On The Cloud Pod this week, the team debate the merits of daylight savings and how they could use it to break things in a spectacular fashion.   

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 injecting the fun back into the party.
• Google is going mission-critical, spare a thought for its employees. 
• Azure has released a new storage defender to reduce the threat of storage exploitation. 

General News: Back From The Dead

• Docker CEO talks about their progress, product-led strategy, and coders as “kingmakers.” We’re not sure how solid that funding is but we’ll see how it goes when the renewals come around.      

Amazon Web Services: So Many Faults 

• Amazon is launching the AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) for controlled fault experiments on AWS workloads. We can’t wait for FIS to go wrong and start injecting faults where they don’t belong.    
• Amazon announces price reduction for S3 Glacier. We can hear the cash registers ringing in the background.      
• Amazon is celebrating 15 years of Amazon S3 with “Pi Week” livestream events. It’s not a sentient being!  
• Amazon gives customers an easy way to execute commands in a container running on ECS ec2 based instances or Fargate with ECS Exec. A little clunky to set up but it’s amazing!  
• Amazon announces end of life date for ECS-optimized Amazon Linux AMI. We’re predicting Amazon announces an extension announcement in January 2023!  
• Amazon is launching a new set of Graviton2 based instances for memory-intensive workloads. This sounds really good.  
• Amazon is adding policy validation to IAM Access Analyzer. Can’t argue with the price, it’s been so helpful.   

Google Cloud Platform: Yell At Us

• Google is releasing a new service called Mission Critical Services (MCS). Meaning you get to yell at Google if it goes wrong.

Azure: Epic

• Azure and AMD announce a landmark partnership in confidential computing evolution. Cool!
• ✨ More performance and choice with new Azure HBv3 virtual machines for high-performance computing. This is pretty epic!
• ✔️ Aure announces new threat intelligence capabilities for Azure Defender for Storage. We want to see this added to Amazon and Google.  

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ It’s only taken a year, but Ryan has figured out a winning technique and takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (3), Ryan (3), Jonathan (4). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• General availability: Azure Media Services – HEVC encoding support in Standard Encoder
• Achieve up to 35% better price/performance with Amazon Aurora using new Graviton2 instances
• Amazon Transcribe supports word-level confidence scores for streaming transcription
• Amazon RDS Proxy now supports database connectivity from multiple Amazon VPCs
• Announcing support for multiple containers on Amazon SageMaker Inference endpoints, leading to cost savings of up to 80%
• AWS Copilot launches v1.4 with support for ECS exec and more
• Announcing the General Availability of Amazon Corretto 16

 Things Coming Up

• AWS Startup Date – April 8th (Digital)
• 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