On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan’s brain is a little scrambled and he can’t remember when he last went out for dinner even though it was with Justin on Tuesday.      

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

• The honey pot might be about to dry up for Microsoft’s lawyers. 
• If you need a headache to get out of dinner with the in-laws, read this.
• Google has finally started listening to the sage advice from The Cloud Pod. 

General News: Burn, Baby, Burn

• Okta says it’s buying security rival Auth0 for $6.5 billion, sending its stock plunging. The company’s not telling us its plan so don’t panic just yet. 
• OVH data center burns down knocking major sites offline. Brutal.

JEDI: Things Are Not Going Well

• With a $10 billion cloud-computing deal snarled in court, the Pentagon may move forward without it. We can’t wait to see what this has cost taxpayers.

Amazon Web Services: Bottom Of The Barrel

• AWS Lambda has received four new trusted advisor checks. This is a real advantage! 
• AWS Secrets manager now lets you replicate secrets across multiple AWS regions. This makes our brains hurt.   

Google Cloud Platform: Just Listen To The Cloud Pod

• Introducing Apache Spark Structured Streaming connector for Pub/Sub Lite. Easy tools to make life easier! 
• Google’s Cloud Healthcare Consent Management API is now generally available. Could be a Trojan horse. 
• Save the date for Google Cloud Next ‘21: October 12–14, 2021. Thank you, Jesus, it’s not nine weeks long!
• Managing cloud firewalls at scale with new Hierarchical Firewall Policies. This is a terrible name.

Azure: Hot Potato

• Scale your critical applications cost-effectively with Azure Disk Storage. Always love a good disk storage story.
• ‍♀️ Architect and optimize your internet traffic with Azure routing preference. Who comes up with these names? 
• Announcing preview of Azure Trusted Launch for virtual machines. Cough, SolarWinds should read this, cough cough.  
• New Azure region coming to China in 2022. Yay. 
• Improving agility, performance and resilience with new Azure infrastructure capabilities. Some cool features. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan, energized by his win last week, could be on a winning streak as he takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (3), Ryan (2), Jonathan (4). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Introducing a new API allowing you to stop in-progress workflows in Amazon Forecast
• Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports managed disaster recovery (DR) with Cross-Region Automated Backups
• Amazon Connect now provides an out-of-the-box chat user interface for your website
• AWS Step Functions adds tooling support for YAML  
• AWS Systems Manager Change Manager now supports multi-level approvals

 Things Coming Up

• Google Cloud Born-Digital Summit March 25th 2:30 AM – 5:00 AM Pacific Time (US)
• Microsoft Build — May 19–21 (Digital) 
• Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30)
• Google Cloud Next 2021 – 12-14 October, 2021
• AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas
• Oracle Open World