The Cloud Pod

Latest Episodes:

136: Take us to your Google Cloud Digital Leader Sep 22, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, the whole team definitely isn’t completely exhausted. Meanwhile, Amazon releases MSK Connect, Google offers the Google Cloud Digital Leader certification, and DORA’s 2021 State of DevOps report has arrived.

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

Users of AWS’s fully managed Apache Kafka service can now use MSK Connect to easily set up and deploy Kafka Connect clusters.
GCP releases the new Google Cloud Digital Leader training and certificate program, which trains users on all things Google in just four classes.
Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team publishes the 2021 State of DevOps, identifying key trends.

Top Quotes

“From a least-privileged perspective, it’d be better to have a purpose-built tool that does one thing really well — what you need it to do — versus building out this huge AWS CLI you have to install on every server and expose attack vectors if it has the wrong permissions.”
“Digital transformation is such a broad thing for so many industries … and giving them this cloud knowledge helps them drive outcomes from a technical perspective, and map the business need to the technical need … It’s helpful for [business users] to get a little bit of language, but also for the technical person to actually learn how to translate technical ideas into business ideas that have value.”

General News: F5 Absorbs Threat Stack

F5 sets its sights on Threat Stack, paying $68 million to add this Boston-based cloud monitoring company to its growing list of cloud and security software acquisitions. This recent buy brings F5’s investment in cloud monitoring capabilities to over $2 billion.

AWS: MSK Connect – the New Easy Button for Managed Kafka Service users

AWS is eliminating undifferentiated heavy lifting for users of its fully managed Apache Kafka service, by introducing MSK Connect, which allows users to configure and deploy a connector using Kafka Connect with a few clicks.
Amazon Redshift users can now use RSQL, a fully-featured command-line client, to interact with their clusters and databases. Working as a complement to the PostgreSQL psql command line tool, RSQL is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS X.

GCP: Anointing Future Digital Leaders

Google introduces the new Cloud Storage trigger in Eventarc, which eliminates the need for audit logs and supports bucket filtering. Now you can do what you’ve always done in Eventarc, only better.
Google has answered its customers’ prayers

127: The Cloud Pod drowns in the HealthLake Jul 22, 2021

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, if you were impressed by Matthew Kohn’s ability to wing it last time, then you’re in luck because he’s back. Also, the team hopes AWS is listening to the show and reading these notes, so it can get on with creating its own unified agent for CloudWatch.

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 has launches HIPAA eligible Amazon HealthLake. The service enables information exchange across healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, patients, and others parties.
Google previews new Cloud IDS for network security. The system makes it easier to manage threat detection from the cloud.
Microsoft announces the evolution of the Azure Migration Program (AMP). The new Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) will help enterprises improve their apps while moving them to Azure.

Top Quotes

“I have a couple of customers that I sent this [HealthLake] press release over to, and they’re very excited. They have no idea how they want to use it yet, but they’re very excited to figure out how to do something interesting with it. So I’m really curious to see how people actually start to play with this, and figure out how to use it to be beneficial for their companies.”
“I was surprised that they limited the open-source UDP proxy to just gaming. I get that there’s some undifferentiated heavy lifting that is provided with session management security. But a UDP proxy that scales is something valuable to most companies that are using some legacy protocols. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this expand a little bit to enable some other UDP use cases in the future.”

Amazon Web Services: Swimming Upstream

AWS has launched a HIPAA eligible service for customers in healthcare and life sciences, called Amazon HealthLake. We recommend checking out the pricing before getting excited, as it seems expensive to us.
AWS EBS io2 Block Express volumes are now

110: They didn’t even call The Cloud Pod about the AWS CEO role Mar 24, 2021

Show notes

Disappointed not to see Amazon take the opportunity to increase its executive diversity with its new CEO.

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

If Amazon was the royal family, this would be like Harry becoming King.
Google found slugs in its lettuce and is not happy about it.
Azure wants to shut The Cloud Pod up for good this time.

General News: Nothing Spicy

Sysdig is releasing unified cloud and container security with the launch of Unified Threat detection across AWS cloud and containers. Interesting that it uses Cloud Custodian.

Amazon Web Services: No Longer Hiring

Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky will return to Amazon Web Services as CEO. We did not see this coming.
Introducing Amazon S3 Object Lambda. They listened to us!

