The Cloud Pod

Latest Episodes:

107: The Cloud Meshes with Microsoft Mar 04, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, Peter is spending the next 12 hours in a rejuvenation chamber like a regular villain straight out of a James Bond film.

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 on a mission to replace humans so we can go on holiday permanently.
Google is a bit early with the April Fools’ joke.
Azure is, much to our surprise, ahead of everyone else for once.

Amazon Web Services: Battle Bots

Amazon announces Alexa Conversations is now generally available for voice app development. We’re still a bit disappointed in her voice — it would be nice to hear something a bit more natural.
Amazon launches computer vision service to detect defects in manufactured products. Soon we’ll just be sitting around eating bon bons — we can’t wait!
AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) region now open to all, with three availability zones and more services. We think this is a reaction to the huge cloud growth in Japan.
AWS DeepRacer League’s 2021 season launches with new Open and Pro divisions. Apparently it’s gone virtual and is being dominated by experts.

Google Cloud Platform: A Bit Jealous

Google introduces GKE Autopilot, a revolutionary mode of operations for managed Kubernetes. Autopilot makes it sound like an Oracle product.
Google announces the Risk Protection Program to enhance trust in cloud ecosystems. Google wants you to pay insurance in case its cloud goes down…
Google extends BigQuery BI engine for faster insights across popular BI tools. Pretty cool!
New enhancements for Google Cloud Marketplace Private Catalog including Terraform support. This is pretty good for internal teams managing private catalogs.

Azure: Killing It

Microsoft has announced a trio of

Episode 103: Bezos retires over Slack outage — Episode 103 Feb 04, 2021

Show notes

It’s Peter’s washing night so please enjoy the soothing sounds of the odd spin cycle as we dive into the huge news coming out of Amazon on 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.

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

America’s version of Queen Elizabeth has stepped down.
Google is a bit late to the party but brings the ice so we forgive its team.
Azure is trying to claim it came first but the chicken says otherwise.

Follow Up: A Bit Slack

Slack explains how the January 4th outage occurred. It was all Amazon’s fault.
FogOps for Linux is now available via the AWS Marketplace. Congratulations on getting FogOps on the marketplace, Peter!
General News: It’s Earnings Season!
Microsoft releases its earnings. This is nuts.
Alphabet also released its earnings. We hope all the money it’s investing in infrastructure and data centers pays off in the long run, because that’s a big loss.
Amazon announces financial results and CEO transition. That’s some crazy profit.
Outgoing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos addresses employees. But who will head AWS now?

Amazon Web Services: Bon Voyage, Bezos

AWS launches multiple private marketplace catalogs for AWS organizations. Not a problem any of us have so not wowed by this.
AWS PrivateLink for Amazon S3 is now generally available. We like it but don’t like the pricing.
Amazon Macie announces a slew of new capabilities. Check out our sponsor OpenRaven, which is much better at solving the same issue and is much cheaper.

Google Cloud Platform: Stop Blaming Our Database

Google announces

Mark Curphey from Open Raven: Getting the birds-eye view of cloud data security Jan 05, 2021

Show notes

Note: This interview is part of a paid sponsorship between Open Raven and The Cloud Pod.

In this TCP Talks episode, Justin Brodley and Jonathan Baker talk with Mark Curphey, Chief Product Office and Co-Founder of Open Raven, a fully integrated platform for security and privacy workflows.

Featured Guest

Name: Mark Curphey

What he does: Mark is Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Open Raven.

Where to find him: LinkedIn | Twitter

Listen to Mark discuss the Open Raven strategy for protecting your data, the use of serverless workflows to scale to enormous workloads. Protecting your data and ensuring compliance using the Open Policy Agent – and more.

Key Points

Discover – Classify – Monitor – Protect

“The cloud has moved in incredibly fast; security has been moved off to the side and as a result companies don’t know where their data is, breaches are happening constantly, and these are the big things that get companies in the press.”

Macie

“Every single customer that we spoke to in the early stages said, a) It doesn’t work b) It’s ridiculously expensive, and c) It’s only on s3 buckets. Well, whilst The Register is always reporting breaches of S3 buckets, my customer data is in RDS! That’s a real piece of the problem for me; sure, it’s popular, but I shouldn’t just be thinking about trying to protect myself from getting on The Register.”

Part of the challenge is that data is not one thing… I may have a name, I may have an address, I may have a card number. There are all sorts of different parameters, and the data could be stored in multiple ways. So you have the concept of like data adjacency; If I have a CCV number, and expiry date and name associated to it that might be something which is real.

With Macie, even if you just use the straight matching techniques, you don’t have control over the adjacency thing, so that’s why a lot of the basic trivial cases get completely missed.

Security at the edge?

“If you are protecting data in the cloud, you have to wire the tools into the cloud to understand which IAM has access, which routes, which security groups can give you access? That’s the only way to understand the context to protect it. You can’t do it in some sort of edge device.”

Getting started with Open Raven

Visit openraven.com to get a 15 day trial. Spin up a SaaS instance and go play.

“We already think we’re a better choice than Macie, but don’t think that’s the end goal. Come partner with us, work with us on the end goal, because those are things that we love; solving massive, complex, and interesting problems.”

https://www.openraven.com/thecloudpod

Ep 81 – Azure & GCP … Are you ok? Aug 05, 2020

Show notes

It’s an unexpectedly short and sweet conference week 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.
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.

This week’s highlights

Alphabet and AWS release their first all-pandemic quarterlies.
Google leverages their machine learning horsepower.
You can get your kicks on our Route 53 console rant after the lightning round.

General: Growth Mindsets

For the first time in its 16 years as a public company, Alphabet’s quarterly sales have dropped. This is of course due to pandemic-related macroeconomic effects. It will be interesting to see if the ad revenue business model is changed long-term.
Despite being less than anytime in the last two years, Amazon reported AWS revenue up 29%. The retail end of Amazon is faring even better, with sales up 43% in North America.

