Runtime. [0:58]

AWS: New Proactive Monitoring from AWS

AWS Enterprise Support adds incident detection and response. [2:01]
Helping to vastly reduce failover times, Amazon RDS Proxy adds support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server. [3:59]
Beginning October 11th, ACM public certificates will be issued by one of the Intermediate CA’s that AWS manages. [7:46]
AWS has announced direct VPC routing for AWS outposts. [10:23]
You can now d eploy your Amazon EKS Clusters Locally on AWS Outposts. [12:12]

GCP: Free Trial Here! Get Your Free Trial Here!

You can now get a 90-day free trial of Google Cloud Spanner. [14:04]
If you need a new way to protect your data, try Google introduced fine-grained access control for Cloud Spanner. [14:58]

181: You get a Tanzu, I get a Tanzu, EVERYONE GETS A TANZU Sep 07, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon announces Amazon Inspector’s new support of Windows OS for continual software vulnerability scanning of EC2 workloads, Google has several exciting announcements regarding Chronicle, Azure is announcing pretty much everything under the sun, and Oracle announces OCI Lake in beta.

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Episode Highlights

Amazon Inspector now supports Windows operating system (OS) for continual software vulnerability scanning of EC2 workloads.

Google makes 3 announcements about Chronicle.

Azure has three–yes, three–new releases this week.

Oracle announces OCI Lake in beta.

Top Quote

“The picture is still opaque of what the real value of this is going to be. But the fact that it’s out there is good or, you know… it’s the classic. “I’m leaving Amazon and I have worked on this code for five years and I like doing open source. So I can keep using it. It can be that classic move.”

General News:

Gartner published an article indicating that SaaS vendors will be using sustainability as a basis to raise their prices. [0:34]
The news out of VMWare this week can basically be summed up as: Tanzu, Tanzu, and more Tanzu. [2:38]

AWS: Scanning, scanning, scanning….

Amazon Event Ruler is becoming open source. [10:50]
Amazon Inspector now supports Windows operating system (OS) for continual software vulnerability scanning of EC2 workloads. [14:12]

GCP: Dear Diary, today I…

A Chronicle blog post diary, Google made several announcements [17:09]:

There are new ingestion metrics coming to Chronicle.

New YARA-L functionalities are coming that will allow you to apply more fine grained time based criteria into your detections.

The Chronicle native-VirusTotal augment widget is now available.

Azure: New Releases, New Releases Everywhere…

Azure Managed Grafana is now generally available. [19:39]
Enterprise-ready Azure Monitor change analysis capability released

180: Azure Data Explorer Says ‘All Your S3 Data are Belong to Us’ Aug 31, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, Amazon adds the ability to embed fine-grained visualizations directly onto web pages, Google offers pay-as-you-go pricing for Apigee customers, and Microsoft launches Arm-based Azure VMs that are powered by ampere chips.

Thank you to our sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides top notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world’s most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you’re having trouble hiring? Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

Episode Highlights

Fine-grained visualizations can now be embedded directly into your webpages and applications

Google is now offering pay-as-you-go pricing for its Apigee API customers

Microsoft launches Arm-based Azure VMs powered by ampere chips

Top Quote

“I think I feel like SimCity 2000 lied to me. By now we should have had satellites in space collecting solar power and beaming microwave energy down to us.”

General News:

Due to concerns about power shortages and availability of supplies, Microsoft and Amazon cancel several new planned data centers in Ireland. [1:18]

AWS: Adding Visuals to Your Apps Is Getting Even Easier…

Fine-grained visualizations can now be embedded directly into your webpages and applications thanks to Amazon QuickSight. [4:44]
Amazon’s announcement of the new AWS Support App for Slack is going to streamline management of technical, billing, and account support cases. [6:24]
AWS Security Hub is now publish announcements through Amazon SNS, and anyone can submit via the console or CLI. [8:37]
Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports email subscription for SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). [10:37]
Amazon CloudFront launches Origin Access Control (OAC), which helps more easily secure S3 origins. [11:08]
Your account login pages are becoming even more secure, thanks to AWS WAF Fraud Control. [12:38]
Amazon EKS Anywhere Curated Packages now generally available. [13:20]

179: Google Cloud Can’t Be DDoS’d Aug 24, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team weighs the merits of bitcoin mining versus hacking. Plus: AWS Trusted Advisor prioritizes Support customers, Google provides impenetrable protection from a major DDoS attack, and Oracle Linux 9 is truly unbreakable.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS Trusted Advisor offers a new Priority capability for Enterprise Support, offering a prioritized view of critical risks.
Nothing’s touching Google, as it blocks the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack to date, with a whopping 46 million requests per second (RPS).
The new Oracle Linux 9 comes with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7 (UEK R7) and Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK).

Top Quotes

“This is really just institutionalizing the knowledge that the Enterprise customers are already getting from their account team. And it probably really helps — in the event that the AWS account team experiences churn for those customers — not to be negatively impacted. It probably makes it really easy for new people on that AWS account team to come in and know where the other team left off. I don’t think it’s really a new feature — just a new way to access data that customers are already getting.”
“Ignoring those Tor nodes — which didn’t make a whole lot of traffic — that’s 12,000 requests a second per source IP, on average. That’s enormous.”

AWS: A Trusty Advisor’s Priorities

Finally, AWS has found a use for Mechanical Turk, with its new Priority capability for Trust Advisor.
If you’ve been curious about what’s happening during domain updates of the OpenSearch Service, you now get more visibility into validation errors during blue/green deployments.
Great news for license-holders and clearly by popular demand: RDS for Oracle now supports managed Oracle Data Guard Switchover and Automated Backups for read replicas.

GCP: Heavily Armored Cloud

Google Cloud is saying goodbye to its IoT Core service in 2023. How about instead of turning it off, just stop selling it?
You can benefit from operating system Committed Use Discounts (CUD) with workload predictability. Now, get some cuts on your SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) — with savings of up to 79%.
There’s much fanfare at Google, as it blocks the largest Layer 7 DDoS attack to date. It didn’t last long though, because the attackers gave up — probably deciding there was no value in continuing.

178: What’s in the Microsoft Dev Box? Aug 18, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team chats cloud region wars to establish the true victor. Plus: AWS Storage Day offers a blockhead badge, all the fun of the Microsoft Dev Box, and Google sends people back to sleep with its Cloud Monitoring snooze alert policy.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS Storage Day 2022 marks the fourth annual event streamed live on Twitch, with its File Cache service announcement and five new available learning badges.
Google now offers alert policy snoozing in Cloud Monitoring for maintenance or non-business hours.
Microsoft previews its Dev Box, a managed service enabling developers to create cloud workstations.

Top Quotes

“I found it completely shocking that this didn’t exist in AWS — that you only had enable/disable — when first moving over there. So this is a fantastic feature for Google Monitoring. I love it.”
“This seems like one of those things I’d like, but half the fun of starting a new project is installing a new version of Python or something that completely hoses my local laptop. And I spend the next three or four days frantically trying to undo what I’ve done that breaks six other things.”

AWS: It’s Storage Day!

AWS livestreamed its fourth annual Storage Day on Twitch, and Ryan is rather excited about getting his hands on that blockhead badge for core storage competency. Plus, the new File Cache service promises to accelerate and simplify hybrid cloud workloads.
Continue to be blown away by the theory of HTTP/3 (and if you’re like Ryan, dread the day you have to troubleshoot it), as Amazon CloudFront now supports it.
Now available in US regions (with a likely quick extension with increased adoption and understanding of the service): AWS Private 5G.
Amazon and Splunk co-announce the release of the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) project with a lot of partners… but (interestingly) no Elastic.
If you’ve been holding off on that move from Dockershim to the new launcher, now’s the time to do it before it’s too late: Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.23.
Apparently Amazon Cognito enables native support for AWS WAF, but we’re not entirely sure what they’re enabling here — it feels like something they should have already been doing.

GCP: Hitting the Snooze Button

Query Library offers new tools for increasing developer productivity. You should eventually be able to actually save your queries into a custom Query Library, but we’re still waiting on this.
A snooze, not a pause

177: The Cloud Pod Hopes That Amazon Knows the Three Laws of iRobots Aug 11, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team gets judicial on the Microsoft-Unity partnership. Plus: Amazon acquires iRobot, BigQuery boasts Zero-ETL for Bigtable data, and Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks is in public preview.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

iRobot signs an agreement with Amazon for its acquisition. To what end remains known to Amazon and Amazon alone.
Google offers a Zero-ETL approach for Bigtable data analytics using BigQuery.
Serverless SQL for Azure Databricks is now in public preview.

Top Quotes

“Almost all of Amazon’s big acquisitions have always been about something indirect. The Whole Foods acquisition was really about the logistics supply chain behind the scenes of moving that around — they kept the brand … and they have the same footprint for stores … but now they have a lot more infrastructure for AmazonFresh. And I suspect for iRobot it’s the same thing.”
“This is super handy for huge datasets where you want to track trends over a long time. It’s always really difficult and you always end up compromising somewhere — by not loading or querying your full dataset, because you can’t get it from A to B, or trying to run the query against two separate data sets and combining the results. So this is a nice thing to have for those users who have data across these multiple places.”

AWS: We, Robots

Those who hate working in Amazon warehouses might not have to have anything to complain about anymore, as Amazon agrees to acquire iRobot.
If you need to get up to speed with Graviton, you’ve now got Graviton Fast Start, which helps move workloads over to AWS.
VMware’s interesting cloud workload protection feels like a continued diversification away from virtualization as your main revenue stream.
CloudWatch Evidently, Amazon’s second product to help with feature flagging, adds support for creating target customer segments for feature launches and experiments. Neat!
In what seems like a cost-saving announcement, Lambda gets tiered pricing (but most enterprise customers already have this pricing experience).

GCP: It’s A Big World Out There

You can now benefit from a Zero-ETL approach for Bigtable data analytics using BigQuery.
An on-premises Windows workload nice-to-have offers support with Certificate Authority Service.
Second generation

176: The Cloud Pod Earnings Continue To Be Steady Aug 04, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses why Ryan’s yelling all day (hint: he’s learning). Plus: Peter misses the all-important cloud earnings, AWS Skill Builder subscriptions are now available, and Google Eventarc connects SaaS platforms.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Earnings time is upon us once again, and it’s apparently doom and gloom all around as tears of loss are wiped away with $100 bills.
AWS makes its Skill Builder subscriptions available with more than 500 courses and four new learning experiences. (The Cloud Pod is now registering signups for a virtual proctor while you take the test.)
Google Eventarc for events enthusiasts unifies and integrates supported SaaS platforms.

Top Quotes

“Teams is a huge focus. The last two years have been companies figuring out how to remote work for the first time ever. That’s not a sustainable thing — those two years’ growth is all just pandemic.”
“I do like the way that they’re presenting a lot of this training. I don’t learn well in the classroom setting — I learn by doing, so any kind of hands-on labs or the jams which I’ve done in person at re:Invent are better for me to learn the internet intricacies of different services. So I love this.”

General News: Earnings, Damned Earnings, and Negative Analysts

First up for reported earnings is Microsoft, where no one’s really hurting. (Wait until you see the other guys.)
Sadly, Google still hasn’t figured out how to make money on GCP. Ad revenue is down.
Amazon suffers slower demand amid another net loss. Rivian takes a big hit, so if you were hoping to see it turn around, it hasn’t.
Of course, all of this bad news means Google and Microsoft have scaled back hiring efforts. Coupled with high inflation and bad interest rates, an economic bloodbath in the next 12 months looms.
Oracle axes U.S. staff as part of a plan to lay off thousands — mainly in marketing and customer experience. This could signal a step back from opening so many new data centers.

AWS: Building Skills One Course at a Time

Handy new IPv6 support appears for AWS Global Accelerator.
Already five years too late, CDK for Terraform is now (finally) generally available.
Amazon OpenSearch Service gets a trifecta of boosts in the form of advanced log and application analytics,

175: AWS re:Inforces Their Dislike for OrcaSec Jul 28, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team gets skeptical on Prime Day numbers. Plus: AWS re:Inforce brings GuardDuty, Detective and Identity Center updates and announcements; Google Cloud says hola to Mexico with a new Latin American region; and Azure introduces its new cost API for EC and MCA customers.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS re:Inforce brings us Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Detective and IAM Identity Center releases, updates and name-changes for additional protection and headache.
Google Cloud adds a third Latin American data region to its collection — this time, in Mexico.
EA and MCA customers now benefit from Azure’s new Cost Details API for better HR and finance management.

Top Quotes

“This must always have been their plan. Amazon did not build that block Inspection Service just so that Orca could serve their own customers. They must have had an eye on the huge customer base of people using EBS Volumes to do this exact same thing. So it’s no surprise [as they’ve] had almost two years of sole ownership of the service to deliver this to customers. I’m not surprised at all to see an enhancement like this. And it’s awesome. Really.”
“Microsoft is in a lucky position, because the Windows ecosystem has been very services heavy for a long time. … They’ve got this unique position where they can deprecate … they can pivot to new APIs more quickly than AWS, who are stuck with so many customers [and it’s] very painful for them to deprecate … It’s lucky that [Microsoft] don’t have customers that would push back against this, because they’re used to constant change.”

AWS: re:Inforcing Prime Numbers

#⃣ There may well be some spin in Jeff Barr’s latest brag on behalf of Amazon for its Prime Day 2022. Impressive numbers nonetheless!
New malware detection for EBS Volumes with GuardDuty is the first of three announcements hot out of AWS re:Inforce — very similar to Orca Security malware snapshot and restore functions.
The second offering is Amazon Detective’s support for Kubernetes Workloads on EKS, for improved security investigations. There’s nothing not to like here, and it shows exactly why we use managed services.
Finally, the terribly named AWS IAM Identity Center — which you may remember was previously called AWS SSO — promises to scale your workforce access management. They could’ve called it “AWS Centaur,” but instead opted for two words that mean absolutely nothing.

GCP: Making US Automakers Happy One Latin American Region at a Time

Google Cloud says hola to Mexico, as it adds a third Latin American data region following Santiago, Chile, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. If there are further updates within the next three to four years, Ryan has kindly volunteered to be The Cloud Po

174: The Cloud Pod Goes the Distance With Rocky Linux Jul 20, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses facial recognition avoidance tactics. Plus: Waving farewell to CentOS 7 with the rise of Rocky Linux, Amazon traverses the new Cloudscape, and the U.K. heatwave spells disaster for Oracle and Google data centers.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

As CentOS is put out to pasture, say hello to Rocky Linux, named in honor of CentOS late co-founder Rocky McGaugh.
Cloudscape Design System is the latest AWS open source wonder for web application building.
The great British heatwave of 2022 burns Oracle and Google data centers to a crisp.

Top Quotes

“It answers the question of who we shout at if there’s a bug at zero day and the community doesn’t get around to fixing it. Now we can shout at Google.”
“It’s probably a sign of further issues to come unless they do some productive work. Because it’s one thing to … build a data center in Utah [where] it gets up to 45 degrees C and the sun’s heating the air under some land. And that’s a completely different situation than heating up Europe, which is … much less expected to have those kinds of temperatures so far north. … So it’s going to be time to invest in HVAC business.”

General News: The Best Data Lake Is the One With Your Boat on It

VentureBeat offers up its top 10 data lake solution vendors this year. If you also don’t know what a data lake is, fear not (it tells you).

AWS: Open Source Because They Can’t Sell It?

AWS suits up for battle against Microsoft and Google with its server chip. Fire up the Graviton!
Cost-saving automated and easily modifiable EBS Elastic Volumes are here. (Just watch out for a pesky potential price increase.)
The very cool VPC Flow Logs for Transit Gateway will make things much more efficient.
AWS announces neat new AppConfig Extensions. Step one: Enable feature. Step two: Figure it out yourself. Step three: Profit, profit, profit.
AWS goes open source with Cloudscape Design System for building web applications.
More epic work from Amazon as EC2 R6a Instances join the M6a and C6a club, now rolled out across all three primary node types. You’re welcome!

GCP: The Rise of Rocky

Stunned reactions all around here at The Cloud Pod:

173: Oracle Begins Its Invasion of Sovereign Nations Jul 13, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses shorting Jim Chanos amid the great cloud giant vs. colo standoff. Plus: Google prepares for a post-quantum world, Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are now generally available, and master of marketing Oracle introduces sovereign cloud regions for the European Union.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Future forward Google prepares for a post-quantum world, while most corporations won’t catch up for a long time.
Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are now generally available (so the hidden Mac Mini under that developer’s desk can finally be replaced).
Master of marketing Oracle introduces sovereign cloud regions for the European Union.

Top Quotes

“Quantum computing has been taken very seriously from a security perspective. Conservative estimates [are] 10 to 20 years before we have quantum computers large enough and reliable enough to run short algorithms to factor these large primes. But we’re starting … It’s going to take a long time for businesses to actually catch on and realize and modernize and adopt this before the bad things start to happen. If they ever do.”

“The big issue is from a federal government perspective: In a world where quantum computing can actually go through those primes fast enough and decrypt all this data … it’s a huge national security risk [and] a huge problem for the world. … Does it follow into the corporate world as quickly? No. Will it become a big issue when it happens? Hell yeah. There’ll be a Y2K-level disaster that we’ll have to be dealing with.”

General News: Walmart Muscles In

Will cloud giants really drive colos off a financial cliff? Big leagues short-seller and Enron prophesier Jim Chanos seems to think so… or maybe that’s all part of his plan.
Walmart saw that and said, Well, we’re doing it too: Their CTO claims they’re now the largest hybrid cloud in existence. Having 10,000 massive buildings at their disposal must be convenient.

AWS: New York, New York

EC2 M1 Mac instances are now generally available. Thanks to Apple’s licensing agreement, they have to be turned on for 24 hours minimum.
Identity and Access Management gets IAM Roles Anywhere for workloads outside of AWS, removing a huge and clunky obstacle to adoption. Awesome.
EC2 Auto Scaling customers can monitor their predictive scaling policy with Amazon CloudWatch, but we’re left wondering how to close the loop on having to monitor the monitoring service to make sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing.
If you’re a .NET developer leveraging AWS for all your compute needs, you’re in luck — there’s a streamli

172: The Cloud Pod Masquerades With GKE Autopilot Jul 07, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses data sovereignty for future space-customers. Plus: There’s a global cloud shortage, Google announces Apigee advanced API security, and GKE Autopilot gets new networking features.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Microsoft is the latest victim in a global cloud shortage, spinning it as a temporary issue fueled by surging Teams demand and rapid Azure growth.
Google announces Apigee Advanced API Security in a bid to defend against increased attacks and traffic volumes.
GKE Autopilot gets new network features in the form of IP masquerading and eBPF, now generally available.

Top Quotes

“The supply chain has been huge on a lot of people. You don’t hear so much from Amazon, and I don’t know if that’s related to the commerce site Amazon.com and the overprovisioning they did … If AWS went the same route and has a bunch of stock, cluster manufacturing their own chips, maybe they have a little bit more control. But everyone else is screwed.”
“In the article, it just says what you can do to detect bots. But some bots are the use case [you’re] selling to the world. … On the surface, it sounds logical, but there are some ‘gotchas’ that you need to be careful of if you’re doing B2B or doing things that look bot-ish.”

General News: All the Joy of the Crypto Crash

Apparently the tech talent crunch (not because we suck at running Kafka) is to blame for a 68% reliance on AWS managed services. Come on, VentureBeat, you can do better than this!
Microsoft is in the yellow zone because of a global cloud shortage, which it’s attributing to rapid Azure growth and increased Teams demand.

GCP: The Very Apigee of Security

Google announces Apigee Advanced API Security to help protect against increased attacks and traffic volumes. Seems more like a WAF function than a misconfiguration issue, though.
Go go go, Google: get more support for structured logs in the latest version of Go logging library.
Monitor your cloud metrics now in Managed Service for Prometheus. Allegedly, Cloud Native community members have an 86% chance of using Prometheus (we’re not so sure about that number.)
Say bonjour to the new Paris region, as the French government aims to make the nation cloud native.
GKE Autopilot’s new IP masquerading and eBPF network features are now generally available.

171: AWS Snowcones in Space Jun 30, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter finally returns with some beer-based bets about Amazon extending its TLS deadline. Plus: Terraform drift detection for managing infrastructure, chilling tales of Amazon’s CodeWhisperer ML advances, and Anthos on-premise options finally arrive for your platform of choice. Plus the cloud talks about AWS SNOWCONES in SPACE!!!!!!

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Terraform Cloud finally adds drift detection to help manage infrastructure, now generally available after its 2020 preview.
Amazon’s crazy “ML-powered coding companion,” CodeWhisperer, is here for our jobs.
Google expands its Distributed Cloud platform with Anthos on-premises options.

Top Quotes

“I’m surprised it’s taken so long. Because I mean, the reality is if you’re in a plan, and the plan doesn’t require any changes, then there’s been no drift. So what was the obstacle in delivering this as a feature sooner?”
“Not only they’re training their own machine learning models, but they’re also generating code. Not concerned at all.”

General News: Drifting in the Right Direction

While everyone’s been a little afraid to pull the trigger, HashiCorp announced drift detection in Terraform cloud, which is in a public beta. Pretty exciting!
HashiCorp also announced the launch and free public beta of HCP Boundary, but what’s their long-term vision?

AWS: Whispering Sweet Somethings to the Machine

SageMaker Ground Truth now supports synthetic data generation, promising to reduce time and training costs for model operations. Getting enough data to actually train a model could be hard… (fake it til you make it?)
Your new “ML-powered coding companion” CodeWhisperer now writes code for you. We’ve joked about it before, but Alexa really is one step away from upskilling to coding.
Peter’s betting two beers at his local pub on Amazon extending the deadline on this one: TLS 1.2 is to become the minimum TLS protocol level for all AWS API endpoints. There’s currently just under a year to get yourself sorted. Good luck!
Apparently, even space has (AWS) Snowcones: Amazon sends one to the International Space Station
As EKS improves control plane scaling and update speed by up to 4x, get ready for a lot of step function workload.
Imagine waiting 10 years for private IP VPNs… well, we did, and

170: The Cloud Pod Is Also Intentionally Paranoid Jun 23, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses Jonathan’s penance for his failures. Plus: Microsoft makes moves on non-competes, NDAs, salary disclosures, and a civil rights audit; AWS modernizes mainframe applications for cloud deployment; and AWS CEO Adam Selipsky chooses to be intentionally paranoid.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

The Balmer era is officially dead: Microsoft curbs non-competes, drops NDAs from worker settlements, disclose salary ranges, and even launches a civil rights audit.
AWS launches their new modernization service for mainframe applications, now deployable in fully managed AWS runtime environments.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky “choose[s] to be intentionally paranoid,” as he leads the company through turbulence.

