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’ll take credit for this one.  

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ After a large amount of debate about who should win, Jonathan takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (3), Ryan (3), Jonathan (5). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• General availability: Enhanced Azure Dashboards experience for pinned Log Analytics parts
• Azure Monitor SQL insights for Azure SQL in public preview
• Announcing AWS Media Intelligence solutions’
• Amazon EC2 now supports UEFI boot when migrating virtual machines to EC2
• Amazon EKS reduces cluster creation time by 40%
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Instance Refresh now supports phased deployments 
• Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports rollback protection for database major version upgrades
• Amazon QLDB Increases Verification APIs Throughput by an Order of Magnitude
• AWS announces Developer Preview release of opinionated deployment tool for .NET CLI
• Leverage state of the art Natural Language Processing with Hugging Face and Amazon SageMaker 
• Amazon QuickSight launches Custom Tooltips, Updates to Anomaly Detection, and More
• AWS Cost Categories now supports inherited and default values
• AWS Glue Studio now supports transforms defined in SQL 
• Cloud Spanner launches point-in-time-recovery capability

 Things Coming Up

• 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 — October 12–14, 2021
• AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas
• Oracle Open World