The Cloud Pod

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139: Back to the Future With Google Distributed Cloud Oct 13, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan reveals his love for “Twilight.” Plus GCP kicks off Google Cloud Next and announces Google Distributed Cloud, and Azure admits to a major DDoS attack.

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

After a few awkward keynotes, Google Cloud Next kicks off days one and two, highlighting new features and announcing Google’s $10 billion investment in cybersecurity advancements.
At Google Cloud Next, GCP announced the Google Distributed Cloud: A network of hardware and software to help organizations improve cloud strategies.
After tooting its horn for reduced DDoS attacks in 2021, Azure reveals details about the largest DDoS attack in its history. This 2.4 terabits/second attack was launched in late August against an Azure customer in Europe.

Top Quotes

“It is kind of crazy, because [Google Distributed Cloud] is an open source project that’s basically how to run Google Cloud in your own data center. It’s probably a smart risk, because I do believe workloads will just eventually end up on Google Cloud.”
“The tools have the functionality built in, but unless you’re offering that as a service to your end users … and thinking about the holistic management of the settings, the deployment and the full lifecycle of those things, it’s the difference between enabling your business to be secure and just shooting it in the foot.”

AWS: Keeping Quiet This Week for Google Cloud Next

Amazon Fraud Detector can now store event datasets and use this historical data to boost performance for ML models — all at a 56% reduction in price.
AWS Console Mobile Application has (finally) added ECS, which will allow users to view and manage a select set of resources to support incident responses from their devices. Clearly someone at AWS listens to TCP and has heard Justin’s many complaints about this.
CDK8s (say that five times fast) is now generally available and supports the Go programming language. Using CDK8s, you can define your K8 applications and apply K8 YAML to any cluster.
Tired of accidentally deleting your backup with your cloud formation stack? The newly released AWS Backup Vault Lock solves this problem by using safeguards to ensure users store their backups using a Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) model.

GCP: Thank U Google Cloud Next

Ahead of Google Cloud Next,

130: The Cloud Pod has how many unattended Google projects? Aug 12, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, it’s been an interesting few days in the cloud, so the team members have made themselves comfortable with plenty of adult beverages to keep them going. Also, Elastic has forked everyone with its latest Elasticsearch move.

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

Elastic has modified the Elasticsearch Python client so it won’t work with forked versions, including the relatively recently released OpenSearch 1.0.
AWS CloudWatch Synthetics now supports visual monitoring. Customers with web apps can see defects that can’t be scripted but would be visible to end users.
Google introduces the Unattended Project Recommender. It uses machine learning to identify projects that have likely been abandoned and forgotten about, so you can cull them from the cloud.

Top Quotes

“People were originally attracted to Elasticsearch because it was an open source project. So this [amending the Elasticsearch Python client] is taking away one of the main reasons they were able to acquire the users they did. I don’t get the strategy, unless they’re pulling a ripcord right now, because they’re bleeding.”
“I know a lot of companies are moving their services into the cloud, and a lot of security engineers are restricting outbound access, or tightly controlling egress. These things [Google’s Private Service Connect] have to happen — these things are absolutely needed — to keep them secure, and allow those companies to sell their services. Good catch-up feature.”

General News: We’re Not Angry Just Disappointed

Elastic amends Elasticsearch Python client so it won’t work with forked versions — and proves it knows how unpopular this is by blocking GitHub comments. This is forcing people to choose sides, and is a really disappointing move.
AWS details its commitment to keeping OpenSearch and Elasticsearch compatible with open source. Elastic has managed the impossible: it’s made AWS look like the good guys.

Amazon Web Services: Unbreaking The Rules

Amazon’s senior cloud leader Charlie Bell is leaving the company after more than 23 years. Knowing how fast AWS moves, we feel tired just thinking about working there that long.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling enhances Instance Refresh

Episode 82: Azure says “How About them Apples, Open Usage Commons” Aug 13, 2020

Show notes

It’s a new week, and that means you can be sure that Google Next is still going on… and of course, we’ve got a new 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.
Commvault is data-management done differently. It allows you to translate your virtual workloads to a cloud provider automatically, greatly simplifying the move to the cloud or your disaster recovery solution to the cloud.
live@Manning: Sign up for RustConf and Manning’s Women in Tech conferences here.