Top Quotes

“We’ve talked about how garbage those [noncompetes] are, the problems they’ve had with them, executives leaving, Amazon going to Microsoft, then getting sued and all the mess of that. So I’m super glad they’re finally starting to see a tide swell change in technology where that’s no longer a thing.”
“I always felt like Amazon was going to just create a mainframe as a service offering — buy a bunch of IBM mainframes that they sell out to you — because that’s been a model of mainframe for a long time: CPU slicing, rentals and that kind of thing. But it seems like now they’re going to go down this other path where the answer is [that] you convert to a more modern architecture, which is interesting.”

General News: It’s a New Era

The times they are a-changin’, as Microsoft revises its position on non-competes, NDAs, and salary range disclosure, while launching a civil rights audit. Take that, Amazon!
Target CIO Mike McNamara jumps away from AWS with a scaled move toward multicloud architecture. Target allegedly has 4,000 engineers, which seems like a lot.
Archera vents via Venturebeat about the unmanageability of cloud costs, calling for standardized billing. While it might be helpful and even valuable, this seems a road too far traveled.

AWS: Modernized Mainframes and Intentional Paranoia

You can now take advantage of AWS’ new modernization service for mainframe applications, deployable in fully managed AWS runtime environments.
There are some nice enhancements for MGN, including DR configuration and Linux to Rocky Linux and SUSE Linux Subscription conversions.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky admits, “I choose to be intentionally paranoid,” as he leads the company into a turbulent

169: The CloudPod bounces back with Elastic Disaster Recovery Jun 08, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, half the team whizzes through the news in record time. Plus: AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, Google Distributed Cloud adds AI, ML and Database Solutions, and there’s another win for NetApp with Azure VMware Solution.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery now supports up to 300 staging and target accounts, which seems like a small number for some enterprises with thousands.
With the power of Anthos, Google Distributed Cloud adds AI, ML and Database Solutions — continuing the trend of service monetization regardless of host location.
Another win for NetApp, the home of choice for Azure VMware solutions optimization.

Top Quotes

“If you’re really doing auto scaling [and] traditional cloud native, you don’t use the service because you’ve already built it into your app. So this is for legacy IT operations like SAP, Oracle, and others. Three hundred or 3,000 covers small and medium business, but large enterprise has way more than that.”
“When Anthos first was announced, and Outpost for AWS, we talked about how likely it was that more and more cloud-native services were going to be made available anywhere, on any cloud, in any data center. It’s definitely a pattern of monetizing the services regardless of where they’re hosted.”

AWS: Bouncing Back From Disaster

Amazon EMR Serverless is now generally available, a cool feature running big data applications (and Outpost too). But it’s interesting that it’s been branded “serverless” when it’s clearly a managed service.
Elastic Disaster Recovery now supports 300 staging and target accounts, but we can’t help wondering how this helps the largest enterprises.
Step Functions launches a workflow-based interactive application workshop, and it looks like a golden age for developer experience is close at hand.
Amazon Route 53 announces IP-based routing for DNS queries, which is going to make things complicated. So preoccupied with whether or not they could integrate, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

GCP: Complexity on Top of Complexity

Google Chronicle offers context-aware detections, alert prioritization and risk scoring for its Security Operations. But wouldn’t you want to protect everybody from everything?
A boon for customer choice and flexibility: Google Distributed Cloud adds AI, ML and database solutions. On prem, running Kubernetes and Anthos? Justin loves this.
Yeehaw! Time to grab that 10-gallon hat an

168: The Cloud Pod Celebrates GCP Madrid Region With Sangria Jun 03, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the new Madrid region’s midday siesta shutdown. Plus: Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 billion, Azure gets paradigmatic with 5G, and you can now take the 2022 Google-DORA DevOps survey.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 billion, in one of the largest-ever acquisitions.
Google Cloud and DORA team up to bring us the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Survey.
Azure calls 5G a “paradigm,” but is it just hype?

Top Quotes

“This is an interesting reverse on the large cloud providers getting into the silicon business, which makes sense to me — that they want to control their supply chain and optimize. … Is Broadcom going to start becoming like a cloud provider? That’s interesting. I wouldn’t suspect that.”
“What [is Azure] trying to do? Are they trying to sell us on [5G]? Are they trying to change the way we develop? Because we’re just going to waste our time developing stuff that requires some of these things, and then the infrastructure is not going to be there to support it.”

General News: Diversifying the Portfolio

In one of the largest acquisitions ever (just shy of Dell’s EMC takeover at $67 billion and Microsoft’s Blizzard acquisition at $69 billion), Broadcom acquires VMware for $61 billion. This could have big implications for enterprise.

AWS: Need for Speed

If you need a lot of disk space to log transactions, you’re in luck: Amazon EC2 M6id and C6id instances buff up their storage by up to 7.6TB.
Ryan’s usually doing whatever he can to avoid this, but if you need Elastic Volumes and Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) support for io2 Block Express, you’ve now got it.

GCP: the State of DevOps in 2022

Why do IT leaders choose Google Cloud certification for their teams? In case you were wondering, here’s a puff piece with the answer.
If you need to change streams with Cloud Spanner, you can now do so. A cool feature, but it does need to be by email (there’s no homing pigeon option… yet).
If you want to learn a whole bunch of irrelevant HPC jargon, this is the blog post for you.
You can now take the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Survey, launched by Google

167: The Cloud Pod Gets Sucked In by the Graviton3 May 25, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team talks tactics for infiltrating the new Google Cloud center in Ohio. Plus: AWS goes sci-fi with the new Graviton3 processors, the new GKE cost estimator calculates the value of your soul, and Microsoft builds the metaverse.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS fires up the Graviton3 processors for some big energy savings.
Google develops the new GKE cost estimator for people who aren’t curious about cost.
Microsoft Build comes out of nowhere to deliver awesome, scary AI-driven tools with much mention of metaverse (yuck).

Top Quotes

“This feature isn’t developed for you because you’re curious about the cost. This is developed specifically for the people who are not curious about the cost. It’s a big red number. When they’re doing the deployment, it’s like, oh, I should probably not do that.”
“I cannot wait for the robot overlords to completely school me at code. This is gonna be hilarious… and frightening.”

General News: HashiCorp Extends Its Reach

Ryan is slightly embarrassed by how much he’s excited about the new HCL Extension for Visual Studio Code 0.1 announcement.

AWS: Abiding by the Laws of Graviton3

Storage company NetApp continues to buck industry trends with Backup and FSx support for ONTAP. Don’t forget to check out the TCP Talks interview with Anthony Lye, Executive VP and General Manager of NetApp.
New AWS-designed Graviton3 Processors power Amazon EC2 C7g Instances, now generally available.
Control Tower now supports concurrent operations for preventive guardrails. Awesome if you’re just starting, tougher if you’ve been at it for a while.
If you’ve been waiting for Kendra to give you something you actually cared about in dev, here you go: Jira connector enables document search on Jira repository.
Great news: Incident Manager expands support for runbook automation. We love announcements like these.
Ryan now has even less excuse for not trying Resilience Hub, after it adds support for Terraform, Amazon ECS and more.
Once again, AWS admits that multicloud is a real thing, with

166: The Cloud Pod Eagerly Awaits the Microsoft Pay Increase May 18, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team struggles with scheduling to get everyone in the same room for just one week. Plus, Microsoft increases pay for talent retention while changing licensing for European Cloud Providers, Google Cloud introduces AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, and AWS announces EC2 support for NitroTPM.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Big changes are afoot with Microsoft on both pay and European licensing fronts.
A very busy Google finds time to release AlloyDB for PostgreSQL.
NitroTPM gets Amazon EC2 support.

Top Quotes

“I hope that it’s the exact opposite of TK and Google Cloud — that they’re really focused on the values and the culture and providing meaningful work. Especially during the last year in the pandemic, a lot of people have realized there’s a lot of different priorities; that money is good — it doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys a lot of things that can make me happy — but it’s getting that fulfillment, and enrichment is also super important. Not just a slog.”
“The problem is they’re not building power plants fast enough to support all of the power demand they have in this country. So there’s a possibility that these cloud providers may get pushback on building data centers in the region, which can have a huge detrimental impact. So keep an eye on that.”

AWS: Some Dynamite Announcements

AWS teams up with IBM in a SaaS-based partnership. Interesting that it’s IBM, but money talks, and there’s no better time to do it.
EC2 now supports NitroTPM and UEFI Secure Boot, which is an interesting pivot for the security-minded.
Open source supply chain security gets a nice big $10 million investment from AWS.
If you need the functionality, you’ve got some nice EKS Anywhere curated software packages to choose from, which are now in public preview.
CloudWatch improves the console experience, which no one really wants. There’s a lot more Amazon can be doing.

GCP: Busy Little Bees

AlloyDB for PostgreSQL promises freedom from expensive legacy databases. Here’s to hoping it works.

164: The Cloud Pod SWIFT-ly Moves Its Money to Google Cloud May 11, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter’s been suspended without pay for two weeks for not filing his vacation requests in triplicate. Plus it’s earnings season once again, there’s a major Google and SWIFT collaboration afoot, and MSK Serverless is now generally available, making Kafka management fairly hassle-free.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Earnings season is upon us once again, with billions earned and lost. Who are the winners?
MSK Serverless is now generally available as a boon for Kafka management.
Google and SWIFT uproot the financial world in announcing a huge cloud-based collaboration.

Top Quotes

“It’s hard to call a 32% increase for Azure earnings a slowdown, but it is definitely slower than what they saw in 2021 and the boom of the pandemic. But the overall trend is everyone’s gonna keep adopting cloud hyperscalers to host their infrastructure.”
“The important thing about this is that it’s signaling a change in compliance controls; all these financial organizations with very traditionally physical hardware in Iraq in the data center [had] no way to move to the cloud. So whether it’s through advocacy or proof of process, being able to virtualize all these things is going to be huge and will open up a massive market for new customers.”

General News: Earnings Are In, and It’s Looking… Good?

Imagine earning $116.4 billion and then still losing money. But fear not after such a rough quarter, Amazon: AWS revenue is here to save the day at 37%.
Meanwhile, Google revenue increased slightly below expectations, and GCP is still losing money — but $43 million less than last year.
Finally, Microsoft has Azure to thank for its 32% growth.

AWS: A Truly Kafkaesque Affair

MSK Serverless is now generally available, offering a reduction in the overhead of managing Kafka.
Amazon EC2 instances get some storage-optimizing icy processing power. (You just know there’s still a whole team of DBAs that doesn’t think this is good enough.)
Last on the AWS front: There are new management features for EC2 key pairs. We’re ecstatic!

GCP: Last Chance to Register for the Google Cloud Security Summit

GCP offers some CISO perspectives on security updates, as well as a reminder to register for the upcoming summit.
No-code solutions provide some nightmare fuel, as

165: The Cloud Pod Angry That Amazon Describes Step Functions as Low Code May 11, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses wholesome local Oakland toast for breakfast. Plus: Hybrid infrastructure is unsustainable, the AWS Proton template library expands, and Amazon angers the team by describing Step Functions as “low-code.”

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Against the trend of popular opinion, it turns out that hybrid infrastructure is a bad idea in the long term, with a few significant drawbacks.
The AWS Proton template library just got bigger, so now people can find something else to complain about.
Amazon annoyingly describes Step Functions as low-code, which is definitely not true.

Top Quotes

“Proton was only developed as an answer for, how should we deploy onto Amazon? It’s setting yourself up just so someone can armchair-quarterback and poke holes in it. Now they’re saying, well, how would you do this? [Answer:] You have the templates. And then they’re gonna be like, the templates are cool, except it doesn’t meet my pretty edge case, so they’ll complain about that. We’ll see templates for the templates next.”
“I just love the assumption that you could low-code a solution with Step Functions, just because I’ve created many a step function and state machine flow. And all it is is coding and then figuring out why the code isn’t doing what I want — because I’m not passing things correctly between the different functions. The ability for someone who can’t write code to be able to to accomplish anything is a little far fetched.”

General News: Don’t Plan on Hybrid for Long…

In the cloud court of public opinion, dissent is infrequent. Yet here’s Michael Bathon of Rimini Street claiming that hybrid is actually bad in the long-term.

AWS: What Is Low-Code, Anyway?

The AWS Proton template library expands — as does people’s list of things to complain about.
Amazon very irritatingly calls Step Functions low-code, with new workflow observability features.
Can the annoying customer with the single use case please stand up? Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports a lot more read replicas. Driven by the business side, perhaps?

GCP: Something’s Got To Give With BigQuery

Cloud TPU VMs are now generally available, with faster speeds and lower costs for training.
BigQuery BI Engine now supports more tools and custom applications. All we heard is that the analysts want to learn BigQuery, so they made it work for them.
It’s one thing to provide a good service and another thing to develop an open source tool that

162: The Cloud Pod Catches a Fleeting Glimpse of Google Cloud Optimization Apr 29, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team rediscovers who Ryan is after an eternity (a secret agent). Plus AWS Fargate now delivers faster scaling of applications; new features for Oracle Support Rewards; and Google Cloud Optimization AI: Cloud Fleet Routing API from GCP.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Witness the magic of AWS Fargate scaling of applications — harder, faster, better, stronger.
Ooooh! Unveiling brand new shiny features for Oracle Support Rewards.
Better planning with more routes: GCP unleashes Optimization AI, API for Cloud Fleet Routing (CFR).

Top Quotes

“Because of that Fargate-specific limitation, [with] the first three services you’re concurrently updating, you’ll actually get a much faster rate through ECS test launches, but that fourth service will be slower. At that point, if the math works out where you’re better off hosting it on EC2 … it’s a lot more complex. I’ve worked with a lot of teams on trying to get ECS services to scale faster, and usually I look at them a little skeptically — do you really need this fast?”
“In terms of looking at lists of interview questions from Google algorithm questions and the traveling salesman problem and optimizing journeys through multiple locations, multiple cities, everything else, it’s a really hard problem. It only gets exponentially more difficult. And then the more efficient you are with that, the more it costs the environment, the more it costs in time or it costs money. So yeah, it’s actually a worthy problem to solve.”

General News: Microsoft Feels the Heat

We’re feeling the pain of Microsoft’s licensing, as its tactics to win the cloud battle lead to new antitrust scrutiny.

AWS: A Very Fargate Indeed

NetApp’s ONTAP, so line up your glasses for a very fine update indeed. Check out the podcast where we interviewed their very own Anthony Lye. #ShamelessPodcastSalesmanship
AWS Fargate now delivers faster scaling of applications, and you can see it in action with ECS. Understand token buckets and how AWS uses them, and if you need a hero, Vlad Ioenscu is here.
Microsoft Active Directory geeks rejoice: a favored topic of the masses with configurable synchronization launched via Single Sign-On.
The Log4j saga simply won’t die: Apache hotpatch issues

163: The Cloud Pod Pushes the Azure Red Button Apr 27, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team establishes that Justin may be immune to COVID. Plus all the latest from the AWS Summit, Azure Red Button team up on DDOS defense, and engines are revving in the great VMware showdown.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

The AWS San Francisco Summit kicks off with a ton of new generally available stuff, but not-so-impressive attendance (looking at you, COVID).
Microsoft and Red Button buddy up on DDOS defense testing initiative.
AWS, Google and Oracle rev their engines for the VMware top spot.

Top Quotes

“Really shows you the power of partnership … There’s finally some easy button for testing these things. Because you always dream: Maybe I could create my own DDoS situation, which seemingly I do occasionally by accident, but intentionally would be nice this time.”
“I don’t necessarily trust their math, but assuming that it’s reasonably correct, it seems like a good market for Oracle to go after if you’re gonna try to compete with those three platforms — I don’t see a ton of people moving straight to the cloud on VMware. But that’s a pretty compelling argument and potentially a way of getting VMware customers to the cloud quicker: let’s just do it now if we don’t have to get off of VMware.”

General News: Great Expectations

Gartner anticipates big growth (20.4%) in public cloud spending for 2022!

AWS: Everything Generally Available

Finally, you can use IAM to control access to a resource based on the account, OU or organization that contains the resource — just how it used to be, and makes a whole lot more sense.
You might be excited for the confusingly named Amazon CloudWatch for Ray — if you can work out what it is (we couldn’t). Something to do with machine learning?
One for the data scientists: Announcing the Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference, which should prove a boon for infrastructure management.
Now the guru can tell you your code sucks, too: Introducing the power of operational issue automatic detection in Lambda Functions with Amazon DevOps Guru for Serverless.
IoT TwinMaker is now generally available, and while your host doesn’t understand, luckily Ryan is on hand to talk about its uses.
AWS Amplify Studio is also now

TCP Talks: The Service Not the Software: Anthony Lye on Evolution and Revolution Apr 25, 2022

In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Anthony Lye, Executive Vice President and General Manager of NetApp’s Public Cloud Services Business Unit. An industry veteran for over 25 years, Anthony has been at the forefront of cloud innovation for over half this time.

Anthony shares his insight on the importance of embracing disruption in the tech industry. He discusses how NetApp seized the right opportunities, got lucky, and came to dominate the Cloud space — even while younger app developers may have no idea what it was.

“They don’t comprehend — nor should they — the complexities of infrastructure,” Anthony explains. “And I really love the fact that we’ve been able to democratize ONTAP, because it’s cool, but you’ve got to be really smart to get the best out of it. And so we just decided we would be the smart ones.”

What’s really behind innovation in tech? “The context is where you are. And people like to think that the world operates through evolution. And sometimes it’s revolution –- sometimes, you have to do something radically different.”

Anthony also discusses cloud computing trends, the importance of customer focus, what NetApp does differently, and the multi-cloud.

Featured Guest

Name: Anthony Lye

What he does: Anthony is Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Public Cloud Services business for NetApp

Key quote: “You’ve got to put the customer in the middle of your business. And you’ve got to go where they want you to go. If you don’t, your hold may last a while, but it won’t last. And I still can’t believe that what we did we got away with, and we’ve gotten so much time to build so aggressively. It’s great.”

Where to find him: LinkedIn

Key Takeaways

There are two halves of the cloud space: the IT half and the app half. IT people see huge opportunities in extending data centers. App people want to and can build and run their own stacks, and Anthony took advantage of this. “They don’t have to wait for the IT people,” Anthony says. “And I wanted to build something for them — I didn’t want to just hang out on the IT side. I went and asked a whole bunch of application people: what do you need?”
NetApp spies huge business growth potential on the horizon with recurring revenues. “Recurring revenues are the best kinds of revenues you can get,” Anthony clarifies. But people don’t always consider this. “Because they’re different, they sort of ignore them — they don’t like them. And before they know it, they’re years behind and caught. And passed as if they’re standing still.”
The customer is and always should be focused on as front and center of any business. For NetApp, the software and implementation are the same, but the unique integrations are what makes the service stand out. With SaaS, it’s now the second “S” — the service — that matters most. “The rule of SaaS is the other Henry Ford thing: you can have it in any color you want, as long as it’s black,” Anthony says. “We’re going to run it for you as a service, and you’re going to love it”, NetApp tells customers, increasing developer productivity and providing a much higher release cadence.

Resources

Here’s what was mentioned in the episode

ARM: the most widely used family of instruction set architectures with over 200 billion ARM chips produced.
CloudCheckr: an end-to-end cloud management platform with cost, security, resource

161: The Cloud Pod Observes Its Databases With Google Cloud SQL Insights Apr 14, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week and with half the team gone fishin’, Justin and Peter hash it out short and sweet. Plus Google Cloud SQL Insights, Atlassian suffers an outage, and AWS finally offers accessible Lambda Function URLs.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Atlassian suffers an outage, sparking fears of data loss.
AWS offers some very welcome accessibility for Lambda Functions.
Google announces Cloud SQL Insights for MySQL.

Top Quotes

“When Lambda first came out, before I even used it, this is how I thought it would work … then it didn’t. So it’s cool that it’s now available. I’m surprised it wasn’t the default — the starting point — before getting more complex, like API gateways.”
“It’s almost required: These tools are so important when it’s a managed service and you can’t get under the covers yourself. So it’s cool, for sure. Especially when you get into how these things work with your cloud and how they interact with each other, it becomes even more important.”

General News: Atlassian Made a DevOops

While only 0.25% of their customer base was affected, Atlassian’s outage is not a good look. The company continues to be haunted by it, with data loss fears.
Sungard is doomed. A Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing confines them to history’s unmarked grave of discarded cloud victims.

AWS: Lambda Finally Does What It Was Always Meant To

Accessible Lambda Function URLs are now yours — something that would’ve been nice when it first came out.
Security Hub launches five controls and one new integration partner, in a move that seems to open the door to start using it for all sorts of non-security checks.
Amazon ECS now allows you to run commands in a Windows container running on AWS Fargate. Peter doesn’t want to do this at all, but maybe someone does.
Something you always thought would have been there but didn’t know actually existed: Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Agent job replication.
Ooooooh: PrivateLink, Transit Gateway and Client VPN services all get a data transfer price reduction — a good first step!
In case you’re looking (Peter’s not), there are two new Amazon EC2

160: The Cloud Pod Goes Fishing on Google BigLake Apr 06, 2022

Google Biglake takes the feature of the week with the ability to federate data from multiple data lakes. On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the most expensive way to run a VM (Oracle wins). Plus some exciting developments, an AWS OpenSearch 1.2 update with several new features, and Azure’s having a party, so bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP).

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

The Cloud Pod goes fishing on Google BigLake with a new tackle box and a whole lot of data.
AWS opens up the market with its OpenSearch 1.2 update boasting several new features and which could attract more customers.
Azure implements a fancy new bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) policy.

Top Quotes

“Are they saving BigOcean for the next layer of unification above when we need to aggregate multiple BigLakes?”
“It is good to be able to do it, and I still pity the poor companies who need to migrate IP addresses and anchor their IPs to a provider in order to get their DVR functionality. So this now makes that possible, however bad a pattern that is in the cloud.”

