The Cloud Pod

Latest Episodes:

122: Welcome to Crash Consistency Week Jun 17, 2021

Show notes

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 Figure It Out

Google is

109: The Cloud Pod Hopes all Fault Injections are Simulated Mar 17, 2021

Show notes

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

Show notes

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 101: AWS plays the Parler games Jan 18, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, news has been a bit slow coming out of the Cloud Providers; the team suspects they might be curled up on the floor in fetal position after the events of last year.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

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

Open Raven, the cloud native data protection platform that automates policy monitoring and enforcement. Auto-discover, classify, monitor and protect your sensitive data.

This week’s highlights

Amazon has gone to the gym over the holidays and is now kicking butt.
Helping teach us the ways of the cloud, Google is.
There’s nothing remotely funny about Azure this week.

General News: Ryan Doesn’t Want to Wear Pants

Amazon has kicked controversial social media platform Parler off AWS. The multi-cloud people are going to be unbearable now.
Amazon defends its decision to suspend in response to Parler’s lawsuit. Most people don’t know Amazon sent Parler notices for months — it’s not like they weren’t warned.
F5 Networks to acquire edge-as-a-service startup Volterra for $500M. There’s so much buzzword lingo in this announcement, we suspect this service will lack substance.
Red Hat buys Kubernetes security startup StackRox. We’re surprised Google didn’t buy it.
Pat Gelsinger is stepping down as VMWare CEO to replace Bob Swan at Intel. We think he has a very long road ahead to get Intel back on track.

Amazon Web Services: Family Time

AWS announces Transfer Family now provides support for EFS file systems as well as S3. Would be nice if this would tie into Incognito or Simple Directory Service.
Amazon EMR now supports Apache Ranger for fine-grained data access control. Neat.
Achieve faster database failover with Amazon Web Serv

Episode 98: AWS tries the JEDI mind trick again Dec 16, 2020

Show notes

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 metrics for EC2 instances. Troubleshooting

Episode 86 – Google Cloud Next Digital Finally Ends Sep 17, 2020

Show notes

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 degradation and failures. Might be worth the money —

Get Your Hands Cloudy with Forrest Brazeal from A Cloud Guru – Episode 11 Sep 17, 2020

Show notes

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
Google Cloud Platform

The Right to Bare ARM Chips – Ep 43 Oct 16, 2019

Show notes

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 have been FedRAMP authorized

Episode 28: The Cloud Pod Metal Edition Jun 18, 2019

Show notes

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 of accounts

Episode 19: Announcing the new Cloud Pod Premium Tier Apr 18, 2019

Show notes

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.

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This week’s highlights

General News: Not Dead Yet

Amazon Web Services: Proceed With Caution

Google Cloud Platform: Just Figure It Out

This week’s highlights

General News: Back From The Dead

Amazon Web Services: So Many Faults

Google Cloud Platform: Yell At Us

This week’s highlights

Amazon Web Services: The Weird Kid in Class

Google Cloud Platform: Jonathan’s Money Maker

Azure: Lost in Space

This week’s highlights

General News: Ryan Doesn’t Want to Wear Pants

Amazon Web Services: Family Time

This week’s highlights

General News: Everyone’s Favorite Topic

Amazon Web Services: The Presents Keep On Coming

re:Invent Continued

This week’s highlights

General: A Bit Picky

Amazon Web Services: You’ll Need Some Pain Relief

Featured Guest

Key Takeaways

Here’s what was mentioned in the episode

Sponsors:

Sponsors:

Topics:

Reinforce Predictions

Honorable Mentions

Sponsors

Related Podcasts

Links

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