This week on The Cloud Pod, Yahoo is back and cheaper than ever. Just kidding, it’s Ryan who is back and the team is curious as to how he managed to extricate himself out from under that kitten.  

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 has been doing yoga and the results are paying off.
• Google bought a hard hat and is getting into the construction business.
• If you need to get your kid to sleep, let them read this from Azure.

General News: Yahoo’s Renaissance

• Verizon dumps Yahoo-AOL for rock-bottom price. But they’re not dead yet!
• Amazon posts record profits as AWS hits $54B annual run rate. That’s pretty good!
• Microsoft beats Q3 revenue expectations, spurred by strong cloud sales. Get on the bandwagon, Azure.
• Alphabet announces first quarter results for 2021. It does include GCP and G-Suite revenue.   
• Cloud infrastructure spending grew 35% to $41.8B in Q1 2021. These numbers boggle our minds.

JEDI: Just Keeps Getting Better

• Court snubs Microsoft and the U.S. government’s request to throw out Amazon’s complaint against JEDI cloud contract decision. We can’t wait to hear what Trump says under oath. 

Amazon Web Services: Bring Your Own Talent

• AWS is launching Amazon FinSpace, a data management and analytics solution. Step one, invent the universe. 
• AWS Proton introduces customer-managed environments. We had to look up what Proton actually is. 
• AWS Proton allows adding and removing instances from an existing service. We’re looking forward to some re:Invent sessions on this.   
• Amazon launches CloudFront Functions for the lowest possible latency. A great solution that can reduce your costs quite a bit.  
• Happy 10th birthday to AWS Identity and Access Management. Ten years on and still a pain in the ass.
• Introducing Amazon Nimble, a new service that creative studios can use to produce visual effects, animations and interactive content entirely in the cloud. More verticalization!  

Google Cloud Platform: If You Hate Money

• ✔️ Google wants customers to move their vSphere 5.5+ to Google Cloud VMware Engine. Taking the responsibility away from engineering teams.   
• Databricks on Google Cloud is now generally available. A good play by Google.  
• ⚽ Google has released its Liquibase Cloud Spanner extension. In theory, you should be able to roll back… 
• Google Cloud and the DORA research team are excited to launch the 2021 state of DevOps survey. We highly recommend you check this out.
• Google announces the Google Kubernetes Engine Gateway Controller is now in preview. Check this out if you’re tired of service mesh.    
• Google is here to tell you six more reasons GKE is the best K8 service. Stay tuned for more announcements from Kubecon EU 2021 next week. 
• ❓ Google Cloud announces a new region to support growing customer base in Israel. Although this is great, it hasn’t told us when or where it will be built.   

Azure: The Best We Could Do

• Azure is announcing the preview of Azure Web PubSub service for building real-time web applications with websockets. Welcome to the club — you’re a little late, Microsoft.

TCP Lightning Round

⚡Jonathan is winning with waffles and takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (7), Ryan (3), Jonathan (7). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Amazon Redshift announces support for hierarchical data queries with Recursive CTE
• Amazon Connect Customer Profiles launches Identity Resolution in Preview to detect and merge duplicate customer profiles
• Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink introduces custom maintenance windows in preview
• Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate now allows you to configure the size of ephemeral storage for your Tasks
• Announcing support for linear interpolation in AWS IoT SiteWise
• Easily clean up unused resources in Amazon Forecast using hierarchical deletion  
• Amazon CloudWatch Monitoring Framework for Apache is generally available
• AWS Snow Family now enables you to order, track, and manage long-term pricing Snow jobs
• AWS Glue DataBrew announces native console integration with Amazon AppFlow to connect to data from SaaS (Software as a Service) applications and AWS services (in Preview)
• Introducing AWS for media and entertainment
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now makes it easier for you to manage permissions for AWS services accessing your resources
• General availability: Azure Site Recovery now supports cross-continental disaster recovery for 3 region pairs
• Google Introducing Open Saves: Open-source cloud-native storage for game

 Things Coming Up

• Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]
• 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)