General News: Decisions, Decisions

VentureBeat discusses how to choose the right AWS region for your business, but they seem to be missing a few considerations (sovereignty, anyone?). Also, picking a region isn’t a great idea for a business (like an e-commerce site) that needs to be multiregional to survive if things go sideways.

AWS: Opening up the Search Nice and Wide

Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes 1.22 — maybe AWS bribed the Kubernetes governance board because they were tired of trying to keep up with Kubernetes’ quarterly patch releases.
Good news for console users who no longer have to click through five separate pages of configurations, with the new and improved Amazon EC2 console launch experience.
Cue applause track: AWS Organizations now provides central AWS account closure. We’ve been waiting for this for years.
Amazon EC2 now performs automatic recovery of instances by default — a no-brainer, really.
Killing the need for all those expensive backup software solutions, AWS Backup now allows you to restore virtual disks from protected copies of your VMware virtual machines. You can use it for decades.
Could there be a more expensive way to run a VM than VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts? Yes, as it happens: Oracle. But this is a not-so-distant second place.
Not ideal, but there should be a workaround, as

159: The Cloud Pod Suspends Its (GCP) Hosts Mar 31, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan is in the doghouse and he’s been suspended (with full pay). Plus, we’re comfortably numb with AWS Cloud NGFW, GCP suspends hosts for big savings, and Azure is once again shutting the Front Door on us.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS Cloud NGFW cost calculations leaves us comfortably numb.
GCP boasts big savings by temporarily suspending unneeded hosts.
Azure is once again shutting the Front Door with a new, modern cloud service.

Top Quotes

“I’m ready to make my [AWS] re:Invent next year’s first prediction, which will be an AmazonBasics version of that for 1/10th of the cost.”
“I’m very curious to actually see the comparison … in cost because, assuming performance is relatively similar, cost is what this always comes down to.”

AWS: Pay Less, More Often!

Helping you bleed cash by the hour instead of writing one big annual check, AWS presents the new Cloud NGFW. Ouch.
Knock yourself out with up to 10 GB ephemeral storage supported with AWS Lambda. It’s cheap (at $0.0000000309 for every GB-second), but they’re not giving it to you — they’re selling it to you.
We’re slightly concerned about the general availability of AWS Proton support for Terraform Open Source and its effects on potential future innovation.
Amazon hops on Google’s gamification bandwagon with Amazon GameSparks now in preview.

GCP: GCP Equalizes With a Quiet Week

Nice job, Google: a feature with an edge over other cloud providers that offers big savings by temporarily suspending unneeded Compute Engine VMs. Awesome!

Azure: It All Comes Down to Costs

Azure shutting the front door on us once again with the now generally available modern cloud CDN service, Azure Front Door. This probably gives them a competitive advantage over AWS for at least a week or two.
In a surprising turn of events, Microsoft announces its intent to establish an India datacenter region in Hyderabad. As that’s where most of their employees are, how was there not one there already?
It’s like UPnP for cloud, so do not use lightly: Azure Load Balancer now allows you to manage port forwarding for a backend pool. We seriously recommend discussing this with your security team in advance.

TCP Lightning Round

Peter finally levels up, making the scores: Justin (4), Ryan (1), Jonathan (1), Peter (1).

Other Headlines Mentioned:

158: The Cloud Pod Discloses All of Its Okta Breaches Mar 24, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, it’s a brave new world for Ryan, who learns all kinds of things. Plus the Okta breach leads to customer outrage over not telling them for months, AWS announces its new Billing Conductor, and Google expands Contact Center AI for a reimagined customer experience.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Okta is in big trouble with furious customers after it fails to disclose a security breach… for months.
AWS announces the brand new and very welcome AWS Billing Conductor to much fanfare and great rejoicing.
Google expands end-to-end with Contact Center AI for a touted “reimagining” of the customer experience.

Top Quotes

“The breach is bad enough, but then the handling of the communications of it is really what seals the deal and where you really do all the damage. It’s one thing if someone attacks you and gets in through something unintended … that’s not going to shake my confidence in using a company. But someone who’s hiding it, someone who’s clearly dancing around it, makes me think that they’re not well organized.”
“Google is notoriously bad for customer support … and it’s very difficult to be a satisfied customer of Google when you have to deal with their support channels. So anything they can do for anybody to make the customer experience less frustrating is good. Let’s hope that this doesn’t just turn into another agent, please situation where all you want to do is break out of the system and just speak to a real person who can apply some logic.”

General News: Okta Breach Shenanigans

Change your credentials immediately. Customers are raging at Okta, which manages 100 million logins but failed to disclose a security breach for months. Just who is running things over there?

AWS: Money Money Money

Donald Trump’s golf courses are going to be very unhappy to learn that AWS is investing $2.3 billion in UK data centers over the next two years, taking advantage of the Moray West Wind Farm off the coast of Scotland — creating 1000 jobs and injecting £500,000 into the Scottish economy.
Billing and accounting departments across the land rejoice as AWS announces its very welcome and much improved AWS Billing Conductor.
Sharing is caring: AWS Lambda console now supports the option to share test events between developers.

GCP: ReAImagining Customer Experiences

“Agent, please.” Let’s hope Google’s Cont

157: The Cloud Pod Goes on a Quest…. An AWS Cloud Quest Mar 17, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses Peter’s concept of fun. Plus digital adventures with AWS Cloud Quest game, much-wanted Google price increases, and a labyrinthine run-through of the details of Azure Health Data Services.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS gamifies cloud training with the release of Cloud Quest, along with two new initiatives in a bid to build foundational cloud skills for younger people.
Google announces price changes while framing it as “choice”: Some services will decrease in price while others will increase.
Microsoft launches Azure Health Data Services, the details of which turn out to be super fun trying to get your head around.

Top Quotes

“If you’ve ever wanted the job of living in a 3D world where a construction worker runs up to you and tells you that the server running in this weather app is failing and helping them figure this out, this game is for you. And you can earn gems and build and it feels very much like Roblox…. I give it an A for effort and an F for execution.”
“One of the arguments that people have made against the cloud forever is that once you’re locked in, they’re gonna jack the rates up, and then you’re screwed because you’re stuck there. It’s that exact thing. This is now giving credence to those naysayers who traditionally will say that’s not really true. … Now we have an exact use-case: Google did it. So what’s to stop Azure and AWS from doing it?”

AWS: Slay the Dragon and Rescue the Cloud

New bigger and badder EC2 X2idn and X2iedn Instances for you to throw your money away on are now here — supporting memory-intensive workloads with higher network bandwidth.
If you’re excited about Pi Day, Jeff Barr helps celebrate with a bragging blog post on the number of objects Amazon S3 now boasts (with some fun galaxial anecdotes to boot).
A feature we can finally appreciate: Amazon ECS Update Service API now supports updating Elastic Load Balancers, Service Registries, Tag Propagation, and ECS Managed Tags.
And moving onto an AWS feature we don’t care about, Amazon ECS now supports on-premises workload orchestration on Windows OS.
More Windows support arrives, this time for containerd runtime on EKS starting with Kubernetes 1.21. We don’t know about you, but we’re starting to get releases mixed up here.
Don’t get fooled by the marketing folks: There’s still work for the dev team to do with the general availability of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags.
We’re not sure who wants to use this, but Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

156: The Cloud Pod Takes Back Everything It Said About Windows vs Linux Security Mar 09, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team reminisces about dealing with awful database technologies, which Ryan luckily managed to avoid. Plus all things cybersecurity as Linux gets hit with a huge security emergency, Google acquires Mandiant for $5.4 billion, and Orca Security catches a major Azure cross-tenant vulnerability.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Linux is on the backfoot as it’s hit by the most severe vulnerability in years.
Google has acquired the cybersecurity giant Mandiant for a cool $5.4 billion.
Orca Security catches a huge Azure cross-tenant vulnerability.

Top Quotes

”But is Mandiant now going to be suddenly finding the vulnerabilities and publishing the vulnerabilities that they’re finding in Azure and AWS, and happen to maybe not mention the ones externally that are happening in GCP? They’re no longer an independent third party.”
“Even with these things happening, you’re still safer running in the cloud. Even though there are outages, you’re still more highly available in the cloud. I hate to see these things in the news.”

General News: Linux Is Feeling the Pain

Knative is now officially a CNCF incubating project — any competitors in the market?
As Linux is bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years, we take back everything we said about Windows vs Linux security.

AWS: Solving Very Cloudy Problems

Faster failover is the name of the game with AWS this week: its RDS for MySQL & PostgreSQL Multi-AZ deployment option comes with improved write performance. Jonathan is also very, very excited about their JDBC driver for MySQL.
AWS customers can now request their CyberGRX report for due diligence on third-party suppliers. But who watches the watchmen?
Ryan’s always suffered from slow performance, but now he can now get specific about how his bad code is affecting it, thanks to Amazon DevOps Guru’s extended support for Lambda with CodeGuru Profiler integration.

GCP: Getting Out the Wallet

Google pays $5.4 billion in hush money to Mandiant in a move that’s sure to massively boost their credibility in the cybersecurity arms race. Mandiant’s biggest customer? GCP itself.
You can now leverage OpenTelemetry to democratize Cloud Spanner observability — which of course they want everyone using.

A

155: The Cloud Pod Shows Green in the New AWS Status Page Mar 02, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team heads down a Cisco business model rabbithole. Plus cloud status pages struggle with reality, AWS is tracking carbon footprints, and Microsoft sees serious security business growth with Defender.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Cloud status pages aren’t reflecting reported issues, in what appears to be a cover-up by error-shy cloud providers.
AWS introduces a new carbon footprint dashboard to help customers track their sustainability for cleaner, greener living.
Following on the heels of AWS and Azure, Microsoft Defender now provides security on Google Cloud, and is also available for Azure Cosmos DB.

Top Quotes

“Understanding the thresholds would be nice, but it’s difficult, because if you have an instance up and running just fine, but you can’t launch a new instance, is EC2 down? Is the control plane being down the same as the service itself being down? The ability to launch a new instance would be fairly instrumental to using the service. There’re lots of very fine distinctions made between whether something’s working or not. I think a little more transparency is needed. But I don’t think they’re trying to mislead anybody.”

“They’re so strong in other areas, I think it’s a mistake to try to compete everywhere with the two other companies that are roughly [their] size. Do the thing you’re really good at and just keep doing it better.”

General News: Move Along, Everything’s Fine Here

It seems like cloud providers are on a customer gaslighting mission, with cloud status pages not reflecting reported issues.

AWS: Continuing Its Tradition of Silly Names

In a badly timed announcement, AWS shows off its new unified Health Dashboard. It does make sense to keep it in one place, though.
Amazon S3 showcases important, super valuable new additional checksum algorithms. If it’s computationally expensive, push it back onto the client.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Warm Pools has two new hibernation and scale-in features — a great solution for penny-pinchers who invested in Windows.
The new AWS CloudSaga tool allows for security event simulation and testing. A great first step in what should prove to be cheaper than bringing in a whole team to do it.
How many IPv6 workloads are you running? Now you can connect them to IPv4 Services.
Six months too late for Jonathan, AWS’ new Customer Carbon Footprint Tool allows customers to track sustainability, helping to reach those clea

154: The Cloud Pod Is QUIC and Rusty This Week Feb 23, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, order in the court! Plus tackling those notorious latency issues with AWS Local Zones, things get quick and rusty with AWS s2n-quic, and GCP flexes with Dataplex data mesh.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS takes on network latency issues — its customers’ #1 complaint — with AWS Local Zones.
AWS is getting quick and rusty this week with s2n-quic, its new open-source protocol for Rust implementation.
GCP announces Dataplex in Google Cloud is now generally available, enabling the creation of the data mesh view.

Top Quotes

“We must be hitting some huge brick walls in web performance that are really hurting certain application workloads that require low latency, because if you look at both these announcements back-to-back, they’re really trying to improve performance.”
“This is definitely a hard problem for companies to solve. Data is not going to be uniform, and you’re going to have many different sources of it, and you want it to all play nice together so it’s usable across a larger view than it used to be. I like these types of solutions, where they’re applying governance and a way of doing things that’s not just everyone reinventing these wheels — which is what we’ve been doing up until now.”

General News: Order in the Court! Judge Ryan Presides

Best Buy selects AWS as its strategic cloud provider, but Peter and Ryan argue that it may not be all that exclusive.
VentureBeat reveals that Optimizely is partnering with Google Cloud. Justin thinks the reason the company chose GCP over AWS comes down to wanting to feel special.

AWS: Goodbye Network Latency?

With AWS’ announcement of the global expansion of AWS Local Zones, will its customers’ number one complaint (network latency) be finally addressed? No doubt a good move forward.
AWS is also getting quick and rusty this week with the introduction of s2n-quic, the new open-source QUIC protocol for Rust implementation. For encryption nerds, this is it.
The general availability of AWS Backup for Amazon S3 is sure to be a great enablement — not to mention a massive cost saving for those using the age-old solution of full data replication between buckets.
Amazon comes to the rescue with auto-adjusting budgets — something to add to budgets, not a tool to replace them. Super valuable nonetheless!

GCP: The Great Dataplex Data Mesh Flex

You can now build a data mesh on Google Cloud

153: The Cloud Pod Gets the (CloudFormation) Stage Hook Feb 17, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan’s got his detective hat on. Plus Akamai steps up to CloudFare with Linode acquisition, AWS’ CloudFormation Hooks lift us up, and EPYC instances are now available.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Akamai notes CloudFare’s aggressive pivot to edge computing and acquires AWS competitor Linode for $900m.
AWS announces the general availability of AWS CloudFormation Hooks, which should prove very useful.
Amazon provides EPYC-powered instances, with up to 15% improvement in price-performance.

Top Quotes

“When AWS announces general availability of an instance, I have never been unable to launch that instance to test it. … I can’t say the same thing for workloads on GCP.”
“If you ever take a laptop that has no security patches on it and you put it on a network … it’ll be hacked within minutes. It’s crazy how bad it is, actually. This is what we always talk about: it’s when you get hacked, not if you get hacked. Because if you have vulnerabilities, there’s always a chance. It’s just a matter of time before someone figures it out.”

General News: Akamai Steps Up Its Game

Capitalizing on existing relationships, F5 unveils its new cloud platform with a huge advantage in security — but it might be a tough sell.
Akamai acquires AWS competitor Linode for $900m. Clearly Akamai saw what CloudFare was doing and thought I gotta get me some of that.

AWS: Getting Its CloudFormation Hooks In

AWS announces the general availability of its CloudFormation Hooks. Very nice.
We wish we’d had Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer’s new security features back in December — now it’s February and no one cares about Log4j anymore.
A nice freebie comes in the form of improved performance for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS).
Epic new EC2 c6a instances are powered by EPYC processors, providing up to 15% price performance improvements next to c5a instances. And there was much rejoicing.
Protect your login page against credential stuffing attacks with AWS WAF Fraud Control.
We don’t completely hate the new Billing console home page experience. Actually, it’s pretty good.
Ryan thinks AWS’

152: Is GCP Rebranding No-Code as ‘Visual Interface’? Feb 09, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan grapples with life in the confusion matrix. Plus money money money with Q4 2021 earnings announcements, shiny new digital badges from AWS, and Google Serverless Spark lights the way on data processing and data science jobs.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Q4 2021 earnings: Amazon and Microsoft are killing it with impressive cloud revenues (the only part we care about), and Google is losing money but its cloud is still growing.
Nothing much from AWS (again) as performance reviews continue over there; but there are some new digital badges to show off your AWS cloud storage knowledge.
Serverless Spark is now available on Google Cloud to simplify data processing and data science jobs, allowing more focus on code and logic, and less on managing clusters and infrastructure.

Top Quotes

“There’s the rub: it’s in the details as usual. You do need to operate as a business and achieve that transformation together. No matter what, any kind of migration is going to have an impact on product delivery and feature roadmap, which will have an impact on the ability to sell. So it really does take everyone marching to the same tune in order to get that done, or it just causes infighting.”
“The safest move is always to take a small [proof of concept], push that, and do your cloud landing zone with that… But then you’re left — at a certain point — with the thing that makes you the most amount of money [not fitting] your plans… It’s a huge risk: a lot of businesses get stuck trying to modernize. How do you justify the interruption to the revenue streams and the lack of feature delivery while you’re doing that transformation to the thing that pays all the bills?”

General News: Q4 2021 Earnings Are In and It’s Looking Good

Some serious cloud revenue growth reports from AWS, Microsoft, and Alphabet with growth at 40% or higher, despite Amazon losses. And if you ever want to own Google stock, now’s your chance.
Meanwhile, VentureBeat reports on best practice for strategically maximizing the ROI of cloud migrations, although one or two of those metrics are questionable.

AWS: Performance Reviews Keep Things Quiet

Now you can demonstrate your cloud storage knowledge and skills with brand new shiny digital badges! Very pretty — and good to stick on the resumé.
52 AWS cloud services declare adherence to the CISPE Data Protection Code of C

151: Free Trial Ends Next Month… or Does It? Feb 03, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, we’re back to a full house (at least for one episode.) Plus, introducing AWS open-source Cloud Map, GCP announces new Bigtable autoscale feature, and Oracle gives us a retro tour of a data center.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

In a move that shows it supports open source when convenient, AWS introduces new Cloud Map capabilities, and U-turns on proposed charges after 30 days. The new console still sucks, by the way.
GCP introduces the very welcome Bigtable autoscaling feature, with new optimizing and manageability features and improvements.
Oracle comes bearing over a hundred gifts from its blog, and gives us a look inside a data center.

Top Quotes

“I’m starting to wonder what’s going on over at AWS. We’ve talked about the Orca issues, the security rollout … And now we have this: We’re turning on things in your account that are going to cost you money. I saw the earnings… they look pretty good, so I’m not entirely sure why they’re turning on features that cost money — with no notice — and putting the onus on me to turn this stuff off.”
“So isn’t that really just a rehashing of the same problem that most IT professionals have been doing for the last 20 years? On the other hand, I don’t want to manage my own legacy Oracle footprint, so the fact that they’re going to take that, move it to the cloud, and then run it for me — I’m all for that.”

General News: Zero Trust ‘Hijacked’ by Network Security Firms

0⃣ Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry gets us wise to network security firm marketing tactics, highlighting that practicing zero trust and investing in network security are incompatible with each other.

AWS: Not Amazon’s Best Month…

In a ridiculous move that completely violates the trust of its customers, AWS attempts to charge after a 30-day trial when no one is paying attention — but everyone noticed. First Orca, now this.
Watch out you don’t make your CFO cry with the launch of the very nice but very expensive new Amazon X2iezn instances.
AWS shows its open-source credentials — but only because it’s convenient — with the rollout of the new AWS Cloud Map MCS Controller for K8s.

GCP: Coming for Crypto

Cloud Bigtable’s new autoscaling feature promises cost optimization and im

150: The Cloud Pod Exfiltrates Jonathan’s Credentials Jan 27, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan is still AWOL. Also Amazon is on GuardDuty with credential exfiltration, Google Cloud Deploy is generally available, and Azure is suffering from more serious DDoS attacks.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Amazon’s been on GuardDuty with enhanced detection of EC2 instance credential exfiltration.
Google Cloud Deploy (GCD) is now generally available, making continuous delivery on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) easier.
Azure reports that it spent the last half of 2021 dealing with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that are increasing in both severity and frequency.

Top Quotes

“The biggest risk to cloud infrastructure is that you’re one secret access key away from a big booboo.”
“Last November, [Azure] had just mitigated a pretty large attack — at the time the largest in history, at least from ones that have been reported to the world. … Things have gotten worse in Q3 and Q4 — not only the levels [of attacks], but the complexity has gotten worse.”

AWS: Beefing Up GuardDuty

The threat detection service Amazon GuardDuty — which monitors your accounts for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior — is pretty great already. In the aftermath of the Superglue issue, however, AWS is ramping things up with enhanced detection of EC2 instance credential exfiltration.
AWS Security Hub has been integrating with AWS Health and with AWS Trusted Advisor (TA). Does this mean everything annoying gets reflagged? Thanks, TA!
In a move that makes a lot of sense, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports ECS Exec and Amazon Linux 2 for workloads running on-premises with Amazon ECS Anywhere. No more yum and Red Hat-based Fedora deployment sounds great, although it would be nice to have a few more implementation details ahead of rolling it out.
Replication is now possible for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), but watch out for those pesky inter-region transfer fees — which do rack up — before enabling this.

GCP: Google Cloud Deploy Makes Your Life Easier

Google Cloud Deploy (GCD) is now generally available, making it easier to do continuous delivery to GKE. We’ve also done the math on this and it seems to be cheaper than Ryan: GCD customers get their first active delivery pipeline per account free, and pay a $15/month management fee for each additional pipeline. Whereas Ryan is, frankly, expensive.

Azure: Azure Under Attack and It’s Getting Worse

In an announcement that isn’t really an announcement, you can

149: The Cloud Pod BreaksFormation Jan 19, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team decides 2022 is already a long, cursed year — bring on 2023. Plus nuggets of wisdom from Gartner, Orca discovers breaksformation and Glue vulnerabilities, and 10 questions to help boards (and others) maximize cloud opportunities.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

Gartner reveals six cloud trends for 2022: Take what you need for your organization and throw away the rest.
Orca Security discovers vulnerabilities in AWS’ CloudFormation, and — more seriously — Glue.
GCP releases 10 questions to help boards safely maximize cloud opportunities — which can also give you the opportunity to bag that promotion.

Top Quotes

“Look at the rate of growth of cloud over the past few years. The rate of training new people could not possibly keep up. … [Organizations] want to hire someone who’s got 20 years’ experience in something that’s only been around for five years. I can see it being a real problem in terms of quality of output.”
“Because Orca published a blog post, we know about this — would AWS have disclosed it to us? If there are other people out there doing research against AWS and they’re not publishing these things, there could be other things that we don’t know about, that are not being addressed. Transparency is important.”

General News: Get Out the Crystal Balls

SiliconANGLE published a guest blog from Gartner’s Paul Delory on his six predictions for what is coming to the cloud in 2022.
VentureBeat has five considerations for saving more and wasting less on cloud services. We didn’t learn much, but everyone’s mileage varies.

