The Cloud Pod

Latest Episodes:

138: Cloud Pod productivity is way up thanks to the Facebook outage Oct 06, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team is running at half-duplex without Peter and Ryan. Plus Cloudflare R2 is here, Facebook died for a day, and AWS releases Cloud Control Plane.

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

Cloudflare’s new R2 service is making waves in the cloud object storage space, offering incentives like no egress fees and lower rates than its competitors.
Influencers, boomers and bored teenagers collectively screamed on October 4th as Facebook and its associated apps experienced an unprecedented six-hour outage.
AWS Cloud Control Plane offers developers an easier way to manage their third-party and AWS services with a new set of common APIs.

Top Quotes

“The bigger impact is actually WhatsApp, because for a large portion of the world, Whatsapp is the primary method of communication. If you go … to different countries overseas … everyone’s on WhatsApp. Everybody. So to not have that communication is a huge loss. And you have to wonder, does Facebook need to think about diversifying their backend in some way? Should all of their DNS be inside Facebook?”
“[AWS Cloud Control API] is probably going to be a requirement for any new services that launch in AWS … which means that we will no longer be waiting weeks or months for new services to be available in CloudFormation.”

General News: The day that Facebook died (for six hours)

Cloudflare is getting into the cloud object storage market with its new, competitively-priced R2 Service. Unlike other storage services, Cloudflare is nixing the dreaded egress cost, and will charge 10% less than AWS, its largest competitor.
Facebook is having a rough week. On October 4th — the day before a former employee testified to Congress about the social media giant’s negative impacts — Facebook accidentally unpublished itself and its affiliated apps for around six hours. A seemingly routine update caused issues with its BGP routes: Read the company’s account of events here.

AWS: On a mission to control the cloud

In a rush to release before the next AWS summit, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is now generally available. With Prometheus, users can easily monitor their containerized apps at scale, and new features like alert manager and ruler let users integrate SNS with various destinations.

129: The Cloud Pod ditches our m1.small instances Aug 05, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team is back in full force and some are sporting fresh tan lines. Also, it’s earnings season, so get ready for some big numbers — as well as some losses.

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 is finally killing off EC2-Classic. EC2 was launched in 2006, with one instance type (m1.small), security groups, and the US-EAST-1 Region.
The 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services is out, and AWS, Google, Microsoft and Oracle have all made it. Although some scraped in by the skin of their teeth.
Get consistent Kubernetes definitions with the new Anthos Config Management feature. The Kubernetes Resource Model (KRM) helps users define and update resources with minimal effort on their part.

Top Quotes

“I would say Google’s getting market share because they are able to leapfrog everyone else on Kubernetes, big data, and machine learning.”
“Considering all the different vendors that are involved in a hospital, just being able to have a standard data format with FHIR is huge. And they also now power that with the cloud. There are lots of really interesting use cases that get unlocked with this [Azure Healthcare APIs] solution.”

General News: Earn Baby Earn

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, crushed earnings expectations. It still lost a lot, though. Increasing the price of YouTube TV could have limited the damage.
Microsoft’s revenue is up 21% overall. Azure’s revenue doubled, which is nuts.
Amazon’s revenue is up 27% overall — but that’s down from the 41% year-on-year increase the company saw in Q2 of 2020. It’s starting to see post-COVID-19 corrections.

Amazon Web Services: Not Fit for Consumption

AWS named as a Leader for the 11th consecutive year in the

125: JEDI is Dead, and the Cloud Pod Launches Bottlerockets in Celebration Jul 07, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, Ryan was busy buying stuff on Amazon Prime Day and didn’t want to talk about JEDI, so he arrived late to the recording. Also, long-time sponsor of The Cloud Pod, Foghorn Consulting, has been acquired by Evoque, so the team grilled Peter for the juicy details.

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 $10 billion JEDI cloud contract has been canceled by the Pentagon. In its place, the DOD announced a new multi-vendor contract known as the “Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability.”
Evoque Data Center Solutions has acquired cloud engineering experts Foghorn Consulting. This is a key part of the company’s Multi-Generational Infrastructure (MGI) strategy, which it announced the same day as the acquisition.
AWS released some incredible numbers from Amazon Prime Day. Jeff Barr gives his annual take on how AWS performed and the record-setting event.

Top Quotes

“The Pentagon has called off the $10 billion cloud contract [JEDI]. It was being dragged through the courts by Amazon and Microsoft, and this is sort of an admission that the Pentagon didn’t want Donald Trump to get subpoenaed and testify on what his involvement was in the whole contract.”
“This is a big problem that almost every business has: how do you stop a deployment, especially a large deployment? Typically, we throw people at it, and we have them watch millions of dashboards, and hopefully, they catch it. But usually, it’s a problem somewhere that’s exposed to the customer that triggers that. So if we can have more tools like Gandalf that detect problems earlier, it’s great.”

General News: Some People Can’t Take a Joke

Evoque Data Center Solutions acquires Foghorn Consulting. Congratulations to Peter on this exciting news!
The AWS Infinidash story has taken on a life of its own. What started as a joke has led to backlash from the community complaining about it being a form of technology gatekeeping.

