The Cloud Pod

Latest Episodes:

133: Google Cloud Serverless Functions now with Servers Sep 02, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, AWS releases new features including Managed Grafana, GCP Serverless solves the cold start problem, and Wiz hacks into CosmosDB.

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 shows no sign of slowing down after the Summit, making Managed Grafana generally available and releasing new features for VPC, CloudFormation, and CloudWatch.
Google introduces new capabilities to minimize cold starts, giving serverless customers the option of using — gasp! — servers.
Wiz finds a critical security flaw in CosmosDB which allowed it to hack into thousands of Azure customers’ databases. Looks like Microsoft needs to make some calls.

Top Quotes

“I just think about all the companies who were … trying to build their own ML models for document recognition and how far they are versus how far Amazon and Google are and Azure. … this is the reason why using your cloud vendor might be the better choice. Because they’re not even getting this kind of scale and or price reduction for anything they’re doing on top of ML.”
“I think the main benefit for this change is going to be shared tenancy systems because, with virtualization, everytime there’s a context switch between different tenants on the CPU, you have to throw away that entire cache. The smaller that cache is, the faster that’s going to be, and the better overall performance you’ll get from the system.”
”There’s servers behind everything. So nothing’s serverless just how exposed are you to it? And to me, I think that level of exposure where it’s no longer serverless is if I have to patch it.”

General News: Docker goes “Full Oracle”

Docker announces it will begin charging enterprise customers to use it’s desktop app. Enterprise companies with over $10 million in revenue or greater than 250 employees have until January 31st, 2022 to buy the subscription. In Justin’s words, “that’s just dirty.”

Amazon Web Services: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

To enable East-West traffic, Amazon has removed some VPC routing restrictions, allowing users to inspect, analyze or filter all traffic flowing between two subnets.
AWS CloudFormation users are sharing a collective sigh of relief as they can now disable the automatic rollback when a cloud formation fails and retry stack operations from the point of failure. Peter is jumping for joy.
AWS announces a 32% price reduction for Amazon Textract users in 8 regions as well as a 50% reduction in processing times for asynchronous jobs. Fast or cheap? We

120: The Cloud Pod crosses the data streams Jun 03, 2021

Show notes

This week on The Cloud Pod, apparently there was a machine learning conference because there is A LOT of machine learning news. For the listeners (and hosts of The Cloud Pod) who don’t understand machine learning, buckle up because this will be a long episode for you.

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 acting like it’s helping but really it’s lying with numbers.
Google is pretending the 1991 Ford Fiesta it’s selling is a 2021 Mustang.
Azure got a little overexcited with the use of its naming bot.

General News: Fake It Until You Make It

Amazon data shows more diversity among senior leaders after the definition of “executive” loosened. Well, that’s one way to do it.
Amazon’s Andy Jassy is warming up for the CEO role. We hope competitors don’t expect him to tread softly when he starts.
Pluralsight will acquire A Cloud Guru to address growing cloud skills gap. This is earth-shattering.

Amazon Web Services: Busy As Usual

Amazon Redshift Machine Learning is now generally available. There’s a helpful table to explain the different machine learning products.
Amazon ECS Anywhere is now generally available. A bit disappointed that they haven’t addressed the networking issue more.
Introducing Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics Studio for analyzing streaming data. They’re really into studios at the moment.
Amazon SQS now supports a high throughput mode for FIFO Queues. This is nice.
Amazon Location Service is now generally available with new routing and satellite imagery capabilities. Ju

Episode 96 – re:Invent is here with presents for everyone! Dec 01, 2020

Show notes

Santa arrived early and he brought all the goods with him to The Cloud Pod this week. The team dives into all the big announcements from AWS re:invent 2020.

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

Amazon flips the bird at Microsoft with its Babelfish announcement.
AWS is angling for a free Jeep Wrangler with its new service.
AWS is helping customers get out of the sticky situation they’re in and don’t know it.

Amazon Web Services: Thankfully They Didn’t Ruin Our Predictions

Amazon launches managed workflows for Apache Airflow to simplify data processing pipelines. Interesting to see it giving some alternative options.
AWS Lambda now has Code Signing, a trust and integrity control to confirm code is unaltered and from a trusted publisher. Not a nice way to start Thanksgiving if you are Palo Alto.
Amazon announces centralized account access management of AWS Single Sign-On and Attribute-based access control. Has a few rough edges.
Multi-Region Replication is now enabled for AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory. We’re so glad this is finally here.
Amazon announces reusable building blocks called modules to define infrastructure and applications in AWS CloudFormation. Amazon is jumping on the reusable elements bandwagon with this one.
AWS Security Hub integrates with AWS Organizations for simplified security posture management. Basically a centralized security hub.