AWS: CloudFormation’s Breaking Apart and the Glue Doesn’t Stick

Orca Security Research Team’s been hunting in AWS waters, and found a vulnerability in CloudFormation. AWS responded that on further inspection, there was no threat to customers or resources.
There’s something more troublesome afoot, though: The Orca team also discovered a vulnerability with Glue. AWS Principal Engineer Anthony Virtuoso thanked Orca for its findings: but a coordinated effort between AWS and Orca might have avoided all of this.
AWS releases its new console which, overall, looks a lot like the old one with new lipstick — it still doesn’t appear to deliver.

GCP: 10 Questions and Some Fire in the W

148: The Cloud Pod Siemplify’s Our First Recording of 2022 Jan 13, 2022

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter finally gets to share his top announcements of 2021. Plus, Google increases security with Siemplify, Azure updates Defender, and AWS comes into the new year with a lot of changes.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning, and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.

This week’s highlights

AWS confirms that applications can now be deployed on Amazon EKS using the IPv6 address space.
Google looks to boost its security operations by acquiring SOAR provider Siemplify.
Azure spent December updating Defender: was it worth it?

Top Quotes

“All the cloud providers are embracing containerization and the technologies that allow containerized workloads to work well on their platform. But the side effect is that they also run equally well on everybody else’s platform.”

“[As Vice President of Google Cloud Phil Venables wrote in a blog post,] ‘The race by deep-pocketed cloud providers to create and implement leading secure technologies is the tip of the spear of innovation.’ Which is interesting, because I think this is an area where Google’s really crushed it, and I think Amazon has failed. Not failed, but not invested as much as they should have.”

General News: Google Acquires Siemplify

Google acquired Siemplify, a security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) provider. The hope appears to be that it will help security teams using GCP better manage their threat responses.

AWS: Plenty of Non-Outage News

IPv6 applications are now deployable through Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). This prevents IP exhaustion, minimizes latency, and simplifies routing configurations. On the downside, IPv6 can’t be added retroactively, and this EKS add-on only supports Linux — a dealbreaker for the team.
The AWS compute optimizer has been enhanced to allow users to specify both x86 and ARM as their preferred architecture for their EC2 instance type recommendations. This is a big blow to other tools that perform the same operations.
AWS announced the general availability of the EC2 Hpc6a Instance. It’s built for HPC workloads to leverage AMD EPYC 3rd-generation processors. This release expands AWS’ portfolio of HPC compute options. Plus, according to Justin, the instance name reminds him of the song “abcdefu” by GAYLE.
According to a recent job posting, AWS plans to completely re-imagine how its network is managed. It allegedly has two secret projects that could mitigate the risk of cloud outages — like the one that impacted the company in December of 2021.

GCP: Phil Venables on the Keyboard

Phil Venables, the venerable Google VP and

147: Goodbye 2021, A log4j kinda year Dec 22, 2021

EDITORIAL NOTE: Your Cloud Pod hosts are on vacation until early January!! Enjoy our 2021 wrapup and look ahead to 2022 and we’ll be back in your Podcast feed mid January!

Justin, Jonathan, and Ryan are minus Peter in this episode as they review the year in cloud computing.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning, and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.

This week’s highlights

It’s the last podcast of 2021. The next one premieres in the third week of January.
Log4j came back with a vengeance during the holiday season.
The team looks back at its 2021 predictions and forecast for 2022.

Log4jackass

Using AWS security services to protect against, detect, and respond to the log4j vulnerability is still an issue. Suggestions to upgrade to version 2.16 for Apache log4j security issue for EKS, ECS, and Fargate customers wasn’t enough. Customers are asked to upgrade to 2.17. By the end of 2021, it will probably be 2.22 just to get into the spirit.

Did The Team’s 2021 Predictions Come True?

The hosts reviewed their 2021 predictions to see if they came true.

Johnathan’s prediction about bracket computing and other quantum technology didn’t come true to break TLS. It’s still a long way off but there are now more classes in quantum programming to prepare for the cutover. Jonathan takes half a point on his merit.
Peter believed The biggest blocker to cloud adoption would be costs, with individuals spending too much on poor cloud migrations. Justin believes he’s way off on this prediction. Though cost is a big consideration it’s definitely not the blocker. However, Jonathan believes more controls are needed to prevent overspending.
Justin’s prediction on the verticalization of the cloud in fintech, health, retail, etc. came true. Ryan says it makes a lot of sense for industries to go this route instead of building everything out.
Ryan said work from home (WFH) would be a permanent trend, further breaking traditional security. Justin agreed on the first part but not the second on security issues. Though plenty of workers still log in through their companies’ VPNs, there is a big move to implement zero-trust security.

Favorite Announcements Of 2021

The hosts reviewed their favorite announcements of 2021.

Justin is happy that Amazon released its Redshift Serverless program to compete with Snowflake
Jonathan’s most favorite announcement was the introduction of OpenSearch. Especially how it went from notification to general release in a short period. Justin is impressed at the community working to improve OpenSearch. He hears more about this product now than elasticsearch.

146: The Google CyberCAT is Out of the Bag Dec 15, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, Oracle finally has some news to share. Plus Log4j is ruining everyone’s lives, AWS suffers a massive outage post re:Invent, and Google CAT releases its first threat report.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

A critical vulnerability in Apache Log4j wrought havoc over the weekend. Cloud platforms and developers alike are racing to fix the bug, which gives hackers an opportunity to take control of systems remotely.
On the heels of re:Invent, AWS suffered a major outage last Tuesday in its US-EAST-1 region, which had staggering repercussions across the cloud.
Google Cybersecurity Action Team (CAT) releases its first Threat Horizons report, revealing its top three concerns threatening cloud users today.

Top Quotes

“It’s amazing how much of our infrastructure and applications live on these open source contributions of one or two people, and how critical they are to the entire ecosystem. And when they break or they’re vulnerable, it becomes a huge issue for us very quickly.”
“Think about what Microsoft did: They started signing device drivers and signing applications that run in Windows, and everyone thought Oh, they’re just exerting control, what a terrible idea. They’re just trying to corner the market. And now, of course, 15 years later, binding authorization is probably the most critical next step in securing the cloud.”

General News: The Log4j Vulnerability is COVID for Tech

In light of the critical Apache Log4j 2.0 vulnerability that gives attackers the ability to to execute arbitrary code on other systems, AWS has released a hotpatch for the logging platform. The aim is to help developers mitigate risk as they work to update their systems to 2.15 or newer.
VentureBeat reminds us that while the Log4j debacle is bad, at least organizations now have tools and processes in place to respond quickly to zero-day bugs.
GCP has released a set of recommendations for those who are investigating and responding to the Log4j 2.0 vulnerability.
To help customers detect whether their systems have been compromised by the Log4j bug, Google has updated its IDS signature to automatically scan for any Log4j exploit attempts.
Google creates a new Web Application Firewall (WAF) rule to detect and block Log4j exploit attempts by attackers.

AWS: What Better Way to Follow Up re:Invent Than With a Giant Outage?

On the Tuesday after re:Invent,

145: The Cloud Pod Evidently Wants to Talk about re:Invent Dec 07, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team finds out whose re:Invent 2021 crystal ball was most accurate. Also Graviton3 is announced, and Adam Selipsky gives his first re:Invent keynote.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

Amazon’s re:Invent 2021 featured a ton of new updates, including AWS CloudWatch Evidently, AWS Private 5G, and a new AWS Sustainability Pillar.
Justin’s prediction pick — Graviton 3 — was announced on Day Two of re:Invent, along with serverless options for data analytics, and a free machine learning (ML) database for existing AWS customers.
Amazon CEO Adam Selipsky missed the mark at his re:Invent debut, announcing fewer new releases than expected to a low-energy crowd.

Top Quotes

“This is Adam’s [Selipsky] first keynote as CEO of AWS… I do feel it was a missed opportunity. Number one, he didn’t drive out a ton of announcements, which everyone expected. There was a miss across the entire audience — people were expecting something they didn’t get. And then number two, OK, maybe you’re not the best public speaker: maybe you should go with a different model.”

“In the keynote, the message was really clear: They’re trying to democratize access to machine learning, they’re trying to give this access to more than just the elite data scientists and programmers. And that made me think that if you expand that out to no-code in general, that’s a really powerful thing”

AWS: re:Invent 2021 feat. a Mechanical Cat

Amazon highlights its top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2021 and gives details of new releases and updates across the platform.

Pre:Invent: Because Every Good re:Invent needs a Warmup

In support of its mission to educate 29 million people by 2025, AWS expands access to its free cloud skills training to empower learners to pursue careers in technology.
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is now generally available to provide fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications for its enterprise customers. This scalable solution enables customers to use AWS as an elastic recovery site rather than relying on an on-premise disaster recovery infrastructure.
AWS Control Tower users can now created nested organizational units within the platform. Huzzah!
AWS Audit Manager users can now simplify their audit preparations with

144: Oh the Places You’ll Go at re:Invent 2021 Nov 18, 2021

The Cloud Pod: Oh the Places You’ll Go at re:Invent 2021 — Episode 144

On The Cloud Pod this week, as a birthday present to Ryan, the team didn’t discuss his advanced age, and focused instead on their AWS re:Invent predictions. Also, the Google Cybersecurity Action Team launches a product, and Microsoft announces a new VM series in Azure.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS releases new G5 instances, which feature up to eight NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs. That’s super, super fast.
Google’s Cybersecurity Action Team adds Risk and Compliance as Code (rCaC) Solution.
Microsoft announces the NDm A100 v4 Series, and claims another spot on the TOP500 supercomputers list.

Top Quotes

“[AWS Resilience Hub] is already building on top of the FIS, which is interesting, but at some level I just want you to execute Lambda functions that validate things for me, and then tell me that I’m resilient because I validated it with Lambda.”
“Anything that empowers more dynamic and interactive web development I’m all for.”

Amazon Web Services: Give Us Your Car

AWS is releasing new G5 instances, which feature up to eight NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs. For the cost of a small car every month, you too can get up to 40% better value on inferencing and graphics-intensive operations.
AWS is releasing the Resilience Hub, a service designed to help you define, track and manage the resilience of your applications.
Unified Search in the AWS Management Console now sources results from blogs, knowledge articles, events and tutorials. Buyer beware with this one: It will pull outdated information that is still available on AWS, and you could end up with a giant albatross that costs you a fortune.
Amazon ECS is improving ECS Capacity Providers to deliver faster cluster auto scaling. When you’re using a capacity provider, it’s painfully slow to get the underlying hosting infrastructure to scale fast enough, so we’re presuming AWS has addressed this in the back end.
Manage access centrally for JumpCloud users with AWS Single Sign-On. We’re super happy to see this: Take notes, Azure AD.
Amazon ECS adds container instance health information. This is nice to see and will help improve your application resiliency.

AW

143: It’s Chaos in the Cloud Pod Studio Nov 17, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, the pod squad is down to the OG three while Ryan is away. Also AWS announces serverless pipelines, GCP releases Spot Pods, and Azure introduces Chaos Studio.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS releases Serverless Application Model (SAM) pipelines to save development teams time. These pipelines streamline CI/CD configurations for AWS applications.
In the spirit of savings, new GCP Spot Pods help GKE Autopilot users run fault-tolerant workloads while spending less money. Hooray!
Azure Chaos Studio helps development teams wreak controlled havoc with a managed experimentation service, allowing them to safely build, break and optimize their apps with reckless abandon.

Top Quotes

“I think for some people when they’re looking at, OK, we’re gonna make this commitment to a different architecture, at that point in time, they’ve looked at serverless versus containerized apps, and most companies went the containerized apps route, but that might change in the next wave.”
“Python 3.10 looks really interesting. It’s got a bunch of new features … around data handling specifically, which is really what people have been using Python for for years: bioinformatics and data science. But it has really neat features around matching different schemas of data and things like that.”

AWS: Finally, a Pipeline We Can Get Behind

AWS releases Serverless Application Model (SAM) pipelines, a new feature of the AWS SAM CLI, to help users simplify CI/CD configurations for AWS serverless applications. The new feature will help development teams minimize the amount of time spent creating pipelines, while also ensuring safe deployments.
With AWS Fault Injection Simulator, users can now create and run FIS experiments that check the state of Amazon CloudWatch alarms and run SSM automations. We hope the only fault injections you have are in your EC2 instances, not in your Thanksgiving turkey.
AWS customers running Windows containers rejoice: New Amazon ECS Exec allows you to execute commands or get information directly from your Windows container shell. Magic!
Amazon is doubling down on Canada. AWS announced plans to open a second Canadian region, in Calgary, bringing the company’s total region count to nine. The Calgary region is set to open in late 2023 or early 2024, and AWS has committed to using renewable energy to help

142: The Cloud Pod spends the Weekend at the Google Data Lakehouse Nov 03, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team wishes for time-traveling data. Also, GCP announces Data Lakehouse, Azure hosts Ignite 2021, and Microsoft is out for the metaverse.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

GCP releases its data lakehouse, a new architecture that offers low-cost storage in an open format. The real question is, can we book it on Airbnb?
Microsoft kicks off Azure Ignite 2021, announcing new capabilities for its hybrid, multicloud and edge computing platforms.
Microsoft also unveils plans for its own metaverse, including upgrades to Teams, Dynamic 365 Connected Spaces and more.

Top Quotes

“I’m a big fan of IDE for coding and that integrated environment to reduce context shifting, but when you’re talking about access to data, Jupyter is something that’s hosted, that you can protect and grant access to, versus an IDE like RStudio. It becomes a much trickier scenario to maintain any kind of data sovereignty, or protect that in any way, just because, by its true nature, you have to open it up.”
“Between the Facebook Metaverse and Microsoft, who’s going to win the race? Everyone wants to build “Ready Player One.” And Facebook owns Oculus and they have all my data, then they can get my brain as well: They can just monetize the crap out of my profile. And then Microsoft has their augmented reality things… . But I think the power of the Azure cloud actually gives them the advantage versus Facebook, in my opinion. “

General News: ‘Tis Earnings Season

Microsoft was the first to announce its quarterly revenue, boasting a $45 billion increase. This jump of 22% beats Wall Street expectations, and includes Microsoft Azure, LinkedIn commercial revenue, Office 365, and Xbox.
Google also posted impressive results, rounding out the quarter at $18.9 billion, up a whopping 68% from one year ago. Much of this success came from Google Ads and GCP, where revenue was up 45% or about $5 billion.
Due to ongoing supply chain issues and labor shortages, Amazon missed the mark on its earnings forecast, posting a profit of $3.2 billion, a 49% decrease from last year. AWS, however, outperformed (as usual), with a 39% rise in revenue to $16.1 billion.

AWS: The Official Cloud Storage Provider of MI6

TCP Talks: From Monolith to Microservices: Jonathan Heiliger on Modern IT Service Management Nov 01, 2021

In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Jonathan Heiliger, co-founder and partner at Vertex Ventures: an early-stage venture capital firm backing innovative technology entrepreneurs.

Earlier in his career, at just 19, Jonathan co-founded web hosting provider GlobalCenter and served as CTO. He went on to hold engineering roles at Walmart and Danger, Inc., the latter of which was acquired by Microsoft. He was also Vice President of Infrastructure and Operations at Facebook (now Meta), and a general partner at North Bridge Ventures. The latter firm’s portfolio included Quora, Periscope, and Lytro (which has been acquired by Google.)

At Vertex Ventures, Jonathan has helped cutting-edge companies like LaunchDarkly and OpsLevel revolutionize the tech space with continuous delivery and IT service management solutions. Jonathan shares his insights into the shifting market of IT services and explains why decentralizing infrastructure management can help digitally native companies operate at a faster pace.

According to Jonathan, the question of IT service infrastructure isn’t being adequately addressed. Without properly defining service ownership, businesses looking to scale run the risk of siloing critical knowledge, and losing track of services networks.

Jonathan also discusses his own experiences running infrastructure at Facebook (oops, Meta), the merits of both centralized and decentralized IT services management, and how he and his partners at Vertex Ventures approach new investments.

Featured Guest

Name: Jonathan Heiliger

What he does: Jonathan is a co-founder and partner at Vertex Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm that backs B2B software entrepreneurs. He held his first CTO role at 19, and has previously worked for Walmart; Danger, Inc.; Facebook (soon to be known as Meta); and North Bridge Ventures.

Key quote: “We need systems to help us build bridges from the world of paper-based and in-memory to scaling to tens and then hundreds of microservices. It’s that pain point of tracking all the info about apps and their services, dependencies, ownership and versions that I think is this big problem lurking below the surface.”

Where to find him: LinkedIn | Twitter

Key Takeaways

As companies rely on an increasing number of IT services, Jonathan says that it’s imperative that technology leaders establish ownership of IT service management, and meticulously track their software and vendor partners.

According to Jonathan, this kind of IT management is still done in a fairly rudimentary way, even for larger companies. “Every engineering team — even the most well run engineering orgs — the majority of them use Excel spreadsheets to track who owns what service, and even what services may talk to one another,” he says. He sees this as a big problem that’s going to catch up with companies one day.

When considering whether a centralized or decentralized IT management service infrastructure is best for you, Jonathan suggests doing a deep dive on your business objectives.

For example, digitally native businesses, which rely on a vast network of microservices, might work better with a decentralized infrastructure. Non-digitally native brands, on the other hand, might benefit from a centralized system to ensure continuity in the technology.

Avoiding vendor lock-in — i.e. becoming too dependent on a single service provider — is critical in keeping

141: The Cloud Pod Wears Gaudi Outfits for Amazon’s New Deep Learning Accelerator Oct 28, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, half the team misses Rob and Ben. Also, AWS Gaudi Accelerators speed up deep learning, GCP announces that its Tau VMs are an independently verified delight, and Azure gets the chance to be Number One for once (with industrial IoT platforms.)

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS is using Gaudi Accelerators to speed up deep learning models — for nearly $10,000 a month.
Google announces that Tau T2D VMs are now available in preview, and takes the opportunity to report that Phoronix has identified these Tau instances as the best price-performing ones yet.
Azure bags the Number One spot in the Gartner Magic Quadrant category of Industrial IoT Platforms. We’re wondering how much schmoozing Microsoft had to do to pull this off.

Top Quotes

“I guess [AWS Gaudi Accelerators] solve the problem of lack of availability of NVIDIA CPUs. It’s almost impossible to buy a decent graphics card, and I’m sure the cloud providers are suffering horrendously with not being able to scale their machine-learning instances the way they wanted to, because of the chip shortage.”

“We’ve said it for a long time now that with Google coming to the market when they did, it was very easy to take all the major gripes of AWS and Azure and improve on them. And they banged it out of the park. So kudos to them, because it is a much better user experience than [what you get with] the other two cloud providers.”

General News: HashiCorp Increases Access to its Service Mesh

HashiCorp introduces its new Consul API Gateway to help route traffic to applications running on the Hashicorp Consul Service Mesh. This seems like an early release, given its fairly basic capabilities.

AWS: Rolling Out Gaudi Accelerators — Not Architecture

AWS announces AWS Panorama, which is an appliance and SDK that allows users to process video data at the edge of their locations. AWS Panorama was first introduced at the last re:Invent, and is now generally available.
Amazon joins Microsoft, Google, IBM, Honeywell and more in the race to build a quantum computer, partnering with Caltech to open a new center in Pasadena.
4⃣ To save Peter some time in the lightning round, we combined four Amazon DocumentDB updates into one announcement: Users can now enjoy additional support for access control; support for $li

CloudWatch detects The Cloud Pod as an Anomaly – Ep 44 Oct 31, 2019

Peter goes Absent With Out Leave – AWOL. Redhat can’t save IBM’s earnings, AWS starts detecting anomalies, Google adds 100-Gbps direct connect links to their data centers, and Azure gets FHIR-Y. We also take a few somber minutes to talk about the passing of Mark Hurd, Oracle’s former Co-CEO. Plus the world famous lightning round.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Topics

General News/Topics

AWS

Google

Azure

Lightning Round (Jonathan 11, Justin 16, and Guest 4):

Episode 7 – The Cloud Pod now 99.9% available Jan 29, 2019

Episode 7 – The Cloud Pod now 99.9% available

Jonathan, Justin, and Peter talk about the latest news in AWS, Google and Azure. This week we talk about the AWS Backup Services, Oracle Cloud launching in Toronto and AWS Re:Mars. Plus the lightning round and Jonathan’s cool tools.

Sponsors

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod Last Week in AWS: lastweekinaws.com Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

News

Nvidia Tesla T4 GPU’s now available in beta – https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/nvidia-tesla-t4-gpus-now-available-in-beta
AWS Announces AWS Backup and support for multiple services – https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-backup-automate-and-centrally-manage-your-backups/
Oracle Cloud launches in Toronto region and plans Mumbai region – https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/oracle-cloud-infrastructure-launches-toronto-region
- https://inc42.com/buzz/oracle-plans-data-centre-in-india-to-challenge-aws-google-cloud/
Oracle says open source vendors locking down licensing proves they were never really open – https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/17/oracle_exec_opensource_vendors_locking_down_licenses_proves_they_were_never_really_open/
AWS Announces RE:Mars event June 5/6th – https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-launches-remars-event-focusing-ai-second-stage-invite-mars/
AWS Trusted Advisor announces 9 new best practices – https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/01/aws-trusted-advisor-expands-functionality/

Lightning Round

AWS GA Party

Episode 6 – The Cloud Pod Now Supports Resource Tagging Jan 22, 2019

Episode 6 – The Cloud Pod Now Supports Resource Tagging

Jonathan, Justin, Peter talk about the latest news in AWS, Google and Azure. This week we talk about the TSO Logic Acquisition, Document DB, TriggerMesh Lambda, Azure win of the DOD contract, plus much more including the lightning round and cool tools by Jonathan.

