The Cloud Pod

Latest Episodes:

181: You get a Tanzu, I get a Tanzu, EVERYONE GETS A TANZU Sep 07, 2022

Show notes

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–say that five times fast. [22:03]

180: Azure Data Explorer Says ‘All Your S3 Data are Belong to Us’ Aug 31, 2022

Show notes

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.

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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.

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

Show notes

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.

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

Show notes

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.

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

Show notes

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.

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

Show notes

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.

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

Show notes

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.

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 streamlined deployment exp

172: The Cloud Pod Masquerades With GKE Autopilot Jul 07, 2022

Show notes

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.

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.

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Episode Highlights

Top Quote

General News:

AWS: Scanning, scanning, scanning….

GCP: Dear Diary, today I…

Azure: New Releases, New Releases Everywhere…

Episode Highlights

Top Quote

General News:

AWS: Adding Visuals to Your Apps Is Getting Even Easier…

This week’s highlights

AWS: A Trusty Advisor’s Priorities

GCP: Heavily Armored Cloud

This week’s highlights

AWS: It’s Storage Day!

GCP: Hitting the Snooze Button

This week’s highlights

AWS: We, Robots

GCP: It’s A Big World Out There

This week’s highlights

General News: Earnings, Damned Earnings, and Negative Analysts

AWS: Building Skills One Course at a Time

This week’s highlights

AWS: re:Inforcing Prime Numbers

GCP: Making US Automakers Happy One Latin American Region at a Time

This week’s highlights

General News: The Best Data Lake Is the One With Your Boat on It

AWS: Open Source Because They Can’t Sell It?

GCP: The Rise of Rocky

This week’s highlights

General News: Walmart Muscles In

AWS: New York, New York

This week’s highlights

General News: All the Joy of the Crypto Crash

GCP: The Very Apigee of Security

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