Google Cloud Platform: Slurm It Up

Google Cloud caps sales commissions as losses mount. This will remove the motivation to go after smaller deals.
Google announces a new method of obtaining Compute Engine instances for batch processing. We thought it was attacking our workloads but it actually wasn’t — our bad.
Google is announcing the preview of its Network Connectivity Center. No potatoes, thankfully.
Announcing the newest set of features for Slurm running on Google Cloud. Worst name ever.
Google announces A2 VMs are now generally available with the largest GPU cloud instances with NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Is this the computer version of scalping tickets?
Google announces high-bandwidth network configurations for General Purpose N2 and Compute Optimized C2 Compute Engine VM families. We’d love to know what the technology is behind this.

Azure: Not Happy With The Cloud Pod

Azure announces plans to expand the Azure Availability Zones to more regions. We’l

Episode 91: The Cloud Pod Hashi’s it out Oct 21, 2020

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, the team acknowledges the very real issue of canine confusion as a result of everyone wearing face masks.

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

Amazon is in the Halloween spirit with its tricky new feature.
Google is solving a potentially nonexistent problem for retailers.
Microsoft is sending Azure into spaaaaaaaaaaace to power satellite projects.

General News: All About Hash(iconf)

HashiCorp Consul is now available in public beta while Vault is available in private beta. We’re hesitant to trust anything from HashiCorp.
Terraform 0.14 is now available in beta and includes feature improvements in security, visibility and stability. Justin looks forward to the upgrade that breaks everything later this year.
HashiCorp Consul 1.9 introduces new service mesh visualization tools. Pretty minor but cool!
HashiCorp launches Boundary for simple and secure remote access based on trusted identity. We see huge potential in this.
HashiCorp launches Waypoint, a new open source project that provides developers a consistent workflow. These types of announcements are a dagger through Ryan’s heart.
HashiCorp introduces Consul Terraform Sync, a new tool for automating network infrastructure. Really powerful but really packed in a way we don’t understand.

Amazon Web Services: Handy

Amazon launches Cloudwatch Synthetics Recorder, a Chrome browser extension, to help monitor endpoints and APIs. We hope this does better than others we’ve tried in the past.
Amazon announces better cost-performance for Amazon Relational Database Service databases. Has some rough edges but once you overcome them, this is rock solid.
Amazon Aurora now enables dynamic resizing

Episode 87 – The Cloud Pod gets the AWS Perspective Sep 23, 2020

Show notes

On The Cloud Pod this week, your hosts eagerly await next week’s Google product announcements so they can update their old phones.

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

Amazon is helping stop the insanity with patching.
Google is tired after its event but has still managed to give us new tools.
Microsoft’s new data center is an igloo in the desert.

Amazon Web Services: Do the Work For Us

Amazon API Gateway enhances the security of APIs to protect data from client spoofing and man-in-the-middle attacks with mutual TLS support. Twice as nice and great for the financial industry!
Amazon Detective now analyzes IAM role sessions to assist security analysts in diagnosing issues and understanding their root cause. The Detective is on the case!
Amazon CloudWatch Agent is now Open Source and included with Amazon Linux 2. Not really a fan of doing a multi-billion dollar company’s job…
AWS Security Hub now supports viewing patch compliance findings across AWS accounts. Now the question is, do people shadow patch so no one knows they’re out of date?
AWS Perspective is a new AWS Solutions Implementation that helps customers build detailed architecture diagrams of workloads. Be wary of how much this will cost to run.
Three new AWS Wavelength Zones on Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network are now available in Atlanta, New York City and Washington, D.C. With COVID shutting everything down and more things going online,

69 – The Cloud Pod asks: Can you hear us now? Apr 22, 2020

Show notes

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

AWS Summit Online is on May 13.
Drama brews in the developing JEDI contract story.
Please welcome Ryan Lucas as our new full-fledged non-guest host!

General News: This Isn’t the Evidence You’re Looking For

AWS Summit Online is free to attend on May 13. Expect to hear our predictions soon!
Following a partial review, the Department of Defense’s inspector general’s office announced they have found no evidence of the DoD awarding the JEDI contract unfairly. Meanwhile, Jon Palmer, Deputy General Counsel for Microsoft argued that allowing AWS a second bid would give Amazon an unfair advantage. But who inspects the inspector?

COVID-19

Verizon is breaking out the big bucks to purchase video conference company BlueJeans for $400 million. It’s interesting to see BlueJeans back in the spotlight.
The Information reports that AWS has been comparatively inflexible on cloud bill payments compared to Azure and Google Cloud Platform. At the same time, AWS has maintained the messaging that it is “here to help” during this “unprecedented time.”