Sponsors

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod Last Week in AWS: lastweekinaws.com Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Show Topics

Ring Privacy Story – https://bgr.com/2019/01/10/ring-camera-customer-feeds-accessed-creepy-privacy-violation Amazon Acquires TSO Logic – https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-web-services-acquires-tso-logic-vancouver-startup-working-cloud-spending-analysis/ Azure Wins 1.76b DOD Contract – https://siliconangle.com/2019/01/14/microsoft-wins-1-76b-contract-supply-cloud-services-dod/ New AWS Services launch with HIPAA, PCI, ISO and SOC Certifications – https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/new-aws-services-launch-with-hipaa-pci-iso-and-soc/ GCP SpotInst Partnership – https://it.toolbox.com/blogs/technologynewsdesk/google-cloud-platform-announces-spotinst-elastigroup-011019 TriggerMesh brings AWS Lambda Serverless computing to k8 – https://www.zdnet.com/article/triggermesh-brings-aws-lambda-serverless-computing-to-kubernetes/

Lightning Round

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/01/aws-step-functions-now-supports-resource-tagging/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/01/aws-opsworks-stacks-now-supports-amazon-linux-2–amazon-linux-20/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/01/aws-database-migration-service-adds-support-for-amazon-documentdb/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/01/amazon-ec2-spot-now-supports-paginated-describe-for-spot-instance-requests https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/01/aws-iot-core-now-enables-customers-to-store-messages-for-disconnected-devices/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-genera

Import Existing Resources into The Cloud Pod – Ep 48 Nov 20, 2019

Docker sells off its enterprise business to Mirantis. Amazon gets upset with the pentagon and launches a data exchange. Azure wins a lucrative contract and GitHub actions. Google buys cloudsimple complicating things for the VMWare on Azure offerings.

Sign up for our new Newsletter!

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Jonathan – Follows up on Redshift

Topics

General News/Topics

AWS

Reinvent Tips & Suggestions

Attending Sessions
Reinvent Parties
Replay

Google

Azure

Twas the night before Re:Invent – Ep 49 Nov 20, 2019

AWS is getting ready for the biggest event of the year, Re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas. Your Co-Hosts do their best to guess what AWS may announce, we cover some preannouncement news, and more!

NOTE: This episode was recorded on November 20th, to let the co-hosts enjoy Thanksgiving! This episode is AWS specific, as well as our first show after the Re:Invent conference. If you want to stay up to date on Azure or GCP in the interim, follow our Twitter @thecloudpod1 or join our Slack Channel.

Sign up for our Newsletter!!

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Topics

AWS

Reinvent Draft

Jonathan

Zero/Low code application platform
Anthos like hybrid/multi-cloud platform/option
Transit Gateway cross-regional and/or Security group support

Peter

Layer 7 Egress Filtering Gateway
Cloudwatch Dependency Mapping (mute alerts if downstream from another alert)
Outposts GA and/or Shipping

Justin

Cost Reduction for the Network Tier
A device with a camera, like a drone, thing, etc that will replace the deepracer

140: The Cloud Pod Buys all its Synapse in Advance Oct 20, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team’s collective brain power got a boost from guest hosts Rob Martin of the FinOps Foundation and Ben Garrison of JumpCloud. Also, AWS releases Data Exchange, Google automates Cloud DLP, and Azure Synapse Analytics is available for pre-purchase.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS announces Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift, which will allow users access to and management of third-party data. Watch out, Snowflake.
Google is making its Cloud Data Loss Protection (DLP) automatic so users no longer have to worry about manually monitoring their data.
Azure has made Azure Synapse Analytics available for pre-purchase for customers looking to manage their analytics workloads.

Top Quotes

“There’s always that line: If you build a module that is very effective for users across the board, regardless of what they’re doing, at some point it just becomes a resource. It’s pretty tough to build complex modules that everybody’s going to use as-is, and not want to end up making their own.”

“I do not envy security people in this current climate. The proliferation of cloud computing, edge computing, has really had to get a lot of creative minds working together to try and secure data outside your four walls of sanctity. … And so it’s good to see big companies starting to chime in and address that, because I think it’s just going to continue to keep growing.”

General News: Hashicorp + AWS = A Match Made in Heaven

At .conf21, Splunk announces a new workload-based pricing model for its smaller customers that will help drive retention. Clearly Splunk has been listening to TCP complaining about its insanely expensive model.
HashiCorp releases the public beta of HCP Packer, which allows teams to track and automate build updates across their packer and terraform workflows.
AWS and HashiCorp are partnering to make developers’ lives easier with new terraform modules for AWS, as well as an API path that will enable users to quickly deploy AWS resources while keeping modules lightweight and composable. Justin is stoked for this!

AWS: AWS Data Exchange is Coming for Snowflake

AWS releases its Security at the Edge: Core Principles whitepaper to help business and technology leaders ensure their cloud network security extends to workloads running on the edge. The paper points out three strategic areas to address: AWS Services at the edge location, AWS security best practices, and additional edge services.
AWS Glue Craw

Episode 72: 13 Reasons Why This Episode is Better Than the Last One May 20, 2020

Your co-hosts cover conferences past and yet to come on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

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

We take a good, hard look at the ways Google Cloud has AWS beat.
Microsoft Build 2020 featured the fifth most powerful computer in the world.
Google Cloud Next is here to stay for a long, long time.

General News: Let Me Count the Ways

Peter Wayner of InfoWorld wrote an article listing the 13 ways Google Cloud beats AWS. Well…he didn’t say they were all good reasons.

AWS: That’s a MTHFL

AWS announced the Cloud Development Kit for Kubernetes called cdk8s is now in alpha. Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?
You can now use Attribute-based access control with EC2 Instance Connect to define Secure Shell access permissions based on attributes. It’s good to move away from passing around all those extra keys.
State Manager features for Systems Manager now integrate with AWS CloudFormation. Assuming we’re parsing the naming conventions correctly in these press releases, that’s good news!
Amazon CodeGuru Profiler added -javaagent switch, and CodeGuru Reviewer now supports Atlassian Bitbucket Cloud. Obviously, profiling and reviewing are totally different services — how could anyone get those mixed up?
The AWS CloudTrail console has been redesigned. It’s just the S3 user interface again, so it’s not a very intuitive interface.
Amazon Elastic Container Service now

Google to kill Cloud Pod if not #1 by 2023 – Episode 52 Dec 19, 2019

Your co-hosts settle into the winter holidays by unwinding from Re:Invent and recording the last episode of The Cloud Pod of 2019.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

Amazon picks fights with Microsoft, the New York Times and the President.
Oracle’s finances reflect the trouble we predicted they’d be in when Amazon pulled out.
Google sets its sights on dramatically increasing its market share by 2023.

Return of the JEDI

It’s official: the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract has been awarded to Microsoft to modernize the Department of Defense’s IT systems to the tune of $10 billion. Amazon, which anticipated that it would be awarded the JEDI contract, believes the decision was politically motivated, and that Microsoft is under-equipped to deliver on their promises, highlighting the dangers of a vulnerability in such a sensitive system.

In case you missed it, Sundar Pichai will be taking over as the new CEO of Google. Since he was already the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, don’t expect any drastic changes.

And speaking of CEOs, Safra Catz is now officially the sole CEO of Oracle following the death of her co-CEO Mark Hurd. After Amazon’s migration, she’ll have to deal with the company’s revenue challenges and falling stock prices. It’s not a great time for Oracle as the company continues to lose face with CIOs after years of licensing audits and exorbitant penalties.

Football in the Amazon

Amazon may have lost the contract with the DoD, but it can proudly claim to be the cloud computation provider for the

Episode 95 – THE BEST IS YET TO COME!!! Nov 19, 2020

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 databas

131: The Cloud Pod relaxes and has an AWS data brew Aug 19, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, everyone’s favorite guessing game is back, with the team making their predictions for AWS Summit and re:Inforce — which were not canceled, as they led us to believe last week.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS CTO talks about continuous configuration (CC) at Amazon in his latest blog post. CC has made it possible for the company to keep services running while it also adapts and reacts in real-time.
Google launches monitoring and troubleshooting for virtual machines (VMs). Developers will be able to access visual guides talking them through various scenarios.
Microsoft launches a lawsuit in response to AWS winning a $10 billion NSA contract, the content of which is reportedly related to the organization’s attempts to modernize the way it stores classified data.

Top Quotes

“When it comes to streaming VR, you can be very smart about what you send to a consumer and what you don’t. I mean, there’s still enough compute power locally that it has a good idea of what most of the scenes can look like. So potentially, local computers do the background or the bits that are complex, and you just stream the complexity with the bits that do need to be latency sensitive.”
“I feel like all the monitoring tools out there have been missing this [monitoring and troubleshooting for VMs] for a long time, in that they seem to have all the features you need, but then getting the things you want is so difficult.”

General News: Here We Go Again

Amazon has won a secret $10 billion cloud computing contract from the NSA. This is JEDI all over again: Microsoft is not happy and has already launched a lawsuit.
AWS CTO Dr. Werner Vogels talks about continuous configuration at Amazon. There are a lot of helpful tips in this article, particularly if you’re in Dev, DevOps or Ops.

Amazon Web Services: A Good Brew

AWS Codebuild allows project owners to make build logs and artifacts publicly accessible to anyone outside of AWS Console. This is a great way to build trust in your product: thumbs up from us.
AWS continues to muddy the waters of Glue DataBrew with announcements about

118: The Cloud Pod talks LaMDA, which one? May 19, 2021

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

G

The Cloud Pod on Lockdown – EP 64 Mar 19, 2020

Your hosts join the rest of the world in phoning one in on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure

This week’s highlights

More conference cancellations roll in due to the ongoing global pandemic.
Amazon Redshift made several improvements this week.
We take a look at a bug-hunt by a Site Reliability Engineer at Google.

General News: Working From Home

As the pandemic response ramps up across the world, teleconferencing services like Slack and Zoom have struggled to meet demand. Microsoft Teams users in Europe reported difficulty logging into the service. If you’re looking for an open-source web conferencing application, AWS recommends you use Jitsi. If you’re a startup with more AWS credits to spend than money, we recommend you check it out.

In the continued wave of canceled conferences, Microsoft moved the May 19-21 Build developer conference to a virtual-only format. Even virtual conferences aren’t entirely safe bets, as Google has postponed Google Cloud Next 2020: Digital Connect. Perhaps they will try to wait until they can safely host a physical conference again, but who knows when that will be?

AWS: Redshifting Into Gear

Amazon Redshift now allows users to pause and remove clusters so they are not billed for their use while unneeded. In other Amazon Redshift news, the cloud data warehouse now supports materialized views functionality. We suspect that Redshift will be going serverless before long.

As a part of its release, API Gateway will offer private integrations with AWS Elastic Load Balancers and AWS CloudMap. There’s a lot

Episode 15: The Cloud Pod eats 31.4 trillion pieces of PI Mar 19, 2019

Google finds a use for unused Kubernetes capacity by calculating PI, The Hyperscalers double down on gaming platforms and Azure beats Amazon to DOD certification! Plus the lightning round and cool tools with Jonathan.

Sponsors

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod
Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Open Distro for ES

Topics

AWS Re:inforce 2019 Registration now open

Azure Simplifies environment setup with new blueprints for ISO27001 environments

Workload Importance for Azure SQL Data Warehouse in Preview

Gaming Developers Conference

Microsoft Game Stack allows you to Achieve More

Google Cloud makes Game Development More Open and Flexible

AWS announced 190 new features for Lumberyard 1.18

Amazong Gamelift Realtime Servers in Preview

Google Cloud has reached a new record computing 31.4 trillion digital of PI on Pi Day

The Google Cloud Next 19 Session guide is Now available

GCP Turning Data into NCAA March Madness Insights

Cloudflare raises Fresh 150 million round delaying IPO

AWS Joins the GraphQL Foundation

Azure Government is First Cloud to Achieve DOD impact level 5 Provisional Authorization & GA of DOD regions

Azure Da

Episode 11 – Screaming in the last week of the cloud pod Feb 19, 2019

Episode 11

This week we have special guest Corey Quinn (twitter: @quinnypig). We talk about Googles Culture, Managed Database Services, Amazon HQ2. Plus the world famous lightning round and Jonathan’s cool tools.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Azure security center helps protect you from RunC vulnerability – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-azure-security-center-helps-you-protect-your-environment-from-new-vulnerabilities/

Ballmer’s Clippers select AWS in the first round for their public cloud partner

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/steve-ballmers-los-angeles-clippers-sign-cloud-deal-microsoft-rival-amazon-web-services/

News

Google Cloud Security talks at RSA – https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/announcing-google-cloud-security-talks-during-rsa-conference-2019

Liz Fong-Jones posts about her decision to leave Google and the toxic culture – https://medium.com/s/story/google-workers-lost-a-leader-but-the-fight-will-continue-c487aa5fd2ba

Digital Ocean launches Managed Database Service – https://siliconangle.com/2019/02/14/expanding-cloud-platform-digitalocean-launches-managed-database-service/

https://blog.digitalocean.com/announcing-managed-databases-for-postgresql/

Amazon introduces Lower cost storage class for EFS – https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/02/amazon-efs-introduces-lower-cost-storage-class/

Amazon drops plans for New York (Queens) HQ2 – https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/14/amazon-drops-plans-for-new-york-hq2/

Azure releases Monitoring at Scale Features with Multi-resource metric alerts – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/monitor-at-scale-in-azure-monitor-with-multi-resource-metric-alerts/

IBM CEO says they will be #1 in cloud chapter 2 – https://www.forbes.com/sites/siliconangle/2019/02/14/analysis-ibm-ceo-declares-chapter-2-of-cloud-and-ai-at-ibm-think-2019/#7968ea5c648f

Episode 2 – Larry says no normal person would listen to this podcast Dec 18, 2018

Show Notes

AWS

Homework Assignment - Now Go Build E1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a42kxHSX4Xw Show Topic AWS ECS Container Roadmaphttps://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap

GCP

Google Cloud Next: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/mark-your-calendar-google-cloud-next-2019?utm_source=DevOps%27ish&utm_campaign=3fc0c13de2-106&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_eab566bc9f-3fc0c13de2-46450203 Save the date: April 9-11, 2019 at Moscone Center in San Francisco.Registration opened Dec 12th Security Command Centerhttps://cloud.google.com/security-command-center/?utm_source=release-notes&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2018-december-release-notes-1-en

Autonomous Cloud Pod – Ep 40 Sep 18, 2019

Justin goes to Oracle World and comes back with a new understanding of OCI customers. VPC Flow logs get new metadata and we get an update on AWS outposts, but no date or pricing yet.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Investors send Cloudflare’s shares soaring 20% after IPO hauls in $525M

Topics

AWS

Google

Azure

Oracle

Episode 76: IBM Blames Cloud Pod for Outages Jun 18, 2020

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

Episode 28: The Cloud Pod Metal Edition Jun 18, 2019

It is the week before AWS Re:Inforce and that means it is time for the draft! Cloud Endure migrate is now free of charge, Azure has a shared image gallery and Mongo comes to Google Cloud this week on the podcast.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod
Turbonomic – turbonomic.com/cloudpod

Topics:

Reinforce Predictions

Justin
- DLP Cloud solution on AWS
- SIEM for AWS
- Endpoint Security Tools

Jonathan
- Redlock or Trusted Advisor type security tool
- VPC Security Group Improvements
  - Lists of Source IP’s
  - AWS Services as source or destination
- Machine Learning around Flowlogs and Payload data
Peter
- L7 Egress Firewall/proxy
- Flowlogs with Payload data/Packet Capture
- Security Scanning of Container for ECR

Honorable Mentions

Justin
- WAF Enhancement
- Client VPN based Dynamic Access/Security Groups
- Tagging Namespace fix
Jonathan
- Organizations enhancements to make security easier across a set

Episode 19: Announcing the new Cloud Pod Premium Tier Apr 18, 2019

We are back to our normal show after our GCP Next recap. This week the new AWS APAC region, Azure premium tiers and the AWS open letter on climate change. Plus the lightning round and cool tools.

Sponsors

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod

(more…)

Episode 101: AWS plays the Parler games Jan 18, 2021

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

Episode 86 – Google Cloud Next Digital Finally Ends Sep 17, 2020

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&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 & 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 degrada

Get Your Hands Cloudy with Forrest Brazeal from A Cloud Guru – Episode 11 Sep 17, 2020

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’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’m sitting on one team, and I’m touching one technology all the time, I could go two, three, four years and never know anything about networking because all I’m doing is databases, right? Or never know anything about compute, because all I’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’t mean you’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 – not just writing algorithms. Forrest says “it’s figuring out requirements, and it’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’s what was mentioned in the episode

Microsoft Azure: Cloud Computing Services
AWS: Amazon Web Services

122: Welcome to Crash Consistency Week Jun 17, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, Matthew Kohn joins the team as a substitute for Jonathan and Peter, who have gone AWOL. Also, Google demonstrates again why its network is superior to the other cloud providers.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS now allows crash-consistent AMIs without requiring a reboot. No more manual processes needed.
Google is building a subsea cable named Firmina. The cable, to be comprised of 12 fiber pairs, will carry traffic quickly and securely between North and South America.
Oracle announces improvements to its block volumes. Its Ultra-High-Performance (UHP) block volume comes with up to 300,000 IOPS and 2,680 MB/s throughput per volume and is generally available across all OCI commercial regions and on all interfaces.

General News: Not Dead Yet

Hashicorp Vagrant 3.0 will maintain its Ruby-based features while being ported to Go. We thought this was on a path to death but apparently not.

Amazon Web Services: Proceed With Caution

AWS announces a new region in Tel Aviv, Israel. AWS clearly realized it was behind the other cloud providers on building new regions.
Amazon launches AWS Proton in general availability. There are some super cool improvements that have been done to this.
Amazon EC2 now allows you to create crash-consistent Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). This is one of our EC2 wish list items — it’s great to tick it off the list.
AWS announces per second billing for EC2 Windows Server and SQL Server Instances. It’s nice to only be billed for what you actually use.
AWS removes NAT Gateway’s dependence on Internet Gateway for private communications. This has been a big annoyance for a while so nice to see it sorted!

Google Cloud Platform: Just Fi

109: The Cloud Pod Hopes all Fault Injections are Simulated Mar 17, 2021

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

Episode 105: The Cloud Pod’s heart is a Flutter with Space Edge Feb 17, 2021

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’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.

Episode 98: AWS tries the JEDI mind trick again Dec 16, 2020

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’s Favorite Topic

A heavily redacted version of AWS’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 me

The Right to Bare ARM Chips – Ep 43 Oct 16, 2019

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter as we review the latest batch of cloud news. AWS re:Invent 2019 is just a month away and there’s no shortage of announcements this week either.

This week’s highlights

AWS re:Invent 2019 session catalog is live. If you haven’t gotten into the panels you want, you’ll have to get on a waitlist. We’re also considering a podcast meetup! Please let us know if you’d be up for that. Reach out on Twitter or through the contact form.
Look at migrating from Oracle. It may take some time and effort to accomplish, but the savings Amazon’s had are results that bear an attempt at repeating.
You might be in luck if you have an open-source project. AWS is offering promotional credits to promote certain open-source work. Amazon completes massive migrations from Oracle After moving 75 petabytes of data involving 100+ teams, Amazon has finished migrating the last database of their first-party programs from Oracle to AWS services. The slashes in operational costs and latency may have the Amazon teams happy, but Oracle will definitely be watching to see if their other customers will be tempted to follow suit. A 90 percent reduction in cost would be an enticing prospect to switch providers of any service, and half the latency is nothing to sneeze at either.
Amazon looks to be taking some of those savings and turning them right back around into more projects. Of note, they will be offering promotional credits to those working on open-source projects, especially if you are working in Rust. If you manage to get a whole year of funding through Amazon that will mean more time working on what you really care about and less trying to keep the grants coming in every quarter or, worse, every month.

Rounding out AWS news, we discussed four other stories:
1. VPC security groups come to Firewall Manager. Finally. You’d think this would be included day one, but at least it’s here now. Maybe soon it’ll be updated to include federated access?
2. New M5n/R5n EC2 instances will offer up to 100 Gbps networking speeds. If you need to move around larger sets for machine learning, for instance, the price is reasonable.
3. EC2 instances will also be available in Arm-based bare metal form. The bare metal probably won’t grant much of an efficiency edge anymore, but hey, maybe it will help meet especially strict compliances.
4. AWS announced that another 18services hav

135: The Cloud Pod Goes to Google Cloud Toronto, Eh? Sep 16, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS releases OpenSearch and EKS Anywhere, Google Cloud is now available in the Toronto region, and Microsoft deals with two critical security issues.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS releases OpenSearch (previously Elasticsearch) and makes EKS Anywhere generally available — to those who run VMware.
Google Cloud opens a Toronto region, expanding its core Google portfolio into three new zones. How aboot that?
Security issues continue to plague Microsoft, with critical vulnerabilities exposed in both its ACI and OMI features. Hopefully new hire, Charlie Bell, can help them out.

Top Quotes

“I hope that the reason [AWS is] integrating with VMware only is because they’re deeply integrating with that platform and they can spin up new VMs, deploy new infrastructure, and provide the scaling you need to make EKS Anywhere work the way it works in the cloud.”

“Everything now is driven by the cloud in a big way, where you pay by the drip. So now I need to make the drip as efficient as possible. And if I can give you dedicated silicon to do that, that’s the best thing for me. And so it’s quite interesting.”

General News: Jump On It

The Cloud Pod sponsor, JumpCloud, raises $159 million in its Series F round, bringing its total funding to $350 million. Remote working has catalyzed growth for this cloud directory service, now valued at $2.56 billion. Take that, AD.

Amazon Web Services: New Features, Who Dis?

Amazon Elasticsearch is now OpenSearch. In addition to the new name, AWS has also added a host of new features like advanced security, SQL query syntax, updated reporting capabilities, and more. Overall, we are super happy with this first release!
Amazon EKS Anywhere is now generally available… as long as you use it on top of VMware. EKS (almost) Anywhere helps users manage any Kubernetes cluster, and offers automation tooling for cluster lifecycle support. This comes two weeks late for Justin, who included it in his predictions draft. Bummer.
Livestreamers rejoice! AWS is launching EC2 T1 instances for live multi-stream video transcoding, which will provide resolution up to 4K Ultra HD. Using GPUs for graphics processing — what an idea!

Google Cloud Platform: Google Welcomes Toronto to the Family

In addition to giving users dedicated CPUs, GCP is now offering CPU allocation controls

Episode 79 – The Cloud Pod Confidential Jul 16, 2020

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:

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

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

The Cloud Pod Development Kit Now in GA – Ep 31 Jul 16, 2019

The team is back after some well deserved time off, with a busy two weeks they try to cover everything. AWS NYC event, Azure Migration Program, EC2 Instance connect and AWS budget reports.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Topics

113: The Cloud Pod goes mobile Apr 16, 2021

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:

68 – The Cloud Pod is as free as Github for Teams Apr 16, 2020

Ryan Lucas and Ian Mckay fill in for Jonathan on this week’s free-tier episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

GitHub announced a new business model.
Amazon announced a giant pile of Beanstalk updates.
Google published a free book on secure and reliable systems.