This week’s highlights

Foghorn has two new solutions we’d love for them to advertise with us.
Azure advances the open-source front.
Oracle wins the 4th place medal in the VMware race. What would a 4th place medal be — aluminum?!

JEDI: Wait and See

The Department of Defense has been granted an additional month to issue its remand decision. Neither Amazon nor Microsoft have objected to the delay.

COVID-19

AWS is supplying Moderna with the computing as they work on their COVID-19 vaccine. Our deepest gratitude to the 30,000 human subjects in the phase 3 trials.

AWS: Brought to You by Foghorn

The AWS Wavelength 5G partnership is now available in Boston and San Francisco. Inevitably though cloud platforms, like the iphone, will need to break free from their provider-locks.
TCP sponsor Foghorn has developed VPC-In-A-Box℠ for Amazon VPC creation and management, and the Fog360 Security security analysis and visualization service. Send all your questions our way!
The new AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that features a new default mesh configuration. It’s an interesting concept for sure but it might not be for the best.
AWS

Episode 83: The Cloud Pod takes a Quantum Leap Aug 13, 2020

Show notes

Your hosts set right what once went wrong in this week’s quantum 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.
Commvault is data-management done differently. It allows you to translate your virtual workloads to a cloud provider automatically, greatly simplifying the move to the cloud or your disaster recovery solution to the cloud.
live@Manning: Sign up for RustConf and Manning’s Women in Tech conferences here.

This week’s highlights

Amazon and Rackspace may be growing closer soon.
Your hosts may or may not know how quantum computing works.
Google is now available for 35 more minutes out of the month.

General: High Stakes

Reuters reported that Amazon is looking to acquire a stake in cloud infrastructure and services company Rackspace Technology. It is unclear exactly how much of the company Amazon may buy.

AWS: A Discrete Quantity of Computers

You can now run Amazon Braket on real or simulated quantum chips. We’ll try to explain quantum computing to you if we ever understand it ourselves.
AWS Step Functions has been updated to Amazon State Language. Alright, let’s learn this thing the hard way!
AWS Security Hub Automated Response & Remediation is now generally available. It’s an old architecture, but cool to see formalized.
The new Distributor capability of AWS Systems Manager installs and manages third party agents, and that’s pretty cool.
AWS Fargate for Elastic Kubernetes Service and Elastic Container Service now supports Elastic File System. It’s the interface that really makes it work.
Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports EC2 Inf1 instances.
Serverless icon Ben Ellerby wrot

Ep 71: Now Open AWS WFH Region May 14, 2020

Show notes

We crown the winner of the AWS Summit Draft Picks 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 crown the winner of this year’s AWS Summit Draft Picks!
Amazon and Microsoft keep slinging blog posts over JEDI.
We’re all just trying to stay sane, honestly.

AWS Summit: Draft Picks

While it wasn’t a particularly accurate set of predictions this year (with no honorable mentions scoring and even the tiebreaker non-functional), Justin managed to squeak out a win by correctly predicting a price cut in EC2, S3, or Networking and the Covid Crazy Growth Numbers. Jonathan scored the only other point with his prediction of improved DLP Tools for S3.
Amazon Macie simplified its pricing plan and dramatically reduced costs. Is the 80% price cut the new way of announcing a product is generally available?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud cut prices across all regions for Standard Reserved Instances and EC2 Instance Saving Plans.
Inter-Region Data Transfer prices have been reduced for data coming out of São Paulo, Bahrain, Cape Town and Sydney.

General News

Amazon filed a second, concurrent bid protest to the Department of Defense. Microsoft and Amazon continue to snip at each other in public blog posts.

COVID-19

Amazon will allow non-warehouse employees to work from home for at least five months. Microsoft updated their WFH policy, and will give employees the option to work remotely through October.