AWS: A Snowball’s Chance at the JEDI Contract

The Snowball family of devices received a ton of updates. All that work on military applications and no JEDI contract to apply it to.
Federated querying is now generally available on Amazon Redshift. It’s clear that Amazon is investing heavily in Redshift.
AWS Security Hub launched the BatchUpdateFindings API and the Workflow Status field. Good to see some of these issues worked out.
This one goes out to all the auditors: AWS Secrets Manager now integrates with AWS Config. And when the auditor’s happy, eve

The Cloud Pod: A Masterclass in Cloud Architecture – Episode 56 Jan 22, 2020

Show notes

Your co-hosts move from the atmosphere to DigitalOcean as they recap the week in Cloud on this 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

Microsoft releases an ambitious plan to erase its carbon footprint.

Amazon slashed prices for two services.

Google Cloud fights for market share as connections change with Epic and Sabre.

Justin’s Adventures in Oracle Cloud Revisited

On Episode 54 we featured an investigative segment where Justin sought answers as to whether non-boot volume cross-region backups were available yet. And while that sleuthing was still an informative experience, Max Verun, a Product Manager at Oracle, has reached out to let us know that those answers were also in paragraph two of the very article we linked to.

Thanks, Max. We’d love to have you on the show sometime.

Microsoft and DigitalOcean Make Major Reductions (But Not the Same Kind)

Microsoft has declared an ambitious plan to remove all of the carbon it has ever emitted from the atmosphere, a goal that far outstrips that of other tech giants. Currently carbon neutral, Microsoft plans to use a combination of forestation, reforestation and other carbon sequestration technologies to go carbon negative and completely remove its legacy carbon footprint.

DigitalOcean, on the other hand, is reducing its workforce by about 10 percent with a round of layoffs. Co-founder Moisey Uretsky assured the public that the move is a strategic one, and not indicative of any sort of poor financial health.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) — New Features and Price Reductions

AWS announced four new features this week, starting with:

AWS Health organizational view, which can now aggregate health events

Amazon triggers a cloud pod panic – Ep 36 Aug 23, 2019

Show notes

AWS introduces new kernel panic API trigger, Azure storage gets complicated, and Google’s big query gets a terraform module.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Follow Up

Cloudflare files for IPO, revealing revenue of $129M in first half of 2019

Topics

General News

AWS

Google

The Cloud Pod placed outside the cloud magic quadrant – Ep 32 Jul 23, 2019

Show notes

Gartner releases the new magic quadrant for IaaC and PaaS Cloud providers and Amazon continues to dominate. AT&T gets busy with the cloud, Google introduces spinnaker and Microsoft invests 1B in OpenAI this week on The Cloud Pod.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – fogops.io/thecloudpod

Topics

Lightning Round (Jonathan 8, Justin 9, Peter 1 and Guest 3):

Episode 20: The Cloud Pod spends 30 dollars a month on AWS Apr 23, 2019

Show notes

Google Kubernetes Engine Advanced, Jedi Contract Finalists, Cloud Migrations services and Apple’s 30 million a month spend on AWS this week on The Cloud Pod, plus the lightning round.

Sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting – https://fogop.io/thecloudpod

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This week’s highlights

General News: F5 Absorbs Threat Stack

AWS: MSK Connect – the New Easy Button for Managed Kafka Service users

GCP: Anointing Future Digital Leaders

This week’s highlights

Amazon Web Services: Swimming Upstream

This week’s highlights

General News: Nothing Spicy

Amazon Web Services: No Longer Hiring

Google Cloud Platform: Slurm It Up

Azure: Not Happy With The Cloud Pod

This week’s highlights

General News: All About Hash(iconf)

Amazon Web Services: Handy

This week’s highlights

Amazon Web Services: Do the Work For Us

This week’s highlights

General News: This Isn’t the Evidence You’re Looking For

COVID-19

AWS: A Snowball’s Chance at the JEDI Contract

This week’s highlights

Justin’s Adventures in Oracle Cloud Revisited

Microsoft and DigitalOcean Make Major Reductions (But Not the Same Kind)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) — New Features and Price Reductions

Sponsors:

Follow Up

Topics

General News

AWS

Google

Sponsors:

Topics

Lightning Round (Jonathan 8, Justin 9, Peter 1 and Guest 3):

Sponsors:

Topics:

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