General News: [Upgrade to Premium for Full Segment Title]

GitHub has switched to a freemium business model — core features will be free to all users, and premium features like Security Assertion Markup Language will require a paid plan. This is a great new direction, though they may lose a few paid customers tempted to downgrade to the new free tier.

AWS: Amazon Golden Goose

The new AWS Launch Wizard for Solutions and Pricing (SAP) service will orchestrate resource provisioning to help customers deploy or migrate SAP workloads. If you’re paying the premium for a big fancy SAP instance, you’re going to want to be invested in how your infrastructure is set up.
Amazon unveiled a giant pile of Beanstalk updates this week. The AWS Elastic Beanstalk console is now generally available, and upcoming features can be followed the roadmap on GitHub. New generations of Docker, Corretto and Python platforms built on Amazon Linux 2 will all run applications on Elastic Beanstalk. Elastic Beanstalk has added API support for listing platform branches. Beanstalk is looking to be a very popular option for smaller developers, and is getting more impressive with every update.
You can now preview Amazon RDS Proxy with PostgreSQL compatibility, which resolves connection pool issues. This is going to be a super helpful service and at about three cents per hour to run a proxy, it’s also extrem

TCP-Talks: Oh my! SRE, AIOps and Observe-a-what? Apr 16, 2020

This week Chris Riley DevOps Advocate for Splunk and Podcast Host of Developers Eating the World joins us. We ask the tough questions, like what is Observability exactly? We touch on the risk of robots taking my job, with AI-Ops, and if it is marketing buzzwords or a product. Plus the mad rush to SRE all the NOCs, because GOOGLE DOES IT and more on TCP-Talks.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/hoardinginfo

Developers Eating the World Podcast

The Cloud Pod Bug Affects Millions! – Episode 55 Jan 15, 2020

Your co-hosts discuss the National Security Agency, the Department of Defense, the UK Home Office and more on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

Amazon seeks a restraining order in a move to contest the JEDI contract.
Our first 2020 prediction comes true in a Microsoft/IBM team-up.
Jonathan takes a 200 percent lead in the Lightning Round with Amazon Cognito.

Matters of National Security

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is going to court over allegations that the $10 billion JEDI contract was awarded to Microsoft due to improper pressure from the president as part of his personal issues with Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos. Expect the temporary restraining order to be granted or denied on February 11. Amazon may try to drag out proceedings until after the election — and a more favorable administration.

For those of you running Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016, be sure to grab the new patch advised by Microsoft and the National Security Agency. The patch solves a vulnerability that was found in a decades-old component called CryptoAPI, and would allow an attacker to copy the digital signature of legitimate software.

Amazon Web Services — Seven Short Sweet Stories

Though AWS may be hoping to stall the JEDI contract, business as usual shows no sign of slowing. Here are the seven AWS stories we talked about this week:

You can now go to Github for the public roadmap of AWS Elastic Beanstalk and voice any of your input.
UK Home Office (think Department of Homeland Security) has announced they’ll renew their public cloud services deal with AWS for another £100 million over four more years. To put that in context, it’s 0.13 percent the size of JEDI.
Former Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Ariel Kelman has left to join Oracle, and in his absence, AWS is taking the opportunity to

Episode 90: The Cloud Pod gets a NanoDegree on podcasting Oct 14, 2020

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 Ava

126: The Cloud Pod Gives Amazon Money in Advance Jul 14, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, with a couple of no-shows, Justin and Ryan’s Happy Hour includes returning guests Matthew Kohn and Sara Tumberella. Also, the team is curious to see what’s going to change at AWS with its new CEO.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

Amazon has finally launched OpenSearch 1.0. They’re hoping to make the transition to as simple as possible for open-source Elasticsearch users.
AWS customers can now pre-pay for their usage. This will allow customers to pay future invoices automatically.
Google announced the general availability of its new Google Cloud Certificate Authority Service (CAS). It hopes the service will help address the increased need for digital certificates.

Top Quotes

“I’m curious to see if you can do things like optimization, where you can reference a security group rule many times across multiple security groups. [You could] simplify a lot of your ecosystem by having maybe a catalog of rules that you apply selectively.”
“I still haven’t seen much talk about what they’re doing with Beats, and if they’re going to fork Beats as well. Initially, they weren’t going to, but then it sounded like Elasticsearch basically pulled the rug out from under them on that too. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that also get forked at some point in the future as well.”

General News: Red Tape

New AWS CEO Adam Selipsky faces bureaucracy challenges. It will be interesting to see what he keeps and what he changes.

Security: Ryan’s Going to Space

Research suggests security tools are fighting for attention, and there’s a rise in false-positive alerts. When companies want the latest and greatest security applications, they often end up competing with each other, and it makes troubleshooting difficult.

Amazon Web Services: Setting Fire to Dumpsters

AWS announces new VPC security group rule IDs. We’re curious to dig into the details: for example, will it allow users to reference one security group rule across multiple security groups?
AWS launches OpenSearch 1.0. We get the impression AWS is handling this project differently, by really investing in the community.

Episode 27: Microsoft and Oracle interconnect with The Cloud Pod Jun 14, 2019

Google Publishes RCA on their outage, Microsoft and Oracle enter into a cloud alliance and AWS improves incident resolution with Systems Manager Opscenter.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod
Turbonomic – turbonomic.com/cloudpod

Follow Up:

Google Cloud networking incident 19009 Final RCA

Topics:

Ep 71: Now Open AWS WFH Region May 14, 2020

We crown the winner of the AWS Summit Draft Picks on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

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

We crown the winner of this year’s AWS Summit Draft Picks!
Amazon and Microsoft keep slinging blog posts over JEDI.
We’re all just trying to stay sane, honestly.

AWS Summit: Draft Picks

While it wasn’t a particularly accurate set of predictions this year (with no honorable mentions scoring and even the tiebreaker non-functional), Justin managed to squeak out a win by correctly predicting a price cut in EC2, S3, or Networking and the Covid Crazy Growth Numbers. Jonathan scored the only other point with his prediction of improved DLP Tools for S3.
Amazon Macie simplified its pricing plan and dramatically reduced costs. Is the 80% price cut the new way of announcing a product is generally available?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud cut prices across all regions for Standard Reserved Instances and EC2 Instance Saving Plans.
Inter-Region Data Transfer prices have been reduced for data coming out of São Paulo, Bahrain, Cape Town and Sydney.

General News

Amazon filed a second, concurrent bid protest to the Department of Defense. Microsoft and Amazon continue to snip at each other in public blog posts.

COVID-19

Amazon will allow non-warehouse employees to work from home for at least five months. Microsoft updated their WFH policy, and will give employees the option to work remotely through October.

AWS

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer has seen pricing changes. Now CodeGuru’s terrible payment model is much less terrible.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service now supports Kubernetes version 1.16. It’s good to see they’re putting out these updates progressively faster.
A new wizard will allow for simplified creation and management of Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters. This should clean up some of the EKS console nicely.
AWS Identity and Access Management

Episode 23: Unlock the podcast with your Android device May 14, 2019

This week on The Cloud Pod, Amazon S3 deprecates path style routing, then changes their mind. Azure reliability suffers in the first part of the year, and Google summarizes their IO cloud announcements.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – https://fogops.io/thecloudpod

Topics

Lightning Round (Jonathan 5, Justin 7, Peter 1 and Guest 3)

The Cloud Pod gets a Savings Plan – Episode 47 Nov 13, 2019

AWS releases new RI option called the savings plan, IBM builds a financial services cloud, and @jeffbarr celebrates 15 years of blogging for AWS!

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Halloween Downtime RCA – Google

Topics

General News/Topics

AWS

Reinvent Tips & Suggestions

Google

Azure

Lightning Round (Jonatha

139: Back to the Future With Google Distributed Cloud Oct 13, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan reveals his love for “Twilight.” Plus GCP kicks off Google Cloud Next and announces Google Distributed Cloud, and Azure admits to a major DDoS attack.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

After a few awkward keynotes, Google Cloud Next kicks off days one and two, highlighting new features and announcing Google’s $10 billion investment in cybersecurity advancements.
At Google Cloud Next, GCP announced the Google Distributed Cloud: A network of hardware and software to help organizations improve cloud strategies.
After tooting its horn for reduced DDoS attacks in 2021, Azure reveals details about the largest DDoS attack in its history. This 2.4 terabits/second attack was launched in late August against an Azure customer in Europe.

Top Quotes

“It is kind of crazy, because [Google Distributed Cloud] is an open source project that’s basically how to run Google Cloud in your own data center. It’s probably a smart risk, because I do believe workloads will just eventually end up on Google Cloud.”
“The tools have the functionality built in, but unless you’re offering that as a service to your end users … and thinking about the holistic management of the settings, the deployment and the full lifecycle of those things, it’s the difference between enabling your business to be secure and just shooting it in the foot.”

AWS: Keeping Quiet This Week for Google Cloud Next

Amazon Fraud Detector can now store event datasets and use this historical data to boost performance for ML models — all at a 56% reduction in price.
AWS Console Mobile Application has (finally) added ECS, which will allow users to view and manage a select set of resources to support incident responses from their devices. Clearly someone at AWS listens to TCP and has heard Justin’s many complaints about this.
CDK8s (say that five times fast) is now generally available and supports the Go programming language. Using CDK8s, you can define your K8 applications and apply K8 YAML to any cluster.
Tired of accidentally deleting your backup with your cloud formation stack? The newly released AWS Backup Vault Lock solves this problem by using safeguards to ensure users store their backups using a Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) model.

GCP: Thank U Google Cloud Next

Ahead of Google Cloud Next,

You had one Job while I was away – Ep 42 Oct 13, 2019

Justin is back from vacation and gets the podcast back on track. Justin, Peter and Jonathan talk about their guest spot on roaring elephants and Justin’s AWS lambda fireside chat video. Elasticsearch sues AWS over trademark infringement, AWS gets its IQ raised, Oracle gets fedramp certified cloud regions and Google enhances their github app for cloud build. Plus the world famous lightning round.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Topics

Roaring Elephant https://roaringelephant.org/2019/10/08/episode-161-the-cloudpod-weather-report-part-1/

AWS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Aq2DIMRIIg&t=1s

General News/Topics

AWS

Google

Episode 82: Azure says “How About them Apples, Open Usage Commons” Aug 13, 2020

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’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

Episode 83: The Cloud Pod takes a Quantum Leap Aug 13, 2020

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’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 & 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

The Cloud Pod to appear at Intersect.aws – Ep 35 Aug 13, 2019

Github.com gets a CI/CD Service, Lakes are forming with lake formation and Google and Azure get EPYC this week on the show.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Topics

General News

AWS

130: The Cloud Pod has how many unattended Google projects? Aug 12, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, it’s been an interesting few days in the cloud, so the team members have made themselves comfortable with plenty of adult beverages to keep them going. Also, Elastic has forked everyone with its latest Elasticsearch move.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

Elastic has modified the Elasticsearch Python client so it won’t work with forked versions, including the relatively recently released OpenSearch 1.0.
AWS CloudWatch Synthetics now supports visual monitoring. Customers with web apps can see defects that can’t be scripted but would be visible to end users.
Google introduces the Unattended Project Recommender. It uses machine learning to identify projects that have likely been abandoned and forgotten about, so you can cull them from the cloud.

Top Quotes

“People were originally attracted to Elasticsearch because it was an open source project. So this [amending the Elasticsearch Python client] is taking away one of the main reasons they were able to acquire the users they did. I don’t get the strategy, unless they’re pulling a ripcord right now, because they’re bleeding.”
“I know a lot of companies are moving their services into the cloud, and a lot of security engineers are restricting outbound access, or tightly controlling egress. These things [Google’s Private Service Connect] have to happen — these things are absolutely needed — to keep them secure, and allow those companies to sell their services. Good catch-up feature.”

General News: We’re Not Angry Just Disappointed

Elastic amends Elasticsearch Python client so it won’t work with forked versions — and proves it knows how unpopular this is by blocking GitHub comments. This is forcing people to choose sides, and is a really disappointing move.
AWS details its commitment to keeping OpenSearch and Elasticsearch compatible with open source. Elastic has managed the impossible: it’s made AWS look like the good guys.

Amazon Web Services: Unbreaking The Rules

Amazon’s senior cloud leader Charlie Bell is leaving the company after more than 23 years. Knowing how fast AWS moves, we feel tired just thinking about working there that long.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling enhances Instance Refresh

63: The Cloud Pod Stays Home to Enjoy the Fireworks Mar 12, 2020

Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter again as we practice social distancing on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

Details emerged from the ongoing legal battle surrounding the JEDI contract.
Amazon shows off its new operating system.
Powershell 7.0 brings long-awaited features to Windows.

General News

Due to the ongoing global pandemic, AWS Summits have been (responsibly) cancelled in Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai, Paris, San Francisco and Brussels. Hopefully we’ll see these events move online.

Court documents from Amazon’s injunction have been unsealed. The documents reveal that Microsoft’s bid included “non-compliant storage” which was not counted against them. The Department of Defense responded that Amazon’s bid did not include technically compliant storage either.

Our very own Justin Brodley made the news! His comments are included in an article covering a cloud alternatives panel discussion at Altitude 2020.

VMware Inc. overhauled its portfolio of products to focus on Kubernetes support. Expect to see the whole host of products available by May 2020.

AWS:

The new CloudWatch composite alarms will allow you to combine alarms and get a clearer picture of what is happening when something goes wrong.

You can now host your applications with the AWS

Episode 14: Elizabeth Warren votes to break up the cloud pod Mar 12, 2019

This week Matt Adorjan (@mda590) joins us to talk about AWS’s open distro for ElasticSearch, Breaking up big tech, and F5 acquiring Nginx. Plus the lightning round and Cool Tools with Jonathan.

Thanks to our sponsors!

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Show Topics

How does your cloud storage grow? With a scalable plan and a price drop

Azure Premium Blob storage now in public preview

Simply Enterprise Threat Detection and Protection with Google Cloud Security Services

Elizabeth Warren bold plan to break up big tech

Azure Devops Server 2019 now available

AWS Announces Open Distro for Elastic Search

Adrian Cockcroft publishes blog on keeping open source open

Elastic.Co Response to open distros open source

F5 Acquires NGINX

Lightning Round

AWS Performance Insights is now GA for SQL Server

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/03/performance-insights-is-generally-available-for-sql-server/

AWS SSM on-Premise now handles large hybrid environments (Previously less than 1000 instances)

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/03/AWS_Systems_Manager_on-premises_instance_management_for_large_hybrid_environments/

AWS Coretto 11 is now available as a release candidate

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/03/amazon-corretto-11-is-now-available-as-a-release-candidate/

AWS Step functions adds tag based permissions

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/03/aws-step-functions-adds-tag-based-permissions/

New AW

Episode 104: The Cloud Pod gets Introspection Capabilities Feb 12, 2021

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’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 w

The Cloud Pod goes to Mars – Episode 59 Feb 12, 2020

Peter’s returned from his trip to Asia and the band’s back together on this episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

Registration for Amazon Re:Mars 2020 is now open! Academics can use code ACAD20REMARS for a discount.
Google releases several new tools for building and managing data pipelines.
We tried out a new format for our lightning round!

Amazon Web Services: To Infinity and Beyond

Registration is open for the Amazon Re:Mars 2020 robotics and technology conference running June 16-19 in Las Vegas. Tickets cost $1,999, but astronauts get in free! Academics and students registering with a .edu email address can use the discount code ACAD20REMARS if a couple grand is too pricey.

AWS Sync Routes is available on the AWS Open Source blog to allow you to synchronize routes across tables. If you’ve got only a few VPCs, you might have the right use case for this.

AWS CodeDeploy’s blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS now include “linear and canary deployments.” Hidden in that announcement is the implication that they seem to have invented linear deployments.

You can now use a full-screen narrative editor with a preview mode thanks to enhancements to Amazon QuickSight. You can also add static and dynamic URLs within those narratives.

If you’re a Well-Architected Framework practitioner, the new Serverless Lens for AWS Well-Architected Tool may improve your architecture assessments.

If you (somehow) have a workload that can tolerate lost events, the Multi-Region Asynchronous Object Replication Solution may be for you. We’ll hope for a global bucket option to replace this down the line with something more elegant.

Azure’s S

Episode 10: The podcast no longer requires credit cards Feb 12, 2019

Episode 10

Peter returns from his vacation, Major Docker security vulnerability, Azure gets FHIR and the Warriors choose a public cloud partner. Plus the lightning round!

Sponsors

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Topics

CVE-2019-5736 Docker RunC vulnerability –

Vulnerability – https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2019/q1/119
AWS – https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2019-002/
Google – https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/security-bulletins
Azure – https://github.com/Azure/AKS/releases/tag/2019-02-12

Azure Account Failover now in Public preview – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/account-failover-now-in-public-preview-for-azure-storage/

Google Cloud now provides bigquery sandbox without credit card – https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/query-without-a-credit-card-introducing-bigquery-sandbox

Azure API for FHIR – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/lighting-up-healthcare-data-with-fhir-announcing-the-azure-api-for-fhir/

MSFT Healthcare Bot brings Conversational AI to healthcare – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-healthcare-bot-brings-conversational-ai-to-healthcare/

Azure announcing updates and GA for 3 Azure Data Services – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/individually-great-collectively-unmatched-announcing-updates-to-3-great-azure-data-services/

Golden State Warriors Chase Center names Google Cloud as their public cloud provider- http://www.sportspromedia.com/news/golden-state-warriors-chase-center-google-cloud

Build Containers faster with Cloud build with Kaniko – https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/build-containers-faster-with-cloud-build-with-kaniko

Jib 1.0 released by Google Compute to simplify Java Docker Containers – https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/jib-1-0-0-is-ga-building-java-docker-images-has-never-been-easier

Episode 94: The Cloud Pod No Code Required Nov 11, 2020

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 hate

Episode 18: It’s a Google Next, Next Level Recap Apr 11, 2019

Google Next has wrapped up in San Francisco and we break down the announcements, talk about Google’s enterprise play, and more. Special guest Ryan Lucas @ryron01 #googlenext19 #thecloudpod #gcp

Sponsors

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

(more…)

108: The Cloud Pod moves forward without JEDI Mar 11, 2021

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’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 terribl

TCP Talks with Ben Kehoe Serverless Hero – Episode 3 Mar 11, 2020

One of the most exciting cloud computing technologies of the last few years is Serverless computing, whether it be via AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, GCP functions or technologies like K-Native. This week Jonathan and Justin talk to Ben Kehoe Chief Roboticist at iRobot and AWS Serverless hero. We ask Ben the burning questions about Serverless Computing, robotics, AWS and more! Listen today.

The Cloud Pod Goes Quantum – Ep 39 Sep 10, 2019

Episode 39: Recorded on September 10th, 2019. Show Title: The Cloud Pod goes Quantum

This week AWS releases the Quantum Ledger Database, Google gets shielded GKE nodes and Microsoft gets a new shiny datacenter in Germany

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Slack stock plunges on bigger-than-expected loss forecast

Topics

AWS

Google

Azure

Episode 75: The Cloud Pod Deletes Everything (But Keeps Copies) Jun 10, 2020

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…

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

67 – BigQuery Simulates The CloudPod March Madness Apr 10, 2020

Your hosts meet online to work on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Profits of The Cloud Pod’s sticker sales will be donated to charity.
DeepComposer is now generally available.
You can play around with March Madness simulations in BigQuery.

General News: The Cloud Pod Tackles COVID-19

We’re donating profits of our sticker sales to the John Hopkins University COVID-19 Research Response Program through July 1, 2020.

AWS: Staying Productive

The Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights feature, which gives users an overview of their operational problems, is now generally available. CloudWatch Contributor Insights is also generally available for DynamoDB, though it is 50 percent more expensive per million log events than Insights not for DynamoDB. You can build some neat automation around this.

Back in Episode 51, we covered the new instances with ra3.16xlarge nodes, and now Amazon is adding instances with ra3.4xlarge nodes, which lack the excess power of ra3.16xlarge. At a quarter of the price of the larger larges, that’s some considerable savings.

Amazon Redshift now features elastic resize, allowing users to change node types within minutes. This will be helpful if you want to make the move to those cheaper instances.

If you’re looking for something fun while sheltering in place, you may be pleased to hear that AWS DeepComposer is now generally available (and with new features!) You can buy an Amazon keyboard for $99 or a generic for $50.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports In-Region Read Replicas on SQL Server Enterprise Edition in the Multi-AZ config with Always On Availability. Careful though, you can really rack up a bill this way if you’re careless.

Amazon announced that Amazon Elastic File System has quintupled its speed for General Purpose mode file systems to 35,000 read operations per second. That leads into our next headline: Amazon Elastic

Episode 97: S3 Buckets land the key to success Dec 09, 2020

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

Re:Invent 2019 – We *really* should have gone back to the room – Episode 51 Dec 09, 2019

Your co-hosts celebrate the one-year anniversary of the podcast by returning to the place where it all started – AWS Re:Invent. Joining us once again is Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) as we recap the largest week in Cloud.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning, and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data–no matter its source–with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

Machine Learning took center stage as the engine behind many of the new machines introduced over the week, and we expect to see it implemented more and more.

Quantum Computing can be simulated using Amazon Bracket for anyone coding for the razor’s edge in computer science.
Check out The Amazon Builder’s Library for insight into how Amazon operates.

AWS Draft — and the Winner is…

On episode 49, we drafted each of our top three picks for what we thought would be announced at Re:Invent. It’s a three-way tie for first! Each one of us correctly guessed one of our three picks, and nobody guessed that Anderson .Paak would make a musical appearance, leaving the tie unbroken. (Peter predicted that Formula 1 racing would be included, but it was a runner-up choice and goes uncounted.)

Moving on to Re:Invent, we cover the announcements day-by-day:

Sunday

Toys and Security

AWS launched DeepComposer, the world’s first machine learning enabled keyboard. The 32-key, 2-octave keyboard is designed to help developers to get hands-on with AI. You can train the program to generate compositions based on musical genres, but don’t expect any compelling vocals from it yet, though. Check out the announcement for sample selections. For only $99 you will be able to buy a MIDI keyboard (worth about $50) with the AWS logo on

DeepRacer, a machine-learning based toy from yesteryear has received its own upgrades (a stereo camera and LIDAR sensor) which allow the cars to be trained to race each other physically in addition to virtually.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer launches for free as a way to get an overview on your access control policies — it mathematically analyzes access control policies attached to resources and determines which resources can be accessed publicly or from other accounts.