AWS Elasticsearch Announcements:

Episode 85 – The Cloud Pod Plays Buzzword Bingo on Machine Learning Sep 02, 2020

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, your hosts introduce the idea of plaques to commemorate a feature suggestion becoming a product.

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.
When the girls get coding!. Join us on your screens, Oct 13, for the live@Manning “Women in Tech” conference to celebrate the rising movement of women in technology. http://mng.bz/MolW

This week’s highlights

Active Directory just will not die.
Someone is excited about Google’s Data Fusion pipelines. We just don’t know them.
Azure gets features that AWS and Google already have.

General: Did You Do Your Homework?

Former Google engineer Steve Yegge resurrects his blog to explain why Google’s deprecation policy is killing user adoption. We’re still bitter about Google Reader.
The Cloud Pod is sponsoring the Rust Conference and Women in Tech conference. We’re super excited about both of these conferences and supporting more women in the technical world.

Amazon Web Services: So confused

AWS launches second Local Zone in Los Angeles for customers requiring very low latency. This caused massive confusion when they launched the first one as they already had a localized region concept they forgot about.
Connect to AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory seamlessly with new AWS Linux feature. No one has jumped on board with killing Active Directory yet. Someday we’ll get there.
AWS now lets you log all Domain Name System queries to understand how your applications are operating. We don’t really know why you would want this (except maybe Jonathan).
AWS launches Bottlerocket to improve security and operations of containerized infrastructure. Really a joy to set up and makes you feel really secure, without needing a therapist.
AWS Site-to-Site now

Episode 74: The Cloud Pod Gets Their Groove Back Jun 03, 2020

Show notes

The Cloud Pod Gets Their Groove Back — Episode 74

Your co-hosts have cooked up a good one 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

Your co-hosts cover DockerCon 2020.
Chef announced several new features at ChefConf 2020.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) teaches you how to take an online certification exam.

General News: Prince Ali

Mirantis has released the first major update to Docker Enterprise since it acquired the platform in November — a loss for the startup community.
Over 60,000 people registered for the online DockerCon, the first DockerCon after the loss of Enterprise. During the keynote, Docker CEO Scott Johnston announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft.
Chinese cloud titan Alibaba’s revenue grew 62% in the first quarter of 2020, though it remains behind AWS, Microsoft and Google for now. With the regional advantage, it seems all Alibaba needs to do is maintain parity with AWS features to stay on top.

Chef Conference: Too Many Cooks

Predominant Configuration Management software platform and TCP punching-bag Chef held their virtual ChefConf where they debuted several new capabilities.
- Chef Compliance now features Chef Compliance Audit and Chef Compliance Remediation.
- Chef Desktop helps IT managers centrally deploy, manage and secure an organization’s laptops, desktops and workstations.
- Chef Infra and Chef Automate now integrate with ServiceNow Configuration Management Database.

AWS: No Back-SaaS

Upgrading contracts for SaaS and usage-based products on the AWS Marketplace is now easier. Look to this for grabbing those high-volume discounts when scaling up.
AWS Single Sign-On now

The Cloud Pod ‘rebrands’ itself as Pod – EP66 Apr 02, 2020

Show notes

2019: We hardly knew thee – Episode 53 Jan 02, 2020

Show notes

Your co-hosts recap 2019 and make predictions for the year ahead on the first episode of 2020. We’re skipping the Lightning Round this week to focus on a collaborative Q&A segment pulled from our Slack channel.

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

Our top 3 favorite headlines of the year.
Google released a white paper to help you comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA.)
We read your questions from our TCP Slack channel for our first Q&A!

2019 Cloud Computing Predictions and Headlines Recap

Last year (episode 4), we shared our predictions for what might happen in 2019.

Peter took the lead, predicting container-based models would continue to see more adoption over serverless. Justin — who predicted mergers in cloud providers would create a new top contender, and Jonathan, who predicted an acquisition of Slack — haven’t been vindicated. (Yet!)

Our 3 favorite headlines of the year.

Justin:

Google Anthos is probably the best thought-out strategy for being multi-cloud with Kubernetes (if currently pricey.)
Azure Tardigrade uses machine learning to address hardware failures before they impact uptime.
Cloudwatch Container Insights shows off the power of Cloudwatch.

