The Cloud Pod

Latest Episodes:

131: The Cloud Pod relaxes and has an AWS data brew Aug 19, 2021

Show notes

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 logica

118: The Cloud Pod talks LaMDA, which one? May 19, 2021

Show notes

This week on The Cloud Pod, the team discusses the fine art of writing the podcast show notes so there are bullet points for when Peter shows up without doing the homework.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

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

This week’s highlights

Amazon is catering to the unimaginative with its version of a vanilla milkshake.
Google now performs commitment ceremonies but they come at a cost.
Azure did an online pastry course and can now make croissants.

General News: La France Est Méconnaître Amazon (France Is Ignoring Amazon)

VMware picks longtime executive Raghuram as its new CEO. So many people were overlooked for this position.
France says Google and Microsoft Cloud Services are OK for storing sensitive data. Bit of a snub for Amazon.

Amazon Web Services: Busy Little Bees

AWS SaaS Boost released as open source. Sounds more like a product than it actually is.
AWS announces general availability of AWS Application Migration Service. If play is to lift and shift, with no thought of transformation at all, this is for you.
AWS CloudFormation Guard 2.0 is now generally available. It’s great that this supports more than just cloud transformation.
AWS Premium Support launches Support Automation Workflows (SAW). This will make the exchange of data so much easier.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces a new lower-cost storage tier. This is great news for everybody.
Amazon announces the release of EKS 1.20 — the raddest release ever.
AWS launches another way to run containers with App Runner. Just in case you don’t want to use one of the other billion container services.

Google Cloud Platform: Here To Confuse You

Google will bring Starlink s

Episode 95 – THE BEST IS YET TO COME!!! Nov 19, 2020

Show notes

This week on The Cloud Pod, the team used their slightly cloudy crystal balls to share their predictions for Re:Invent 2020. They hope Amazon doesn’t ruin them before the event.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

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

Cloud Academy, which provides an intuitive and scalable training platform to meet teams wherever they are along the cloud maturity curve. Use the code THECLOUDPOD for 50% off its training platform.

This week’s highlights

Amazon spoils the prediction party by revealing a new product just before Re:Invent.
Google is making sandcastles by itself in the sandbox.
Azure is smart enough not to announce anything exciting right before Amazon’s big day.

Amazon Web Services: Crushing Hopes and Dreams

Amazon Lightsail lets developers easily deploy containers in the cloud. This is like the cloud version of candy-flavored tobacco — somebody out there will be excited.
Amazon announces visual data preparation tool AWS Glue DataBrew. Really cool — we wish they’d created this sooner!
AWS Key Management Service now supports three new hybrid post-quantum key exchange algorithms. We’re just happy that the defense is ahead of the offense this time.
Amazon launches AWS Network Firewall, a highly available, managed network firewall service for VPC. Peter is angry that Amazon killed one of his Re:Invent predictions.
Introducing Amazon S3 Storage Lens for organization-wide visibility into object storage. We think the dashboard is built on years of customer complaints, not experience.

Re:Invent Predictions

Prediction rule: If it’s already been officially announced by Amazon, then it doesn’t count. It needs to be in the rumor mill and somewhat specific.

Peter
- Integration between Sumerian and Chime/Slack (messaging service) for virtual in-person meetings
- Major upgrade to CloudWatch/Logs/GuardDuty/CloudWatch Events (SIEM) but an actual SIEM product. Will have its own name or does something to GuardDuty
- Robot SDK for tight integrations into AWS Cloud
Jonathan
- Serverless graph database

Episode 76: IBM Blames Cloud Pod for Outages Jun 18, 2020

Show notes

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

The Cloud Pod on Lockdown – EP 64 Mar 19, 2020

Show notes

Your hosts join the rest of the world in phoning one in on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

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

This week’s highlights

More conference cancellations roll in due to the ongoing global pandemic.
Amazon Redshift made several improvements this week.
We take a look at a bug-hunt by a Site Reliability Engineer at Google.

General News: Working From Home

As the pandemic response ramps up across the world, teleconferencing services like Slack and Zoom have struggled to meet demand. Microsoft Teams users in Europe reported difficulty logging into the service. If you’re looking for an open-source web conferencing application, AWS recommends you use Jitsi. If you’re a startup with more AWS credits to spend than money, we recommend you check it out.

In the continued wave of canceled conferences, Microsoft moved the May 19-21 Build developer conference to a virtual-only format. Even virtual conferences aren’t entirely safe bets, as Google has postponed Google Cloud Next 2020: Digital Connect. Perhaps they will try to wait until they can safely host a physical conference again, but who knows when that will be?

AWS: Redshifting Into Gear

Amazon Redshift now allows users to pause and remove clusters so they are not billed for their use while unneeded. In other Amazon Redshift news, the cloud data warehouse now supports materialized views functionality. We suspect that Redshift will be going serverless before long.

As a part of its release, API Gateway will offer private integrations with AWS Elastic Load Balancers and AWS CloudMap. There’s a lot there, but we wish it had a Lambda

Google to kill Cloud Pod if not #1 by 2023 – Episode 52 Dec 19, 2019

Show notes

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 Seattle Se

Autonomous Cloud Pod – Ep 40 Sep 18, 2019

Show notes

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 15: The Cloud Pod eats 31.4 trillion pieces of PI Mar 19, 2019

Show notes

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.

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 Data Studio – Open Source Gui for Postgre

Episode 11 – Screaming in the last week of the cloud pod Feb 19, 2019

Show notes

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.