A preview version of

Parti(QL) with The Cloud Pod – Ep 34 Aug 09, 2019

Special guest Josh Stella joins us to talk about the Capital One breach. AWS releases PartiQL, one query language to rule them all, Microsoft licensing changes and more. Plus we talk more about Josh’s company @Fuguehq in Cool Tools.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Capital One

A Technical Analysis of the capital one cloud misconfiguration breach

Topics

General News

Cloudflare reportedly files to go public in September

AWS

Google

Azure

Episode 77b: Google Next Prediction Show Jul 09, 2020

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’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 & 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 & 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) – 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 – 45,000
Matt – 60,000
Jonathan- 85,000
Justin – 100,000

121: Blue Origin finds new “dummy” to go to space Jun 09, 2021

Is sending the former CEO of one of the biggest technology companies in the world to space a good idea? On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the potential economic catastrophe that could follow if Jeff Bezos becomes space junk.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Jumpcloud, which provides cloud directory services, enables remote access, eases onboarding and offboarding of users and enables zero trust access models.

This week’s highlights

Amazon is sending the old junk it found in the attic into space.
Google is now fully qualified to direct traffic.
Azure turned its out-of-office message on and hoped no one would notice.

General News: Frenemies

Snowflake had its annual user conference and announced some new tools and features. Pretty good!
Jeff Bezos is joining the first human flight to space with his company Blue Origin. This is super risky, even if he’s no longer CEO.
Fastly blames global internet outage on a software bug. This is the right way to address outages — nice one, Fastly!

Amazon Web Services: Watch This Space

Amazon announces auditing feature for FSx for Windows File Server. This needs an acronym.
AWS has added a third availability zone to the China (Beijing) region operated by Sinnet. Nice to see.
AWS Sagemaker Data Wrangler now supports Snowflake as a data source. Smart move.

Google Cloud Platform: Sneaky Sales Tactics

Google announces the release of container-native Cloud DNS for Kubernetes. Powerful building block or Achilles heel?
Google announces new capabilities for Cloud Asset Inventory. Makes so much sense to come from the provider because they know what you have.
Google releases new Microsoft and Wind

Solutions Architect To SADA CTO: Miles Ward on how and why the Google Cloud has the edge Mar 09, 2021

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… But it’s 2021 — live in the future, that shit works. Now it’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’s not doing it to be a glad-hand, he’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’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’s a whole bunch of people that have made it really obvious that if

Episode 89: Azure gives The Cloud Pod an advisor score of 100 Oct 08, 2020

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 w

134: The Cloud Pod has NetApp ONTAP Sep 08, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team wishes there was something else on tap, not just NetApp. Also, AWS Storage Day has come and gone again, and Azure is springing into the enterprise cloud.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

The third annual AWS Storage Day brought a few presents, including new features for files and transfers.
One announcement was the general availability of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Hell has frozen over, and you can now get Netapp Filers on top of AWS.
Azure announces the launch of Spring Cloud Enterprise, a managed service for Spring optimized for enterprise developers.

Top Quotes

“I assume this is all built natively on top of AWS, and they are managing the service for you on EC2. If that’s the case, I believe this is the first of this type that AWS has offered. We’ve talked about Google partnering with people to operate appliances on your own VPCs, same as Azure. So this is probably the first of many partner integrations.”
“I don’t know if it’s [Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points] they wanted, but I think at these prices, they definitely didn’t want it. If the price was more attractive or if it was simpler to process and calculate — more predictable — I think people would potentially be excited about this.”

General News: Whisk It

DigitalOcean acquired three-year-old startup Nimbella, which develops multi-cloud serverless software. It’s an interesting alternative to, say, building its own serverless stack with OpenWhisk.

Amazon Web Services: Hell Has Frozen Over

Here’s what happened at AWS Storage Day 2021. We recommend you check out the recordings, because it actually wasn’t a snooze fest.
AWS announces general availability of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. If you want to import data into a data lake, this would be one way to do it.
AWS announces Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering to optimize costs for workloads with changing access patterns.This gives you so

Ep 78 – Honey, I built an App Jul 08, 2020

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 instanc

112: The Cloud Pod bots are in control Apr 08, 2021

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’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 tra

Google recognizes The Cloud Pod hosts as celebrities – E46 Nov 07, 2019

This week we discuss the Microsoft Ignite conference, announcements and new features and how we did on the Azure Draft. AWS announces a new Spain region and GCP had a lengthy halloween incident.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Topics

AWS

Google

MS Ignite Draft

Jonathan

Digital Assistant to compete with Alexa or Google Home.
3 more Azure Regions in US
More or Improved tooling for Devops Community

Peter

Istio for AKS
1 more region in Canada
Visual Studio Online

Justin

Azure Portal Redesign
Sagemaker/Databricks like Competitor.
Oracle on Stage

Azure

Microsoft Azure customers reporting hitting virtual machine limits in U.S. East regions

125: JEDI is Dead, and the Cloud Pod Launches Bottlerockets in Celebration Jul 07, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan was busy buying stuff on Amazon Prime Day and didn’t want to talk about JEDI, so he arrived late to the recording. Also, long-time sponsor of The Cloud Pod, Foghorn Consulting, has been acquired by Evoque, so the team grilled Peter for the juicy details.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

The $10 billion JEDI cloud contract has been canceled by the Pentagon. In its place, the DOD announced a new multi-vendor contract known as the “Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability.”
Evoque Data Center Solutions has acquired cloud engineering experts Foghorn Consulting. This is a key part of the company’s Multi-Generational Infrastructure (MGI) strategy, which it announced the same day as the acquisition.
AWS released some incredible numbers from Amazon Prime Day. Jeff Barr gives his annual take on how AWS performed and the record-setting event.

Top Quotes

“The Pentagon has called off the $10 billion cloud contract [JEDI]. It was being dragged through the courts by Amazon and Microsoft, and this is sort of an admission that the Pentagon didn’t want Donald Trump to get subpoenaed and testify on what his involvement was in the whole contract.”
“This is a big problem that almost every business has: how do you stop a deployment, especially a large deployment? Typically, we throw people at it, and we have them watch millions of dashboards, and hopefully, they catch it. But usually, it’s a problem somewhere that’s exposed to the customer that triggers that. So if we can have more tools like Gandalf that detect problems earlier, it’s great.”

General News: Some People Can’t Take a Joke

Evoque Data Center Solutions acquires Foghorn Consulting. Congratulations to Peter on this exciting news!
The AWS Infinidash story has taken on a life of its own. What started as a joke has led to backlash from the community complaining about it being a form of technology gatekeeping.

JEDI: We’re Not Talking About This Anymore

The Pentagon has canceled the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract. It’s not really dead, they’ve just turned it into a joint multi-cloud offering, which is what we said they should do six months ago.

Amazon Web Services: A Little Gooey

Andy Jassy thanks AWS employees as he

Episode 22: The Cloud Pod Increases listener limit to 1 million May 07, 2019

Azure suffers an outage, AWS Snowballs drive block storage at the edge, S3 Batch Operations and Fully Managed Blockchain all this week on the cloud pod! Plus Lightning Round and Cool Tools with Jonathan.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – https://fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

VMWare CEO implies Amazon Partnership is more important than Azure

Topics

Episode 100: The Cloud Pod tail -f’s the news Jan 07, 2021

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!

GCP puts the Cloud Pod on Ice – Episode 54 Jan 07, 2020

Your co-hosts kick off their first regular news episode of the year with Consumer Electronics Show 2020, Google Cloud Next 2020 and Justin’s Oracle adventure.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

Amazon flexes its tech at the Consumer Electronics Show with an automotive exhibit.
Use coupon code GRPABLOG2020 for $500 off your ticket to Google Cloud Next 2020.
Justin does a bit of investigative journalism to understand Oracle’s new boot volume backup announcement.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) at the Consumer Electronics Show 2020 — Cars and CAs

Those attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week saw Amazon show off the practical uses of AWS technology and machine learning at their automotive exhibit. The exhibit includes an array of demonstrations from an in-vehicle digital assistant to car-to-home integrations to a fleet of autonomous cars in China. We’d like to see this sort of in-vehicle technology have constant cloud connectivity, where software updates can continue to be pushed out.

And speaking of updates, you may have already seen a notification or email for AWS’s upcoming 2019 certificate authority. From the article:

“If you are using Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), or Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) and are taking advantage of SSL/TLS certificate validation when you connect to your database instances, you need to download & install a fresh certificate, rotate the certificate authority (CA) for the instances, and then reboot the instances.” -Jeff Barr

Yeah, it’s a chore and it sucks to do, but if you use it and you don’t update your CA, you’ll have an outage. Is doing this once every five years really so bad?

Lastly, in all AWS regions except China, you can now use Private DNS names to access your AWS PrivateLink based services. We’re happy to see it.

Azure Recaps Cost Management for 2019

While Azure’s been quiet since Christmas, their cost management program manager published an article this week recapping the tools they’ve released over the last year to help you monitor and optimize the costs of your cloud

138: Cloud Pod productivity is way up thanks to the Facebook outage Oct 06, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team is running at half-duplex without Peter and Ryan. Plus Cloudflare R2 is here, Facebook died for a day, and AWS releases Cloud Control Plane.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

Cloudflare’s new R2 service is making waves in the cloud object storage space, offering incentives like no egress fees and lower rates than its competitors.
Influencers, boomers and bored teenagers collectively screamed on October 4th as Facebook and its associated apps experienced an unprecedented six-hour outage.
AWS Cloud Control Plane offers developers an easier way to manage their third-party and AWS services with a new set of common APIs.

Top Quotes

“The bigger impact is actually WhatsApp, because for a large portion of the world, Whatsapp is the primary method of communication. If you go … to different countries overseas … everyone’s on WhatsApp. Everybody. So to not have that communication is a huge loss. And you have to wonder, does Facebook need to think about diversifying their backend in some way? Should all of their DNS be inside Facebook?”
“[AWS Cloud Control API] is probably going to be a requirement for any new services that launch in AWS … which means that we will no longer be waiting weeks or months for new services to be available in CloudFormation.”

General News: The day that Facebook died (for six hours)

Cloudflare is getting into the cloud object storage market with its new, competitively-priced R2 Service. Unlike other storage services, Cloudflare is nixing the dreaded egress cost, and will charge 10% less than AWS, its largest competitor.
Facebook is having a rough week. On October 4th — the day before a former employee testified to Congress about the social media giant’s negative impacts — Facebook accidentally unpublished itself and its affiliated apps for around six hours. A seemingly routine update caused issues with its BGP routes: Read the company’s account of events here.

AWS: On a mission to control the cloud

In a rush to release before the next AWS summit, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is now generally available. With Prometheus, users can easily monitor their containerized apps at scale, and new features like alert manager and ruler let users integrate SNS with various destinations.

116: The Cloud Pod is positively charged for AWS Proton May 06, 2021

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’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

Episode 93: Docker Hub rate limits The Cloud Pod Nov 05, 2020

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 an

129: The Cloud Pod ditches our m1.small instances Aug 05, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team is back in full force and some are sporting fresh tan lines. Also, it’s earnings season, so get ready for some big numbers — as well as some losses.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS is finally killing off EC2-Classic. EC2 was launched in 2006, with one instance type (m1.small), security groups, and the US-EAST-1 Region.
The 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services is out, and AWS, Google, Microsoft and Oracle have all made it. Although some scraped in by the skin of their teeth.
Get consistent Kubernetes definitions with the new Anthos Config Management feature. The Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) helps users define and update resources with minimal effort on their part.

Top Quotes

“I would say Google’s getting market share because they are able to leapfrog everyone else on Kubernetes, big data, and machine learning.”
“Considering all the different vendors that are involved in a hospital, just being able to have a standard data format with FHIR is huge. And they also now power that with the cloud. There are lots of really interesting use cases that get unlocked with this [Azure Healthcare APIs] solution.”

General News: Earn Baby Earn

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, crushed earnings expectations. It still lost a lot, though. Increasing the price of YouTube TV could have limited the damage.
Microsoft’s revenue is up 21% overall. Azure’s revenue doubled, which is nuts.
Amazon’s revenue is up 27% overall — but that’s down from the 41% year-on-year increase the company saw in Q2 of 2020. It’s starting to see post-COVID-19 corrections.

Amazon Web Services: Not Fit for Consumption

AWS named as a Leader for the 11th consecutive year in the

Ep 81 – Azure & GCP … Are you ok? Aug 05, 2020

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

The Cloud Pod Automatically Redacted Mar 05, 2020

Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter as we cover all the news you can use on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

AWS restructures its sales force.
Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect is canceled.
Who’s else is excited to re-network their printers!?

General News

We’re proud of the Bonus Episodes we’ve produced lately. Check out our interviews with Rob Martin and Ben Kehoe!

Check out Aviatrix’s panel on Multi-Cloud architecture and networking — featuring our very own Justin Brodley. And if you’re here because you saw Justin’s panel, welcome to TCP!

Global research firm Gartner has named AWS the top leader in Cloud AI developer services. Gartner categorizes industry leaders as having a complete vision and the ability to execute on it. Microsoft and Google were close behind, though unlike Microsoft, Google spread the news.

AWS: Human Salesforce, AI Oversight

Amazon Transcribe can now automatically redact personally identifiable information. You can rest assured when a robot collects your personal information for data analysis, it will use discretion in what it shares with humans.

AWS Global Accelerator users may now use their own IP addresses and tag resources. We already had AnyCast, but the tagging is nice.

Faced with tougher competition, AWS plans to double the size of its

Episode 13 – The Cloud Pod goes all in on AWS, Azure and GCP Mar 05, 2019

Lyft goes all in on AWS and commits big money to AWS in their IPO. Several new solutions for security from the cloud vendors at RSA this week, and Jeff Barr stops by Reddit to tell us all about cloud formation! Plus the lighting round and cool tools with Jonathan.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Show Topics:

Lyft goes all in on AWS Google Releases csp config management for k8

GCP introduces new KMS client libraries

Instantly restore your machines with Azure Backup

SuperMicro hardware weakness lets researches backdoor into an ibm cloud server

RightScale state of the cloud reports indicates Azure gaining on AWS

https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1100893328348831745

Maria DB ceo accuses hyperscalers of strip mining open source

Azure announces preview of sentinel security

Azure GA of Lab Services

Jeff Barr stops by Reddit to drop a quick cloudformation update

Original Thread

Azure Security Center new Capabilities

Azure announces new firewall capabilities

Lightning Round:

Amazon Worklink now works with Android Phones –

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/02/amazon-worklink-now-works-with-android-phones/

Aurora Serverle

The Cloud Pod Faster on Azure… No Wait AWS – Episode 58 Feb 05, 2020

Your hosts are joined again by Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) who is filling in for Peter as we recap the week in cloud.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

It’s earnings season as the top dogs show their growth.
Azure gets back in the headlines with a bold but contested study.
Google fulfills an old TCP prediction with reports of a unified service.

Certificates of Doom Update

Amazon has given customers an extension until March 5, 2020 to rotate their SSL/TLS certificates. Previously, rebooting or manually changing a relational database service (RDS) instance would automatically switch to the new certificate authority, even if the customer didn’t have their application ready to do so.

IBM Changes Leadership

Speaking of new authorities, major changes are coming to IBM. Arvind Krishna will replace current CEO Ginni Rometty on April 6 and current Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will become president. Hopefully the changes in leadership and the acquisition of Red Hat will be what IBM needs to turn around what’s been a rough decade for the tech giant.

Earnings Season

It’s that time of the year where financial analysts are breaking out the line graphs to show investors just how much their holdings are growing. Let’s see what the quarterly reports had to say this time around:

Microsoft saw a rebound from slowing cloud growth last quarter with Azure up 62 percent, Surface up 6 percent, and LinkedIn up 24 percent.
Google Cloud growth was strong enough for the company to brag, but still lags behind AWS, Azure and even Google’s own YouTube.

Episode 9: Redhat Drops support for the cloud pod Feb 05, 2019

Episode 9

Its earnings season and we take a look at both AWS and Googles earnings, plus recap the Azure earnings from last week. We also talk about AWS Corretto GA, Microsoft DNS outage causes data loss?, Mongo DB SSPL licensing and more. Special Guest Ryan Lucas

Sponsors

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Topics

Earnings

AWS Earnings – https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/31/aws-earnings-q4-2018.html
Alphabet (Google) Earnings – https://siliconangle.com/2019/02/04/alphabet-beats-earnings-forecast-costs-weigh-shares/

Google Cloud Firestore Nosql Database hits GA – https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/31/googles-cloud-firestore-nosql-database-hits-general-availability/

DNS Outage results in azure database outage – https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/02/01/dns-outage-turns-tables-on-azure-database-users/

MS Launches AMD powered Azure Instances – https://siliconangle.com/2019/02/01/microsoft-launches-amd-powered-azure-instances-analytics-databases/

Oracle AMD instances Outperform AWS – https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/oracle-amd-instances-outperform-and-outprice-comparable-aws-instances

Amazon Corretto 8 is now GA – https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-corretto-8-generally-available/

Oracle CISO: Are Audits and Certifications enough? – https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/security-in-the-cloud:-are-audits-and-certifications-really-enough

MongoDB SSPL Licenses rejected by RHEL – https://www.zdnet.com/article/mongodb-open-source-server-side-public-license-rejected/

Slack IPO – https://siliconangle.com/2019/02/04/months-rumors-team-chat-leader-slack-files-ipo/

Lightning Round

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports t3 instances – https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/01/amazon-rds-for-oracle-now-supports-t3-instance-types/

Azure announces GA for Query store for sql data warehouse –

Mark Curphey from Open Raven: Getting the birds-eye view of cloud data security Jan 05, 2021

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’t work b) It’s ridiculously expensive, and c) It’s only on s3 buckets. Well, whilst The Register is always reporting breaches of S3 buckets, my customer data is in RDS! That’s a real piece of the problem for me; sure, it’s popular, but I shouldn’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… 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’t have control over the adjacency thing, so that’s why a lot of the basic trivial cases get completely missed.

Security at the edge?

“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’t do it in some sort of edge device.”

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’re a better choice than Macie, but don’t think that’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

TCP-Talks with Amiram Shachar: Reducing cost and complexity of the cloud with Spot Jun 04, 2020

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’s Ocean, a Serverless Infrastructure Engine for Containers,.

107: The Cloud Meshes with Microsoft Mar 04, 2021

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’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

Episode 103: Bezos retires over Slack outage — Episode 103 Feb 04, 2021

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

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Episode 4 – The podcast is now available in multiple regions Jan 04, 2019

Show Notes

Follow Up

Jedi Contract
- Jedi Contract/AWS Bid Riddled with Conflicts of Interest
Community Licensing Issue

Show Topics

Introducing AWS Client VPN to Securely access AWS and On-Premises Resources
Blog Post: Exploring Container Security: let Google do the patching with new managed based images
2019 Predictions from Justin, Jonathan and Peter

Lightning Round

US East 1’s on Fire, The Cloud Pod says let the !#*&@ burn – Ep 38 Sep 03, 2019

US-East-1 has a hiccup in a single AZ, Lambda fixes cold start launches inside a VPC, Google gets an AD service and Microsoft goes cloud neutral in Switzerland. Plus special guest @ryron01

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

In updated IPO filing, Cloudflare seeks up to $483M at $3.5B valuation

Topics

AWS

Google

Azure

120: The Cloud Pod crosses the data streams Jun 03, 2021

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 sa

Episode 74: The Cloud Pod Gets Their Groove Back Jun 03, 2020

The Cloud Pod Gets Their Groove Back — Episode 74

Your co-hosts have cooked up a good one on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Your co-hosts cover DockerCon 2020.
Chef announced several new features at ChefConf 2020.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) teaches you how to take an online certification exam.

General News: Prince Ali

Mirantis has released the first major update to Docker Enterprise since it acquired the platform in November — a loss for the startup community.
Over 60,000 people registered for the online DockerCon, the first DockerCon after the loss of Enterprise. During the keynote, Docker CEO Scott Johnston announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft.
Chinese cloud titan Alibaba’s revenue grew 62% in the first quarter of 2020, though it remains behind AWS, Microsoft and Google for now. With the regional advantage, it seems all Alibaba needs to do is maintain parity with AWS features to stay on top.

Chef Conference: Too Many Cooks

Predominant Configuration Management software platform and TCP punching-bag Chef held their virtual ChefConf where they debuted several new capabilities.
- Chef Compliance now features Chef Compliance Audit and Chef Compliance Remediation.
- Chef Desktop helps IT managers centrally deploy, manage and secure an organization’s laptops, desktops and workstations.
- Chef Infra and Chef Automate now integrate with ServiceNow Configuration Management Database.

AWS: No Back-SaaS

Upgrading contracts for SaaS and usage-based products on the AWS Marketplace is now easier. Look to this for grabbing those high-volume discounts when scaling up.
A

The Smart Choice would have been to go back to the room – Ep 50 Dec 02, 2019

Sponsors:

Your co-hosts are back from Thanksgiving and Re:Invent, and we’re running through all of it for you. In this episode, we cover the lead-up to opening day. Next week, we’ll release an episode fully devoted to Re:Invent coverage.

This week’s highlights

CloudWatch has been growing quietly into a much more robust tool with 11 updates since the last episode.

Attribute-based access control comes to AWS. This should allow a finer control over your security privileges.

CloudTrail Insights launches with machine learning to help you separate the signal from the noise in your user activity and API usage.

Amazon EC2 introduces new API

We’re one step closer to actually paying for what we use with the announcement that EC2 T2 instances will support Unlimited Mode at the account level. If your workload is spread out among multiple accounts, this will be something you should look at. But if you’re looking for load balancer updates, there’s a new batch of those for you too. We especially like the Weighted Target Groups, which have been needed for blue/green deployments for a while now.

Restores and Replicas

Migrating to the cloud has gotten a bit easier with differential and log restores on RDS for SQL servers. Like a lot of the recent announcements, simplicity was highlighted in the announcement of increased availability of DynamoDB tables using global table replicas.