AWS

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer has seen pricing changes. Now CodeGuru’s terrible payment model is much less terrible.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service now supports Kubernetes version 1.16. It’s good to see they’re putting out these updates progressively faster.
A new wizard will allow for simplified creation and management of Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters. This should clean up some of the EKS console nicely.
AWS Identity and Access Management introduced basic password

63: The Cloud Pod Stays Home to Enjoy the Fireworks Mar 12, 2020

Show notes

Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter again as we practice social distancing 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

Details emerged from the ongoing legal battle surrounding the JEDI contract.
Amazon shows off its new operating system.
Powershell 7.0 brings long-awaited features to Windows.

General News

Due to the ongoing global pandemic, AWS Summits have been (responsibly) cancelled in Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai, Paris, San Francisco and Brussels. Hopefully we’ll see these events move online.

Court documents from Amazon’s injunction have been unsealed. The documents reveal that Microsoft’s bid included “non-compliant storage” which was not counted against them. The Department of Defense responded that Amazon’s bid did not include technically compliant storage either.

Our very own Justin Brodley made the news! His comments are included in an article covering a cloud alternatives panel discussion at Altitude 2020.

VMware Inc. overhauled its portfolio of products to focus on Kubernetes support. Expect to see the whole host of products available by May 2020.

AWS:

The new CloudWatch composite alarms will allow you to combine alarms and get a clearer picture of what is happening when something goes wrong.

You can now host your applications with the AWS

The Cloud Pod gets a Savings Plan – Episode 47 Nov 13, 2019

Show notes

AWS releases new RI option called the savings plan, IBM builds a financial services cloud, and @jeffbarr celebrates 15 years of blogging for AWS!

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Halloween Downtime RCA – Google

Topics

General News/Topics

AWS

Reinvent Tips & Suggestions

Google

Azure

Lightning Round (Jonathan 12, Justin 17, and Guest 5):

You had one Job while I was away – Ep 42 Oct 13, 2019

Show notes

Justin is back from vacation and gets the podcast back on track. Justin, Peter and Jonathan talk about their guest spot on roaring elephants and Justin’s AWS lambda fireside chat video. Elasticsearch sues AWS over trademark infringement, AWS gets its IQ raised, Oracle gets fedramp certified cloud regions and Google enhances their github app for cloud build. Plus the world famous lightning round.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Topics

Roaring Elephant https://roaringelephant.org/2019/10/08/episode-161-the-cloudpod-weather-report-part-1/

AWS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Aq2DIMRIIg&t=1s

General News/Topics

AWS

Google

The Cloud Pod to appear at Intersect.aws – Ep 35 Aug 13, 2019

Show notes

Github.com gets a CI/CD Service, Lakes are forming with lake formation and Google and Azure get EPYC this week on the show.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Topics

General News

AWS

Episode 23: Unlock the podcast with your Android device May 14, 2019

Show notes

This week on The Cloud Pod, Amazon S3 deprecates path style routing, then changes their mind. Azure reliability suffers in the first part of the year, and Google summarizes their IO cloud announcements.

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This week’s highlights

AWS: Keeping Quiet This Week for Google Cloud Next

GCP: Thank U Google Cloud Next

This week’s highlights

General News: We’re Not Angry Just Disappointed

Amazon Web Services: Unbreaking The Rules

This week’s highlights

JEDI: Wait and See

COVID-19

AWS: Brought to You by Foghorn

This week’s highlights

General: High Stakes

AWS: A Discrete Quantity of Computers

This week’s highlights

AWS Summit: Draft Picks

General News

AWS

This week’s highlights

General News

AWS:

Sponsors:

Follow Up

Topics

General News/Topics

AWS

Reinvent Tips & Suggestions

Google

Azure

Lightning Round (Jonathan 12, Justin 17, and Guest 5):

Sponsors:

Follow Up

Topics

General News/Topics

AWS

Google

Sponsors:

Follow Up

Topics

General News

AWS

Sponsors:

Topics

Lightning Round (Jonathan 5, Justin 7, Peter 1 and Guest 3)

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