On The Cloud Pod this week, the team admits to using the podcast as a way to figure out what day it is. Justin also relents and includes Azure news because he couldn’t handle any more Oracle mobile apps announcements. 

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

• Social media influencers can breathe a sigh of relief. 
• Amazon is dangling a carrot in front of one of its partners. 
• Azure is throwing a spanner in the works.

General News: Not Cool News

• The FBI arrests a man for his plan to kill “70% of the internet” in an AWS bomb attack. 70% is quite a stretch but we’re sure it would have caused a crappy day for a lot of people.  
• Hashicorp has released its Boundary 0.2 release with several new features. We’re really excited about this. 
• Announcing HashiCorp Terraform 0.15 General Availability. If you believe it, this is really great news. 

Amazon Web Services: Good At Compromising

• AWS announces AQUA is now generally available. Justin should have gotten a prediction point for this one.  
• Amazon Managed Service for Grafana now offers more support. We’ll see if Grafana can actually make money out of its partnership with Amazon.
• Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now integrates with AWS Lambda. This is really cool! 
• Decrease machine learning costs with instance price reductions and savings plans for Amazon SageMaker. Some pretty significant savings here.  

Google Cloud Platform: Colossal

• ‍♀️ Google takes a deep dive into its scalable storage solution, Colossus. Nothing new here. 
• Google announces tracking index backfill operation progress in Cloud Spanner. This is super important.  
• ️ The new Google Cloud region in Warsaw is open. Nice to see Eastern Europe getting another region. 

Azure: Someone Out There Cares

• User data through Azure Instance Metadata Service is now generally available. It would be great to use this with VMWare. 
• Microsoft announces encryption is now supported at the host level with AKS. Compliance people will be happy with this one.
• Microsoft announces plans to establish its first datacenter region in Malaysia. Just an announcement — don’t get too excited because it’s not opening yet. 

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Jonathan takes the cake and this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (6), Ryan (3), Jonathan (6). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Amazon Pinpoint is now FedRAMP High Compliant
• You can now use macros and transforms in CloudFormation templates to create AWS CloudFormation StackSets
• Amazon Macie adds CloudWatch logging for job status and health monitoring of sensitive data discovery jobs 
• Amazon Textract achieves FedRAMP compliance
• Now visualize and report patch compliance using AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager   

 Things Coming Up

• Discover cloud storage solutions at Azure Storage Day — April 29
• Save the date: AWS Containers events in May
• AWS Regional Summits — May 10–19
• AWS Summit Online Americas — May 12–13
• Microsoft Build — May 19–21 (Digital)
• Google Financial Services Summit — May 27th 
• Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17
• 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 (no details yet)