The Cloud Pod

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134: The Cloud Pod has NetApp ONTAP Sep 08, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team wishes there was something else on tap, not just NetApp. Also, AWS Storage Day has come and gone again, and Azure is springing into the enterprise cloud.

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

The third annual AWS Storage Day brought a few presents, including new features for files and transfers.
One announcement was the general availability of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Hell has frozen over, and you can now get Netapp Filers on top of AWS.
Azure announces the launch of Spring Cloud Enterprise, a managed service for Spring optimized for enterprise developers.

Top Quotes

“I assume this is all built natively on top of AWS, and they are managing the service for you on EC2. If that’s the case, I believe this is the first of this type that AWS has offered. We’ve talked about Google partnering with people to operate appliances on your own VPCs, same as Azure. So this is probably the first of many partner integrations.”
“I don’t know if it’s [Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points] they wanted, but I think at these prices, they definitely didn’t want it. If the price was more attractive or if it was simpler to process and calculate — more predictable — I think people would potentially be excited about this.”

General News: Whisk It

DigitalOcean acquired three-year-old startup Nimbella, which develops multi-cloud serverless software. It’s an interesting alternative to, say, building its own serverless stack with OpenWhisk.

Amazon Web Services: Hell Has Frozen Over

Here’s what happened at AWS Storage Day 2021. We recommend you check out the recordings, because it actually wasn’t a snooze fest.
AWS announces general availability of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. If you want to import data into a data lake, this would be one way to do it.
AWS announces Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering to optimize costs for workloads with changing access patterns.This gives you some flexibility that you didn’t

121: Blue Origin finds new “dummy” to go to space Jun 09, 2021

Show notes

Is sending the former CEO of one of the biggest technology companies in the world to space a good idea? On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the potential economic catastrophe that could follow if Jeff Bezos becomes space junk.

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 provides cloud directory services, enables remote access, eases onboarding and offboarding of users and enables zero trust access models.

This week’s highlights

Amazon is sending the old junk it found in the attic into space.
Google is now fully qualified to direct traffic.
Azure turned its out-of-office message on and hoped no one would notice.

General News: Frenemies

Snowflake had its annual user conference and announced some new tools and features. Pretty good!
Jeff Bezos is joining the first human flight to space with his company Blue Origin. This is super risky, even if he’s no longer CEO.
Fastly blames global internet outage on a software bug. This is the right way to address outages — nice one, Fastly!

Amazon Web Services: Watch This Space

Amazon announces auditing feature for FSx for Windows File Server. This needs an acronym.
AWS has added a third availability zone to the China (Beijing) region operated by Sinnet. Nice to see.
AWS Sagemaker Data Wrangler now supports Snowflake as a data source. Smart move.

Google Cloud Platform: Sneaky Sales Tactics

Google announces the release of container-native Cloud DNS for Kubernetes. Powerful building block or Achilles heel?
Google announces new capabilities for Cloud Asset Inventory. Makes so much sense to come from the provider because they know what you have.
Google releases new Microsoft and Windows demos on

Solutions Architect To SADA CTO: Miles Ward on how and why the Google Cloud has the edge Mar 09, 2021

Show notes

In this episode of TCP Talks, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Miles Ward, the founder of the Google Cloud’s Solutions Architecture practice. Currently, Miles leads the cloud strategy and solutions capabilities as the Chief Technology Officer for consulting and IT services company SADA.

Startups have helped increase the popularity of open source products among enterprise businesses. Changing systems can be a struggle for larger, more traditional companies. But legacy businesses also want to accomplish more in a shorter amount of time, which requires shedding clunky, legacy systems.

“Those building blocks make it so that companies operate at a certain rate of change. And I know zero companies asking me to slow down their rate of change,” he notes.

The evolution of product compatibility is also discussed. Product sellers need to help customers understand how much of their system fits and how much doesn’t fit in one solution compared to another, Miles says. Customers need to have a clear understanding of what’s involved and how much work it’s going to be.

In addition, Miles shares his thoughts on the role of the CTO as well as the benefits of rebranding a product everybody hates.