JEDI: We’re Not Talking About This Anymore

The Pentagon has canceled the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract. It’s not really dead, they’ve just turned it into a joint multi-cloud offering, which is what we said they should do six months ago.

Amazon Web Services: A Little Gooey

Andy Jassy thanks AWS employees as he

116: The Cloud Pod is positively charged for AWS Proton May 06, 2021

Show notes

This week on The Cloud Pod, Yahoo is back and cheaper than ever. Just kidding, it’s Ryan who is back and the team is curious as to how he managed to extricate himself out from under that kitten.

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 has been doing yoga and the results are paying off.
Google bought a hard hat and is getting into the construction business.
If you need to get your kid to sleep, let them read this from Azure.

General News: Yahoo’s Renaissance

Verizon dumps Yahoo-AOL for rock-bottom price. But they’re not dead yet!
Amazon posts record profits as AWS hits $54B annual run rate. That’s pretty good!
Microsoft beats Q3 revenue expectations, spurred by strong cloud sales. Get on the bandwagon, Azure.
Alphabet announces first quarter results for 2021. It does include GCP and G-Suite revenue.
Cloud infrastructure spending grew 35% to $41.8B in Q1 2021. These numbers boggle our minds.

JEDI: Just Keeps Getting Better

Court snubs Microsoft and the U.S. government’s request to throw out Amazon’s complaint against JEDI cloud contract decision. We can’t wait to hear what Trump says under oath.

Amazon Web Services: Bring Your Own Talent

AWS is launching Amazon FinSpace, a data management and analytics solution. Step one, invent the universe.
AWS Proton introduces customer-managed environments. We had to look up what Proton actually is.
AWS Proton allows adding and removing instances from an existing service. We’re looking forward to some re:Invent sessions on this.
Amazon launches CloudFront Functions for the lowest

112: The Cloud Pod bots are in control Apr 08, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team discusses the future of the podcast and how they’ll know they’ve made it when listeners use Twitter to bombard Ryan with hatred when he’s wrong.

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 gives Justin a long overdue birthday present.
Google wants to educate the people.
Azure has a new best friend but could they be a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

General News: Goodbye, Friend

The Apache foundation has decided to send Mesos to the attic. This makes us sad because we loved the concept.

Amazon Web Services: Happy Birthday, Justin

New AWS WAF Bot Control to reduce unwanted website traffic. This is great!
AWS is releasing the Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS firewall to defend against DNS-level threats. Pricing is interesting on this one.
AWS launches CloudWatch Metric Streams. After years of complaints, they’re finally fixing this issue.
AWS Lambda@Edge changes duration billing granularity from 50ms down to 1ms. Nice price cut!
AWS Direct Connect announces MACsec encryption for dedicated 10Gbps and 100Gbps connections at select locations. AWS has fulfilled their promise to Justin — three years later.
Amazon announces new predictable pricing model up to 90% lower and Python Support moves to GA for CodeGuru Reviewer. If this goes down next week, blame Ryan.

Google Cloud Platform: So Pretty

Google is releasing an open-source set of JSON dashboards. This is super important.
Google announces free AI and machine learning training for

Episode 100: The Cloud Pod tail -f’s the news Jan 07, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, it appears 2020 is not done with us yet and Ryan receives a mystery emergency alert to kick the show off.

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.

Due to the pandemic and the cancellation of just about every in-person event, Justin has hundreds of stickers at his house that (his wife says) need to go. Head to The Cloud Pod store and use codes 100EPISODE or 2020SUCKS for 75% off.

This week’s highlights

Amazon won’t be taking a holiday to China anytime soon.
Google is tapping Linux users for new ideas.
Azure is being annoyingly helpful to the healthcare industry.

Amazon Web Services: Ready For Battle

AWS Certificate Manager is now compliant with FedRAMP, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. What exactly makes up the compliance requirement? We’re not sure.
Amazon Web Services launches appeal after losing $12-million AWS trademark war in China to local biz Actionsoft. You know who should be suing everyone? The American Welding Society, which has been around since the 1800s.
Amazon SQS announces tiered pricing for monthly API requests. Discounts are good but we’re surprised they’re using tiered pricing.
Amazon Elastic Container Service launches new management console. We want to like this but it sort of just aggravates us.

Google Cloud Platform: Bowing to Demands

Google announces a new tool to mimic the behavior of tail -f which displays the contents of a log file to the console in real time. Thank you Linux users for demanding this!

Azure: Opt-in

Introducing the Azure Health Bot, an evolution of Microsoft Healthcare Bot with new functionality. On the one hand, this is super helpful. On the other, it’s Clippy (the annoying paper clip assistant) and dear God, go away!
Microsoft promises 9

Episode 93: Docker Hub rate limits The Cloud Pod Nov 05, 2020

Show notes

While waiting on tenterhooks to find out who will win the U.S. presidential race, the team welcomed guest Jacques Chester to The Cloud Pod this 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.

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.

Manning Press is offering a 40% discount on any Manning Publication, and we highly recommend Knative in Action by guest Jacques Chester. Use the code PODCLOUD20 to receive 40% off; additionally, the first five people who retweet this episode from the official @thecloudpod1 twitter account will get a free copy.