“It’ll only take a few clicks” makes it sound like Amazon thinks clicking things must be very taxing on us.

Secrets and Cents

CloudTrail Insights will alert you to unusual activity at a cost of 35 cents per 100,000 write management events analyzed. It’s hard to know yet whether how expensive that will end up being, but it sounds cheap. AWS Single Sign-On will connect to Azure AD, making it easier to migrate to Amazon, and AWS Secrets Manager will make it easier to rotate your secrets by handling it at the API level.

AWS is moving from role-based to attribute-based access control and will be implementing Tag Policies to allow you to control the standardization of your tags. Implementing these should serve to become b

133: Google Cloud Serverless Functions now with Servers Sep 02, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS releases new features including Managed Grafana, GCP Serverless solves the cold start problem, and Wiz hacks into CosmosDB.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS shows no sign of slowing down after the Summit, making Managed Grafana generally available and releasing new features for VPC, CloudFormation, and CloudWatch.
Google introduces new capabilities to minimize cold starts, giving serverless customers the option of using — gasp! — servers.
Wiz finds a critical security flaw in CosmosDB which allowed it to hack into thousands of Azure customers’ databases. Looks like Microsoft needs to make some calls.

Top Quotes

“I just think about all the companies who were … trying to build their own ML models for document recognition and how far they are versus how far Amazon and Google are and Azure. … this is the reason why using your cloud vendor might be the better choice. Because they’re not even getting this kind of scale and or price reduction for anything they’re doing on top of ML.”
“I think the main benefit for this change is going to be shared tenancy systems because, with virtualization, everytime there’s a context switch between different tenants on the CPU, you have to throw away that entire cache. The smaller that cache is, the faster that’s going to be, and the better overall performance you’ll get from the system.”
”There’s servers behind everything. So nothing’s serverless just how exposed are you to it? And to me, I think that level of exposure where it’s no longer serverless is if I have to patch it.”

General News: Docker goes “Full Oracle”

Docker announces it will begin charging enterprise customers to use it’s desktop app. Enterprise companies with over $10 million in revenue or greater than 250 employees have until January 31st, 2022 to buy the subscription. In Justin’s words, “that’s just dirty.”

Amazon Web Services: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

To enable East-West traffic, Amazon has removed some VPC routing restrictions, allowing users to inspect, analyze or filter all traffic flowing between two subnets.
AWS CloudFormation users are sharing a collective sigh of relief as they can now disable the automatic rollback when a cloud formation fails and retry stack operations from the point of failure. Peter is jumping for joy.
AWS announces a 32% price reduction for Amazon Textract users in 8 regions as well as a 50% reduction in processing times for asynchronous jobs.

Episode 85 – The Cloud Pod Plays Buzzword Bingo on Machine Learning Sep 02, 2020

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

The Cloud Pod ‘rebrands’ itself as Pod – EP66 Apr 02, 2020

Episode 17: The Cloud Pod now 100% open source Apr 02, 2019

Episode 17

Azure announces new data and discovery classification features, AWS APN changes go into effect, and Chef goes 100% Open Source. Jonathan, Justin and Peter draft their Google Next 2019 predictions and more on the cloud pod. #thecloudpod

Sponsors

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod
Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Topics

Google Next Prediction Draft

Jonathan Picks

Blockchain as a service
Collaboration Tools
New languages for functions

Justin Picks

Major spanner enhancement
Enterprise will be mentioned 4 times on stage by Thomas or his guests
Google Siem Product

Peter Picks

Major announce around GKE in particular monitoring integration
Managed Devops Deployment like Spinnaker
Hybrid Service mesh. ISTIO like for hybrid cloud

Honorable Mention –
- Jonathan – ARM processors
- Peter – Better Microsoft support.
- Justin – Major Acquisition of a large player

Lightning Round

AWS Firewall Manager now supports AWS Shield Advanced

2019: We hardly knew thee – Episode 53 Jan 02, 2020

Your co-hosts recap 2019 and make predictions for the year ahead on the first episode of 2020. We’re skipping the Lightning Round this week to focus on a collaborative Q&A segment pulled from our Slack channel.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

Our top 3 favorite headlines of the year.
Google released a white paper to help you comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA.)
We read your questions from our TCP Slack channel for our first Q&A!

2019 Cloud Computing Predictions and Headlines Recap

Last year (episode 4), we shared our predictions for what might happen in 2019.

Peter took the lead, predicting container-based models would continue to see more adoption over serverless. Justin — who predicted mergers in cloud providers would create a new top contender, and Jonathan, who predicted an acquisition of Slack — haven’t been vindicated. (Yet!)

Our 3 favorite headlines of the year.

Justin:

Google Anthos is probably the best thought-out strategy for being multi-cloud with Kubernetes (if currently pricey.)
Azure Tardigrade uses machine learning to address hardware failures before they impact uptime.
Cloudwatch Container Insights shows off the power of Cloudwatch.

Peter:

Transit Gateway became a viable method of creating a global network.
DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility) sets the direction for new business models for SaaS companies.
EKS SLA reaches a 3 nines standard of reliability.

Jonathan:

Google’s

Episode 96 – re:Invent is here with presents for everyone! Dec 01, 2020

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:

124: The Cloud Pod now with millions of bugs Jul 01, 2021

On The Cloud Pod this week, with the first half of the year full of less-than-ideal events, the team is looking forward to another next six months of less-than-ideal events. Also, everyone is excited to see how they can manipulate the AWS BugBust Challenge for a free ticket to re:Invent.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS launches the BugBust Challenge in the hopes of finding and fixing 1 million bugs. The challenge aims to help developers improve code quality, eliminate bugs and boost application performance while saving millions of dollars in application resource costs.
Google has announced new features for Cloud Monitoring Grafana plugins. The new features include popular dashboard samples, more effective troubleshooting with deep links, better visualizations through precalculated metrics and more powerful analysis capabilities.
Azure VM Image Builder service is now generally available. Image Builder will make it easier to build custom Linux or Windows virtual machine images.

Amazon Web Services: Does Not Have Bugs

AWS announces the world’s first global competition to find and fix 1 million software bugs. We don’t think they’re referring to Amazon bugs, just software bugs in general.
AWS launches customized images for Amazon EMR on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. If you’re looking to reduce the time it takes to build images, that’s a good thing: otherwise it’s a fully managed service, so we’re not sure that users will care.
Amazon announces new Java Detectors and CI/CD Integration with GitHub Actions for CodeGuru Reviewer. We’re amazed by how quickly GitHub Actions is being adopted.
AWS acquires communication technology company Wickr. We want to know why Amazon is buying this: maybe they’re trying to enhance their enterprise and public sector application suites.
AWS now supports container images to simplify

111: The Cloud Pod now available at 9600 bps, 8 bits and 1 stop bit Apr 01, 2021

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 u

Episode 12: Spotinst has yet to announce partnership with the cloud pod Mar 01, 2019

Episode 12

This week we talk about Athena Workgroups, Spotinst AWS partnership, Spatial Anchors in Azure and Microsoft and Google handle several employee issues.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Show Topics

Athena now supports Workgroups to segment/isolated data

Azure has GA’s several new features to create more reliable event driven applications in Azure

Spotinst Announces partnership with AWS

Google Rethinks Federated Identity with Continuous Access evaluation protocol

Next 19 Qwiklabs Challenge

Azure Announces Spatial anchors for collaboration and mixed reality apps

Microsoft Workers protest army contract

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says company will not walk away from contract

Google ends forced Arbitration for Employees –

Lightning Round

EFS now supports tag on create – https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/02/amazon-efs-now-supports-tag-on-create/

AWS Code commit now supports programmatic creations of commits – https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/02/aws-codecommit-supports-programmatic-creation-of-commits-contain/

Performance Insights now supports counter metrics for RDS Postgres, RDS Mysql and Aurora Mysql – https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/02/Performance-Insights-Counter-Metrics-MS-PG-AMS/

Amazon Ec2 Fleets now let you increase target capacity limits – https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/02/amazon-EC2-fleet-now-lets-you-increase-the-fleets-target-capacity-limits/

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager adds support for shorter backup intervals –

Episode 1 – What happens in las vegas makes my liver hurt Nov 21, 2024

Enjoy our recap of AWS Re:Invent 2018

Topics:

Announcements Pre-Reinvent
Monday-Tuedsay - Recap
Andy Jassy - Recap
Werner Vogels - Recap

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting - www.fogops.io - Your leading AWS premier partner helping companies move to the cloudLastweek in AWS - www.lastweekinaws.com - Your weekly dose of AWS Snark and announcements.

Episode 5 – The Cloud Pod now 50% cheaper Nov 21, 2024

Show Notes 1/8/18

Lightning Round

Cool Tools

Sponsors

Foghorn Consulting – https://www.fogops.io/thecloudpod
Last week in AWS – https://www.lastweekinaws.com
Audible – http://www.audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Episode 26: The Cloud Pod Goes Event Driven Nov 21, 2024

Peter is back after a few weeks away from the show. Azure launches new Event Grid features, Palo Alto Networks picks up Twistlock and Puresec and Google has a really bad day. Plus the amazing lightning round with Peter.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – https://fogops.io/thecloudpod

Topics:

Lightning Round (Jonathan 6, Justin 9, Peter 1 and Guest 3):

TCP Talks: Bring Order to your Monitoring with Mike Kelly – Bonus Ep1 Nov 21, 2024

Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker kick off our new TCP Talks bonus episodes with a chat with Mike Kelly, CTO at Blue Medora. Monitoring can be hard on-premises or in the cloud. As a result, it can be downright scary with multi-cloud strategies, hybrid cloud, and legacy tools. Bring order chaos, by centralizing the management of metrics and logs. From solving out of disk space alerts to building observability techniques, Stackdriver and Bindplane can help. Adopting these practices and principals will help your Observability and SRE teams in the cloud.

TCP Talks: Finops in the cloud with Rob Martin – Bonus Ep 2 Nov 21, 2024

The most terrifying part of moving to the cloud isn’t security, migration techniques or learning new infrastructure as code tools, it is managing that pesky cloud bill. To some CFO’s it might even be downright terrifying. Join Jonathan and Justin as they talk about all things FinOps with Rob Martin from Apptio (formerly Cloudability) where they discuss cost management techniques, getting help via the Finops Foundation and more.

A big thanks to TCP-Talks 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 Episode is EPYC! Nov 21, 2024

We follow continuing stories with the JEDI contract, GigaOM and our new Lightning Round format on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

Amazon makes progress contesting the JEDI contract.
AWS and Azure introduce shared cloud block storage.
Google shows signs of shifting priorities.

Arrested Development

United States judge Patricia Campbell-Smith has granted Amazon’s request to temporarily halt work on the JEDI contract by Microsoft. She also ordered Amazon to post $42 million in the event the injunction was issued wrongfully.

AWS Not First to Share Blocks

CloudFormation StackSets users can now manage multiple AWS accounts. We recommend you get your organizational units structured properly now so you’re ready for when that must-have feature for your organization is added.

AWS customers running Linux on Ec2 can now attach provisioned IOPS (io1) EBS volumes to Multiple Ec2 instances. Be careful though: wielding fine control over your data means taking responsibility for your data losses, as well. This news comes a day after Azure announced their own Azure Shared Disks, which was, for those sweet brief hours before AWS’s announcement, the industry’s only shared cloud block storage.

What’s in the Box?

Azure released a new GigaOM study which backs up the findings from the GigaOM study we covered on episode 58. How incredible — Azure, which paid for the scientific (and unverifiable) study, was found to be the best at everything once again!

The Azure Backup service now offers a preview of the

RSA: The Silence of the Clouds – Episode 61 Nov 21, 2024

Your hosts talk about AWS Lambda, Azure’s Cybersecurity of Things and Google’s loquacious AI on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
Blue Medora, which offers pioneering IT monitoring integration as a service to address today’s IT challenges by easily connecting system health and performance data — no matter its source — with the world’s leading monitoring and analytics platforms.

This week’s highlights

AWS Lambda sees savings and supports Dart.
Your kitchen appliances are safer with developments in the Internet of Things.
It’s the last week of our trial of the new Lightning Round format. Comedy’s hard.

TCP News

ICYMI, check out our second episode of TCP Talks: Finops in the cloud with Rob Martin. We learned some things about financial operations, and we’re sure you will too.

AWS Lambda Updates

AWS Compute Savings Plans now apply to your AWS Lambda workloads. That’s nice, but even a decent percentage of such a cheap service probably won’t impact your expenses all that much. In addition, those Lambda workloads now support Dart, an open-source programming language made by Google. If you’re making mobile apps, you’ll be happy to use this. If you’re not making mobile apps, you probably didn’t need to read this paragraph.

AWS Identity and Access Management now allows you to control access for requests made on your behalf by AWS services. It’s a great security feature. We’re looking forward to AWS taking this a step further at this year’s re:Inforce conference.

Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports previous Secrets Manager versions and can read keys directly from JSON objects. It’s going to be much more convenient now that you can use one key instead of, say, 10.

AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr outlined a laundry list of updates to Amazon FSx for Lustre in this blog post. All these changes add up to SageMaker integration, to make SageMaker more attractive to customers.

Spherical Things

TCP Talks: Knative in Action! with Jacques Chester – Ep4 Nov 21, 2024

Jacques Chester author of Knative In Action and Principal engineer at Pivotal joins us to educate us on Knative. Knative is an open-source tool to run functions as a service on top of Kubernetes and is gaining popularity in Kubernetes deployments. Learn all about Knative, Kubernetes maturity, Googles involvement in Knative, and more.

If you are are interested in checking out Knative in Action, I have a coupon code for you to save today on any Manning press publication including Knative in Action!

https://www.manning.com/books/knative-in-action?query=Knative%20in%20Action

Code: podcloud20

TCP-Talks: The unknown unknowns of cloud security with Josh Stella from Fugue.co Nov 21, 2024

Josh Stella (twitter: @joshstella) joins us to talk about the state of cloud security. We discuss Fugue’s new report, the complexity and challenges of IAM, and the most common cloud misconfiguration aren’t always the ones you would expect.

Fugue ensures cloud infrastructure stays in continuous compliance with enterprise security policies. Our solution identifies cloud infrastructure security risks and compliance violations and ensures that they are never repeated. Fugue provides baseline drift detection and automated remediation to eliminate data breaches, and powerful visualization and reporting tools to easily demonstrate compliance.

Episode 77 – The Cloud Pod Enjoys a Snowcone Nov 21, 2024

Your hosts see a new cloud on the horizon and anticipate a flood on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

HashiCorp enters the ring with HashiCorp Cloud Platform.
Microsoft offers free AI classes.
Bayer Crop Sciences pushes cluster size to new heights.

General News: A Challenger Approaches

HashiCorp has launched the HashiCorp Cloud Platform featuring managed Consul as the single initial service. HashiCorp is currently soliciting feedback on the alpha version of HashiCorp Cloud Platform and is planning on releasing Vault next.

AWS: Let it Snow

The AWS Snow family of devices is now joined by AWS Snowcone, a four-and-a-half pound eight terabyte data storage and transfer device, both the most storage and least weight yet. Don’t lose it though — this little guy runs around $2,000.
Aurora Global database now supports write request forwarding for low latency global data reads. This is fantastic news for lazy devs like us.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Groups now support the Instance Refresh feature, eliminating the need for custom scripts and systems. This is a long-anticipated feature for TCP. We can’t believe it’s taken until 2020!
The new Lambda Powertools library within the Serverless Lens for the Well Architected Framework features Tracer, Logger and Metrics as its three core utilities. Using these tools to get yourself set up will save you a lot of strife down the line.

Azure: An ‘Udacious’ Plan

Azure and Udacity are partnering to launch a scholarship program and the free Azure Machine Learning course to address the growing demand for AI specialists. We’ve had good experiences with Udacity so this offering appeals directly to us.
Azure is catering to users new to ARM templates with new features including a template Quickstart gallery and Azure Resource Manager Tools in Visual Studio Code. How did we ever get by without this?

Google: Seeds and Node

TCP Talks: Cloud Wisdom with Bart Castle Nov 21, 2024

In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Bart Castle, an AWS and cloud computing trainer and media personality. Bart works with IT training company CBT Nuggets and also does cloud-migration consulting projects.

Bart shares the patterns he seems based on training demand and also advises how to decide which certification to go for next. He discusses the importance of solving business problems that will help achieve the business’ goals while retooling and transforming systems.

“At this point in my career, every technical conversation that I have is always paired up with a business value conversation,” he notes.

But how should a data team shift focus to better solve business problems? He suggests looking for patterns. Uncovering patterns can help determine actionable steps to maximize efficiency and enable new business opportunities.

Bart also discusses cloud computing trends, CloudFormation stacking, hybrid deployments, and containers.

Featured Guest

Name: Bart Castle
What he does: Bart is a cloud computing and AWS expert and technical trainer, as well as a consultant.
Key quote: “In the end, we’re still looking for those tools that will bridge gaps. This is why, for me, being an integrations professional and getting what integration means is skill number one across all different arenas. Everywhere you look, it’s an integration problem.”
Where to find him: LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube

Key Takeaways

When thinking about all the different training options, Bart suggests pursuing the certification that would help you land a specific job or role. If you’re not sure what your next job might be, look at SysOps administration first since it is closest to traditional network help desk operations support roles.
Based on his training background, Bart sees a rising interest in network automation. Many teams are working with various vendors to address networking and connectivity and to make the transition from command line administration to Python automation.

“A lot of what I’m seeing here is the switch from real deep specialty to real broad generalization, and that can be an overwhelming bite to take when you look at how much information there is to consume,” says Bart.

Learning how the tools work is the easy part, but you have to dig deeper to make it work for your specific business use case. Bart recommends looking for white papers, as well as case studies and blog posts. Communities (like TCP!) can also point you in the right direction.

Bart says, “Once you get those examples of how a piece of input data with the right transformation with this pairing of reporting can solve this problem — now, you’re putting tools in your belt that are going beyond just using the tools, and how to actually solve business problems with them.”

Here’s what was mentioned in the episode

CBT Nuggets: provides in-demand training, primarily in IT, project management, and office productivity topics.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): a cloud object storage service.

“What is

115: The Cloud Pod gets to the root of it Nov 21, 2024

Justin and Jonathan kick off this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod by themselves, Peter joins the party late because he’s been fighting dinosaurs and Ryan is unable to attend as he can’t move from under the weight of the kitten on his lap.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

Amazon will find any excuse to use GIFs just like the rest of us.
Google has given Cardi B a headstart on a theme song for its new product.
Azure sent the wedding invites out late but still expects you to show up.

Amazon Web Services: Cheaper Than Healthcare

Amazon RDS on VMWare no longer requires the use of a VPN tunnel back to AWS. Still cheaper than paying for healthcare.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces support for Asynchronous Search. This is really cool!
Amazon EC2 now allows you to replace the root volume for a running instance. There are some great use cases for this.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux with High Availability is now available on Amazon EC2. Good to see IBM isn’t throwing up barriers.
AWS is releasing the new Amazon FSx File Gateway. Hopefully this is easy to implement.
AWS announces moving graphs for CloudWatch Dashboards. Also known as GIFs for CloudWatch.

Google Cloud Platform: Closet Fans of Cardi B

Google announces PHP, a general purpose programming language, is now on Cloud Functions. Visit thecloudpod.net to see a live example of PHP, also known as the WordPress platform we built our website on.
GCP is launching Web App and API Protection (WAAP), which provides comprehensive threat protection for web apps and APIs. Do not confuse this with the Cardi B song.
Google has made the Doc AI

117: Justin is out, Peter’s distracted by his parents, Jonathan is just British and Ryan is probably tipsy…. But we had one job and we’re recording! Nov 21, 2024

This week on The Cloud Pod, Justin is away so the rest of the team has taken the opportunity to throw him under the bus.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

The Pentagon has had enough of the kids fighting so no one gets the toy.
Amazon has given developers the happy ending they’ve always wanted.
Google is playing with fire and hopes no one gets burnt.

JEDI: Play Nice

Pentagon officials are considering pulling the plug on the star-crossed JEDI cloud-computing project. Reminds us of when we were kids and our parents took toys away when we couldn’t play nice together.

Amazon Web Services: We’ve Made All the Money

AWS announces a price reduction for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. That’s an awful lot of samples.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) announces pricing change for VPC Peering. Just get rid of the ridiculous data transfer fees!
AWS Organizations launches a new console experience. We’re excited to try this out!
AWS announces IAM Access Control for Apache Kafka on Amazon MSK. This is great.
AWS Systems Manager now includes Incident Manager to resolve IT incidents faster. This might initially fall short of some of the other offerings on the market.
AWS Local Zones are now open in Boston, Miami and Houston. They’re continuing on the Oracle model of racks in random garages.
Amazon now lets you create Microsoft SQL Server Instances of Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts. A big hooray for people using Outposts.

Google Cloud Platform: Smells A Bit

Google announces Agent Assist for Chat is now in Preview. Hopefully this is bette

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Amazon Web Services: Getting Excited for re:Invent

Google Cloud Platform: A Bit Confused

Azure: Busy Building Services It Promised For JEDI

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Lightning Round (Jonathan 12, Justin 16, and Guest 4):

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AWS: AWS says ‘Kia Ora’ to its Newest Region: New Zealand

GCP: Making Stateless Stateful with GKE Backup

Azure: Welcome to the Azure Peep Show

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Lightning Round (Jonathan 8, Justin 10, Peter 1 and Guest 3):

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General News: Chime After Chime

COVID-19

AWS: Summit Predictions

AWS: Global Reach, Mediocre Branding

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Azure: A Strong Third Place

Oracle: Wait, Oracle?!

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General News: This Is What Happens When You Go On Vacation

Amazon Web Services: Always Comes Through For Us

Google Cloud Platform: The Detectives On The Case

Azure: Welcome To Snoozeville

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General: Cat Got Your Data?

AWS: Remote Viewing

Google: A Series of Tubes

Azure: Following the Blueprints

Lightning Round

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Amazon Pressures Pentagon, Suffers in Sydney

AWS Adds, Updates and Improves

Google Kills and Creates Services

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Episode 8 – Now With Insane Magic

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Recapping the Shit Year That Was 2020

The Predictions That Were Made for 2020

Favorite Announcements of 2020

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General News: Don’t Off Slack

Amazon Web Services: Winning

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