Featured Guest

Name: Miles Ward

What he does: As CTO of SADA, Miles leads the cloud strategy and solutions capabilities. His remit includes delivering next-generation solutions to challenges in big data and analytics, application migration, infrastructure automation, and cost optimization; and engaging with customers on their most complex and ambitious plans around Google Cloud.

Key quote: “There used to be big crunchy legacy impediments to adoption… But it’s 2021 — live in the future, that shit works. Now it’s more about making it easy enough and predictable enough to consume that folks can unlock the business justification.”

Where to find him: LinkedIn | Twitter

Key Takeaways

Gone are the days when products from different technology providers, like Oracle or SAP, couldn’t work together to solve a customer problem. These days, companies need to make products easy and predictable enough so customers can unlock the business justification straight away.
For Google Cloud, the next phase of growth will require investment in higher-level relationships with customers. Miles references his experience with current Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian (TK).
“TK is super focused about spending the majority of his time face to face with customers,” he says. “He’s not doing it to be a glad-hand, he’s deal making and proposal pushing and thinking through the machinery of how to build higher level relationships.”
There’s a huge opportunity to help the “the real world divisions inside of real world businesses” — not just serve the IT department.
Miles says, “I think there’s a bunch of cloud providers that are working really hard now to facilitate the plumbing and governance and oversight and security controls and operational management of what is — not a hybrid between their data center, and a cloud — a hybrid between their SaaS fleet and the couple of things they still need to run on their own.”
Worried about leveraging a Google solution and then having them pull the plug on it? Miles doesn’t think you should be too concerned about deprecation.
“I think they have heard this feedback really loud and clear,” he says. “There’s a whole bunch of people that have made it really obvious that if you’re going to provide these

Episode 97: S3 Buckets land the key to success Dec 09, 2020

Show notes

This week on The Cloud Pod, the team admits defeat and acknowledges they are not experts in machine learning. Joining them in that club is the rest of us.

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 is helpfully pointing out all your mistakes.
Google knows you have deep pockets and wants a piece.
Microsoft is really bad at keeping secrets.

General News: Jonathan Called It

Salesforce has acquired Slack for $27.7 billion. We’re hoping Chatter will die a horrible death now.

Amazon Web Services: Error 404

Amazon explains the Thanksgiving Kinesis outage that occurred in North East Virginia. We feel bad for the Ops team that had to support this.

re:Invent Continued

Amazon adds stronger Read-After-Write consistency to S3. A really fantastic technical feat.
Amazon announces S3 Replication support for multiple destination buckets. Nice and simple!
Amazon S3 Replication now has the ability to replicate data from one source bucket to multiple destination buckets. Super excited about this!
Integrate Amazon Honeycode with popular SaaS applications, AWS services and more. It’s finally usable now.
Amazon announces new AWS Region is in the works for Melbourne, Australia. It will also use 100% renewable energy, which is cool.
Fully serverless batch computing with AWS Batch Support for AWS Fargate. Batch is a weird service to begin with.
Amazon debuts Trainium, a custom chip for machine learning training in the cloud. We’re confused by this one.
Amazon HealthLake stores, transforms and analyzes

Episode 89: Azure gives The Cloud Pod an advisor score of 100 Oct 08, 2020

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan is shocked the rest of the team managed so well without him while he was on vacation.

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

Progress is tapping its inner Freddy Kruger after acquiring Chef.
AWS is soothing the burns of many with its Compute Optimizer.
Google is behind the eight ball with the launch of its healthcare API.

General News: On The Chopping Block

IBM is splitting itself into two public companies to focus on high-margin cloud computing. We’re not sure about this strategy so we’ll keep an eye on this one.
Google will give up direct control of the Knative cloud open-source project. We’re glad to see this is getting closer to a resolution.
Business application platform Progress is making job cuts at recently acquired enterprise automation technology company Chef. The cuts included part of the Chef engineering team — when you’re buying a product company, that doesn’t seem like a good play.

