The Cloud Pod

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135: The Cloud Pod Goes to Google Cloud Toronto, Eh? Sep 16, 2021

Show notes

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 which will allow

126: The Cloud Pod Gives Amazon Money in Advance Jul 14, 2021

Show notes

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.
AWS now allows customers

113: The Cloud Pod goes mobile Apr 16, 2021

Show notes

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: Cloud CISO perspectives. Hopefully

Episode 90: The Cloud Pod gets a NanoDegree on podcasting Oct 14, 2020

Show notes

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 Availability. Tread carefully here — we’ve been burne

Episode 79 – The Cloud Pod Confidential Jul 16, 2020

Show notes

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 Confidential Virtual Machines product, no

68 – The Cloud Pod is as free as Github for Teams Apr 16, 2020

Show notes

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 extremely cost effective.

TCP-Talks: Oh my! SRE, AIOps and Observe-a-what? Apr 16, 2020

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

The Cloud Pod Development Kit Now in GA – Ep 31 Jul 16, 2019

Show notes

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

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Episode 27: Microsoft and Oracle interconnect with The Cloud Pod Jun 14, 2019

Show notes

Google Publishes RCA on their outage, Microsoft and Oracle enter into a cloud alliance and AWS improves incident resolution with Systems Manager Opscenter.

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This week’s highlights

General News: Jump On It

Amazon Web Services: New Features, Who Dis?

Google Cloud Platform: Google Welcomes Toronto to the Family

This week’s highlights

General News: Red Tape

Security: Ryan’s Going to Space

Amazon Web Services: Setting Fire to Dumpsters

This week’s highlights

General News: Eventual Degradation of Profits

Amazon Web Services: 5G Not Included

Google Cloud Platform: Excel at No Code

This week’s highlights

General News: An Expensive Gimmick

Amazon Web Services: Strangely Quiet

Google Cloud Platform: Apply Sunscreen

This week’s highlights

Google: What’s Next?

This week’s highlights

General News: [Upgrade to Premium for Full Segment Title]

AWS: Amazon Golden Goose

This week’s highlights

Matters of National Security

Amazon Web Services — Seven Short Sweet Stories

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