The Cloud Pod

Latest Episodes:

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

Show notes

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 so good.
AWS is

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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 99: 2020 overstays its welcome Dec 28, 2020

Show notes

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:

Episode 73: The Cloud Pod Celebrates BigQuery’s 10th Birthday May 28, 2020

Show notes

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

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

This week’s highlights

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

AWS: Only Three Stories Somehow

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

Azure: Mixed With What?

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

Google: Happy Birthday!

After dropping out early in the JEDI contract competition citing conflicts with its AI principals, Google has signed a seven-figure contract with the Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit. Google anticipates that this may lead to future business deals with branches of the DoD.
Serverless VPC Access now features ingress settings. It’s really nice to see a tightening down of function access on VPCs and vice versa. This should make a lot of people happy.
Google’s new open-source tool

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

Show notes

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

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

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 permissions to enable accounts for new regions

Episode 8 – Now with Insane Magic Jan 29, 2019

Show notes

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 – https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/20

Episode 3 – 2018 Recap Dec 26, 2018

Show notes

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/

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This week’s highlights

General News: Don’t Off Slack

Amazon Web Services: Winning

This week’s highlights

General News: Great Partners

Amazon Web Services: Dropping Stories For No Reason

Google Cloud Platform: Prom Queen 2021

This week’s highlights

General News: The Elastic Kerfuffle

Amazon Web Services: Let’s Talk

This week’s highlights

Recapping the Shit Year That Was 2020

The Predictions That Were Made for 2020

Favorite Announcements of 2020

This week’s highlights

AWS: Only Three Stories Somehow

Azure: Mixed With What?

Google: Happy Birthday!

Sponsors:

Topics

General News

VMWorld

AWS

Google

Sponsors:

Topics:

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

Sponsors

Topics

Episode 8 – Now With Insane Magic

Thanks to our Sponsors:

News

Lightning Round

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