COVID-19

Google Cloud AI and Harvard Global Health Institute have partnered to create the COVID-19 Public Forecasts model. You can query the forecasts for free in BigQuery or download as CSV.

AWS: Accepting Applications

Anomaly and threat detection for Amazon Simple Storage Service is coming to Amazon GuardDuty at an 80% discount. You can get a 30 day free trial of the improved and affordable service even on accounts already enabling GuardDuty.
The new AWS Community Builders Program is now open for anyone (to apply to). If you’re as interested as we are, be sure to sign up before September 15.
Amazon Simple Storage Service resources can be found in AWS Toolkits for Visual Studio Code using AWS explorer view. Tools like this that make things easier on developers are a good investment for AWS.
AWS CodeBuild now

TCP-Talks with Amiram Shachar: Reducing cost and complexity of the cloud with Spot Jun 04, 2020

Show notes

In this episode of TCP-Talks we chat with Amiram Shachar, founder and CEO of Spot, which aims to help its customers reduce complexity and compute costs by up to 90% in the AWS, GCP and Azure clouds.

We talk about the impact on the spot pricing market, and the differences between the AWS, GCP and Azure approach to spot pricing and delivery, and whether customers are asking for multi cloud solutions.

Amiram discusses the problems Spot solves, why they chose to partner with NetApp and reveal the mystery of the rebrand from Spotinst, then takes us on a deeper dive into Spot’s Ocean, a Serverless Infrastructure Engine for Containers,.

The Cloud Pod Automatically Redacted Mar 05, 2020

Show notes

Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter as we cover all the news you can use 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

AWS restructures its sales force.
Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect is canceled.
Who’s else is excited to re-network their printers!?

General News

We’re proud of the Bonus Episodes we’ve produced lately. Check out our interviews with Rob Martin and Ben Kehoe!

Check out Aviatrix’s panel on Multi-Cloud architecture and networking — featuring our very own Justin Brodley. And if you’re here because you saw Justin’s panel, welcome to TCP!

Global research firm Gartner has named AWS the top leader in Cloud AI developer services. Gartner categorizes industry leaders as having a complete vision and the ability to execute on it. Microsoft and Google were close behind, though unlike Microsoft, Google spread the news.

AWS: Human Salesforce, AI Oversight

Amazon Transcribe can now automatically redact personally identifiable information. You can rest assured when a robot collects your personal information for data analysis, it will use discretion in what it shares with humans.

AWS Global Accelerator users may now use their own IP addresses and tag resources. We already had AnyCast, but the tagging is nice.

Faced with tougher competition, AWS plans to double the size of its sales team. This will be the first major sales restructuring for AWS in

The Cloud Pod Faster on Azure… No Wait AWS – Episode 58 Feb 05, 2020

Show notes

Your hosts are joined again by Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) who is filling in for Peter as we recap the 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

It’s earnings season as the top dogs show their growth.
Azure gets back in the headlines with a bold but contested study.
Google fulfills an old TCP prediction with reports of a unified service.

Certificates of Doom Update

Amazon has given customers an extension until March 5, 2020 to rotate their SSL/TLS certificates. Previously, rebooting or manually changing a relational database service (RDS) instance would automatically switch to the new certificate authority, even if the customer didn’t have their application ready to do so.

IBM Changes Leadership

Speaking of new authorities, major changes are coming to IBM. Arvind Krishna will replace current CEO Ginni Rometty on April 6 and current Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will become president. Hopefully the changes in leadership and the acquisition of Red Hat will be what IBM needs to turn around what’s been a rough decade for the tech giant.

Earnings Season

It’s that time of the year where financial analysts are breaking out the line graphs to show investors just how much their holdings are growing. Let’s see what the quarterly reports had to say this time around:

Microsoft saw a rebound from slowing cloud growth last quarter with Azure up 62 percent, Surface up 6 percent, and LinkedIn up 24 percent.
Google Cloud growth was strong enough for the company to brag, but still lags behind AWS, Azure and even Google’s own YouTube.

Episode 13 – The Cloud Pod goes all in on AWS, Azure and GCP Mar 05, 2019

Show notes

Lyft goes all in on AWS and commits big money to AWS in their IPO. Several new solutions for security from the cloud vendors at RSA this week, and Jeff Barr stops by Reddit to tell us all about cloud formation! Plus the lighting round and cool tools with Jonathan.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting: fogops.io/thecloudpod Audible: audibletrial.com/thecloudpod

Show Topics:

Lyft goes all in on AWS Google Releases csp config management for k8

GCP introduces new KMS client libraries

Instantly restore your machines with Azure Backup

SuperMicro hardware weakness lets researches backdoor into an ibm cloud server

RightScale state of the cloud reports indicates Azure gaining on AWS

https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1100893328348831745

Maria DB ceo accuses hyperscalers of strip mining open source

Azure announces preview of sentinel security

Azure GA of Lab Services

Jeff Barr stops by Reddit to drop a quick cloudformation update

Original Thread

Azure Security Center new Capabilities

Azure announces new firewall capabilities

Lightning Round:

Amazon Worklink now works with Android Phones –

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/02/amazon-worklink-now-works-with-android-phones/

Aurora Serverless now publishes logs to cloudwatch –

Episode 9: Redhat Drops support for the cloud pod Feb 05, 2019

Show notes

Episode 9

Its earnings season and we take a look at both AWS and Googles earnings, plus recap the Azure earnings from last week. We also talk about AWS Corretto GA, Microsoft DNS outage causes data loss?, Mongo DB SSPL licensing and more. Special Guest Ryan Lucas