Amazon Web Services: In Happier News

Amazon S3 on Outposts expands object storage to on-premises environments. If only this had existed a year ago!
AWS Systems Manager now enables developers to view, author and publish Automation runbooks directly from Visual Studio Code. We like this!
Amazon launches several new features with Redis 6 compatibility to Amazon ElastiCache for Redis. These enhancements are making it well on its way to being useful on a big project.
Amazon SageMaker leads the way in machine learning and announces up to 18% lower prices on GPU instances. That’s a huge price cut that we think is great!
Three new securit

Episode 77b: Google Next Prediction Show Jul 09, 2020

Show notes

Google Cloud Next Predictions

Your show hosts come to you with their cloudy crystal balls to give us Google Cloud Next Prediction show for Thomas Kurian’s keynote.

Justin

CloudSQL/Firebase/BigQuery via Anthos
More Granularity in Stackdriver reports/analytics around status reports (Thanks /u/casper_man)
Cloud endpoint Security Protection (Antivirus, Endpoint DLP, HIDS)

Jonathan

New Collaborations & Productivity tools Google Meet, New or Improved
Price reduction (token for Anthos (Small cut pacify the haters)
Thomas Kurian will speak about community governance

(Peter) Matt

GCP will launch a new region somewhere in the midwest
Partnership with a pro-sports league.
Will announce their commitment to cloud infrastructure beyond 2023

Ryan

Tout their amazing bigquery & ML stuff to help with Covid research
A significant price reduction for Anthos drop it by more than 40% or removing 12 month commitment
Layer 7 network inspection and egress filtering

Honorable Mentions

Endpoint Security will run in the hypervisor (Agentless) – Jonathan
Tool Similar to Sagemaker
Threat Hunting Tools
ML/AI chops to Cloud Monitoring
Configuration Management Endpoints
Major Updates to Docs, Sheets, Slides,
Quantum Computers

Tie Breaker: Number of Virtual Attendees on the Register?

Ryan – 45,000
Matt – 60,000
Jonathan- 85,000
Justin – 100,000

Ep 78 – Honey, I built an App Jul 08, 2020

Show notes

Architect Matt Kohn fills in for Peter 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

Ian McKay has cool tools for the new Honeycode service.
Amazon shoots for the stars with their new Aerospace and Satellite Solutions business unit.
A new family of Virtual Machines boast powerful performance benchmarks.

AWS: Business! In! Space!

Amazon’s No-Code solution has finally shipped in the form of Amazon Honeycode, fully managed and now in beta. Friend of the show Ian McKay has created Honeycode export and appflow integration projects which add a lot of usability to the service.
After a six-month beta period, Amazon CodeGuru is now generally available featuring CodeGuru Reviewer and CodeGuru Profiler. CodeGuru is still sticking to Java support, so if you’re working in another language, you won’t find much here.
AWS CodeCommit now supports a limited set of Emoji Reactions to comment on pull requests and commits. The set includes , , , and “ship-it”, though we’d have rather used , , , and .
AWS announced a foray into the space sector with the launch of the Aerospace and Satellite Solutions business unit. AWS appointed former director of Space Force Planning Clint Crosier to lead the unit.
On the last day of June, AWS launched AWS App2Container to help containerize currently running applications without the need for code changes. Once this applies to applications other than .NET 3.5+ and Java, we expect this to be adopted like hotcakes.
On the first of July, AWS announced the Porting Assistant for .NET, a tool to port .NET Framework applications to .NET Core running on Linux. This should clean up the last of the .NET apps in the next, say, 25 years.
Amazon Relational Database Service instances are now

67 – BigQuery Simulates The CloudPod March Madness Apr 10, 2020

Show notes

Your hosts meet online to work 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

Profits of The Cloud Pod’s sticker sales will be donated to charity.
DeepComposer is now generally available.
You can play around with March Madness simulations in BigQuery.

General News: The Cloud Pod Tackles COVID-19

We’re donating profits of our sticker sales to the John Hopkins University COVID-19 Research Response Program through July 1, 2020.