This week’s highlights

AWS will be enjoying fondue in Switzerland.
Google is clearing out the old junk in the attic.
Dr. Microsoft is now taking appointments.

General News: Money, Money, Money

Microsoft has reported its earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2021. Microsoft is over 2020 already.
Google’s parent company Alphabet crushed expectations for both earnings and revenue in its third-quarter earnings results. This could be a good sign it’s not planning on killing Google Cloud just yet.
Amazon reports $96.1 billion in Q3 2020 revenue. Overall a pretty strong quarter!

Amazon Web Services: Spend Or Save?

Amazon launches AWS Nitro Enclaves to carve out isolated environments on any EC2 instance that is powered by the Nitro System. A great increase in security for no additional cost.
Customers can now use Jira Service Desk to track operational items related to AWS resources. This is great for the start-ups and smaller organizations that are using Jira!
Amazon announces new Application Load Balancer Support to make it easier to use gRPC with your applications. Another great feature!
New AWS Europe region will allow customers to run their applications and serve end-users from

GCP puts the Cloud Pod on Ice – Episode 54 Jan 07, 2020

Show notes

Your co-hosts kick off their first regular news episode of the year with Consumer Electronics Show 2020, Google Cloud Next 2020 and Justin’s Oracle adventure.

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 flexes its tech at the Consumer Electronics Show with an automotive exhibit.
Use coupon code GRPABLOG2020 for $500 off your ticket to Google Cloud Next 2020.
Justin does a bit of investigative journalism to understand Oracle’s new boot volume backup announcement.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) at the Consumer Electronics Show 2020 — Cars and CAs

Those attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week saw Amazon show off the practical uses of AWS technology and machine learning at their automotive exhibit. The exhibit includes an array of demonstrations from an in-vehicle digital assistant to car-to-home integrations to a fleet of autonomous cars in China. We’d like to see this sort of in-vehicle technology have constant cloud connectivity, where software updates can continue to be pushed out.

And speaking of updates, you may have already seen a notification or email for AWS’s upcoming 2019 certificate authority. From the article:

“If you are using Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), or Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) and are taking advantage of SSL/TLS certificate validation when you connect to your database instances, you need to download & install a fresh certificate, rotate the certificate authority (CA) for the instances, and then reboot the instances.” -Jeff Barr

Yeah, it’s a chore and it sucks to do, but if you use it and you don’t update your CA, you’ll have an outage. Is doing this once every five years really so bad?

Lastly, in all AWS regions except China, you can now use Private DNS names to access your AWS PrivateLink based services. We’re happy to see it.

Azure Recaps Cost Management for 2019

While Azure’s been quiet since Christmas, their cost management program manager published an article this week recapping the tools they’ve released over the last year to help you monitor and optimize the costs of your cloud operation

Google recognizes The Cloud Pod hosts as celebrities – E46 Nov 07, 2019

Show notes

This week we discuss the Microsoft Ignite conference, announcements and new features and how we did on the Azure Draft. AWS announces a new Spain region and GCP had a lengthy halloween incident.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Topics

AWS

Google

MS Ignite Draft

Jonathan

Digital Assistant to compete with Alexa or Google Home.
3 more Azure Regions in US
More or Improved tooling for Devops Community

Peter

Istio for AKS
1 more region in Canada
Visual Studio Online

Justin

Azure Portal Redesign
Sagemaker/Databricks like Competitor.
Oracle on Stage

Azure

Episode 22: The Cloud Pod Increases listener limit to 1 million May 07, 2019

Show notes

Azure suffers an outage, AWS Snowballs drive block storage at the edge, S3 Batch Operations and Fully Managed Blockchain all this week on the cloud pod! Plus Lightning Round and Cool Tools with Jonathan.

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This week’s highlights

General News: The day that Facebook died (for six hours)

AWS: On a mission to control the cloud

This week’s highlights

General News: Earn Baby Earn

Amazon Web Services: Not Fit for Consumption

This week’s highlights

General News: Some People Can’t Take a Joke

JEDI: We’re Not Talking About This Anymore

Amazon Web Services: A Little Gooey

This week’s highlights

General News: Yahoo’s Renaissance

Amazon Web Services: Bring Your Own Talent

This week’s highlights

General News: Goodbye, Friend

Amazon Web Services: Happy Birthday, Justin

Google Cloud Platform: So Pretty

This week’s highlights

Amazon Web Services: Ready For Battle

Google Cloud Platform: Bowing to Demands

Azure: Opt-in

This week’s highlights

General News: Money, Money, Money

Amazon Web Services: Spend Or Save?

This week’s highlights

Amazon Web Services (AWS) at the Consumer Electronics Show 2020 — Cars and CAs

Yeah, it’s a chore and it sucks to do, but if you use it and you don’t update your CA, you’ll have an outage. Is doing this once every five years really so bad?

Azure Recaps Cost Management for 2019

Sponsors:

Follow Up

Topics

AWS

Google

MS Ignite Draft

Azure

Sponsors:

Follow Up

Topics

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