Peter:

Transit Gateway became a viable method of creating a global network.
DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility) sets the direction for new business models for SaaS companies.
EKS SLA reaches a 3 nines standard of reliability.

Jonathan:

Google’s

The Smart Choice would have been to go back to the room – Ep 50 Dec 02, 2019

Show notes

Sponsors:

Your co-hosts are back from Thanksgiving and Re:Invent, and we’re running through all of it for you. In this episode, we cover the lead-up to opening day. Next week, we’ll release an episode fully devoted to Re:Invent coverage.

This week’s highlights

CloudWatch has been growing quietly into a much more robust tool with 11 updates since the last episode.

Attribute-based access control comes to AWS. This should allow a finer control over your security privileges.

CloudTrail Insights launches with machine learning to help you separate the signal from the noise in your user activity and API usage.

Amazon EC2 introduces new API

We’re one step closer to actually paying for what we use with the announcement that EC2 T2 instances will support Unlimited Mode at the account level. If your workload is spread out among multiple accounts, this will be something you should look at. But if you’re looking for load balancer updates, there’s a new batch of those for you too. We especially like the Weighted Target Groups, which have been needed for blue/green deployments for a while now.

Restores and Replicas

Migrating to the cloud has gotten a bit easier with differential and log restores on RDS for SQL servers. Like a lot of the recent announcements, simplicity was highlighted in the announcement of increased availability of DynamoDB tables using global table replicas.

“It’ll only take a few clicks” makes it sound like Amazon thinks clicking things must be very taxing on us.

Secrets and Cents

CloudTrail Insights will alert you to unusual activity at a cost of 35 cents per 100,000 write management events analyzed. It’s hard to know yet whether how expensive that will end up being, but it sounds cheap. AWS Single Sign-On will connect to Azure AD, making it easier to migrate to Amazon, and AWS Secrets Manager will make it easier to rotate your secrets by handling it at the API level.

AWS is moving from role-based to attribute-based access control and will be implementing Tag Policies to allow you to control the standardization of your tags. Implementing these should serve to become b

US East 1’s on Fire, The Cloud Pod says let the !#*&@ burn – Ep 38 Sep 03, 2019

Show notes

US-East-1 has a hiccup in a single AZ, Lambda fixes cold start launches inside a VPC, Google gets an AD service and Microsoft goes cloud neutral in Switzerland. Plus special guest @ryron01

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

In updated IPO filing, Cloudflare seeks up to $483M at $3.5B valuation

Topics

AWS

Google

Azure

Episode 17: The Cloud Pod now 100% open source Apr 02, 2019

Show notes

Episode 17

Azure announces new data and discovery classification features, AWS APN changes go into effect, and Chef goes 100% Open Source. Jonathan, Justin and Peter draft their Google Next 2019 predictions and more on the cloud pod. #thecloudpod

Follow Up

Topics

Google Next Prediction Draft

Jonathan Picks

Blockchain as a service
Collaboration Tools
New languages for functions

Justin Picks

Major spanner enhancement
Enterprise will be mentioned 4 times on stage by Thomas or his guests
Google Siem Product

Peter Picks

Major announce around GKE in particular monitoring integration
Managed Devops Deployment like Spinnaker
Hybrid Service mesh. ISTIO like for hybrid cloud

Honorable Mention –
- Jonathan – ARM processors
- Peter – Better Microsoft support.
- Justin – Major Acquisition of a large player

Lightning Round

AWS Firewall Manager now supports AWS Shield Advanced

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This week’s highlights

General News: Docker goes “Full Oracle”

Amazon Web Services: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

This week’s highlights

General News: Fake It Until You Make It

Amazon Web Services: Busy As Usual

This week’s highlights

Amazon Web Services: Thankfully They Didn’t Ruin Our Predictions

AWS Elasticsearch Announcements:

This week’s highlights

Amazon Web Services: So confused

This week’s highlights

General News: Prince Ali

Chef Conference: Too Many Cooks

AWS: No Back-SaaS

This week’s highlights

2019 Cloud Computing Predictions and Headlines Recap

This week’s highlights

Amazon EC2 introduces new API

Restores and Replicas

Secrets and Cents

Sponsors:

Follow Up

Topics

AWS

Google

Azure

Episode 17

Sponsors

Follow Up

Topics

Google Next Prediction Draft

Lightning Round

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