AWS: Staying Productive

The Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights feature, which gives users an overview of their operational problems, is now generally available. CloudWatch Contributor Insights is also generally available for DynamoDB, though it is 50 percent more expensive per million log events than Insights not for DynamoDB. You can build some neat automation around this.

Back in Episode 51, we covered the new instances with ra3.16xlarge nodes, and now Amazon is adding instances with ra3.4xlarge nodes, which lack the excess power of ra3.16xlarge. At a quarter of the price of the larger larges, that’s some considerable savings.

Amazon Redshift now features elastic resize, allowing users to change node types within minutes. This will be helpful if you want to make the move to those cheaper instances.

If you’re looking for something fun while sheltering in place, you may be pleased to hear that AWS DeepComposer is now generally available (and with new features!) You can buy an Amazon keyboard for $99 or a generic for $50.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports In-Region Read Replicas on SQL Server Enterprise Edition in the Multi-AZ config with Always On Availability. Careful though, you can really rack up a bill this way if you’re careless.

Amazon announced that Amazon Elastic File System has quintupled its speed for General Purpose mode file systems to 35,000 read operations per second. That leads into our next headline: Amazon Elastic

Re:Invent 2019 – We *really* should have gone back to the room – Episode 51 Dec 09, 2019

Show notes

Your co-hosts celebrate the one-year anniversary of the podcast by returning to the place where it all started – AWS Re:Invent. Joining us once again is Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) as we recap the largest week in Cloud.

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

Machine Learning took center stage as the engine behind many of the new machines introduced over the week, and we expect to see it implemented more and more.

Quantum Computing can be simulated using Amazon Bracket for anyone coding for the razor’s edge in computer science.
Check out The Amazon Builder’s Library for insight into how Amazon operates.

AWS Draft — and the Winner is…

On episode 49, we drafted each of our top three picks for what we thought would be announced at Re:Invent. It’s a three-way tie for first! Each one of us correctly guessed one of our three picks, and nobody guessed that Anderson .Paak would make a musical appearance, leaving the tie unbroken. (Peter predicted that Formula 1 racing would be included, but it was a runner-up choice and goes uncounted.)

Moving on to Re:Invent, we cover the announcements day-by-day:

Sunday

Toys and Security

AWS launched DeepComposer, the world’s first machine learning enabled keyboard. The 32-key, 2-octave keyboard is designed to help developers to get hands-on with AI. You can train the program to generate compositions based on musical genres, but don’t expect any compelling vocals from it yet, though. Check out the announcement for sample selections. For only $99 you will be able to buy a MIDI keyboard (worth about $50) with the AWS logo on

DeepRacer, a machine-learning based toy from yesteryear has received its own upgrades (a stereo camera and LIDAR sensor) which allow the cars to be trained to race each other physically in addition to virtually.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer launches for free as a way to get an overview on your access control policies — it mathematically analyzes access control policies attached to resources and determines which resources can be accessed publicly or from other accounts.

A preview version of

Parti(QL) with The Cloud Pod – Ep 34 Aug 09, 2019

Show notes

Special guest Josh Stella joins us to talk about the Capital One breach. AWS releases PartiQL, one query language to rule them all, Microsoft licensing changes and more. Plus we talk more about Josh’s company @Fuguehq in Cool Tools.

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This week’s highlights

General News: Whisk It

Amazon Web Services: Hell Has Frozen Over

This week’s highlights

General News: Frenemies

Amazon Web Services: Watch This Space

Google Cloud Platform: Sneaky Sales Tactics

Featured Guest

Key Takeaways

This week’s highlights

General News: Jonathan Called It

Amazon Web Services: Error 404

re:Invent Continued

This week’s highlights

General News: On The Chopping Block

Amazon Web Services: In Happier News

Google Cloud Next Predictions

This week’s highlights

AWS: Business! In! Space!

This week’s highlights

General News: The Cloud Pod Tackles COVID-19

AWS: Staying Productive

This week’s highlights

AWS Draft — and the Winner is…

Toys and Security

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