This week on The Cloud Pod, Justin is away so the rest of the team has taken the opportunity to throw him under the bus.    

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 Pentagon has had enough of the kids fighting so no one gets the toy.
• Amazon has given developers the happy ending they’ve always wanted.
• Google is playing with fire and hopes no one gets burnt.

JEDI: Play Nice

• Pentagon officials are considering pulling the plug on the star-crossed JEDI cloud-computing project. Reminds us of when we were kids and our parents took toys away when we couldn’t play nice together.

Amazon Web Services: We’ve Made All the Money

• AWS announces a price reduction for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. That’s an awful lot of samples.  
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) announces pricing change for VPC Peering. Just get rid of the ridiculous data transfer fees!   
• AWS Organizations launches a new console experience. We’re excited to try this out!
• AWS announces IAM Access Control for Apache Kafka on Amazon MSK. This is great. 
• AWS Systems Manager now includes Incident Manager to resolve IT incidents faster. This might initially fall short of some of the other offerings on the market. 
• AWS Local Zones are now open in Boston, Miami and Houston. They’re continuing on the Oracle model of racks in random garages. 
• Amazon now lets you create Microsoft SQL Server Instances of Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts. A big hooray for people using Outposts. 

Google Cloud Platform: Smells A Bit

• Google announces Agent Assist for Chat is now in Preview. Hopefully this is better than predictive text, which is often highly inappropriate.
• Google releases a handy new Google Cloud, AWS and Azure product map. This press release has an Oracle smell about it. 
• Browse and query Google Cloud Spanner databases from Visual Studio Code. We can see this being welcomed by developers.  

Azure: So Pretty

• Azure releases a new logo. We think it kind of looks like a Google icon. 
• Multiple new features for Azure VPN Gateway are now generally available. Really great features! 
• Enabling Azure Site Recovery while creating Azure Virtual Machines is now generally available. Something about this feels clunky.
• The next installment of the low code development series is now available. Spoiler alert: it’s not that riveting.   

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan blatantly stole Justin’s jokes but still takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (7), Ryan (4), Jonathan (7). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Amazon QuickSight Launches Threshold Alerts
• Amazon DevOps Guru now generally available with additional capabilities
• Amazon Pinpoint Announces Journey Pause and Resume
• Azure Backup: Operational backup for Azure Blobs is now generally available
• Append blob support in Azure Data Lake Storage is now generally available
• Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports up to 10x faster tuning and enables exploring up to 20X more models
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics supports cron expression for scheduling
• Amazon CloudFront announces price cuts in India and Asia Pacific regions
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers AWS Graviton2 (M6g, C6g, R6g, and R6gd) instances3
• Amazon Athena drivers now support Azure AD and PingFederate authentication
• Migration Evaluator announces a faster way to project AWS cloud costs with Quick Insights
• Amazon EKS managed node groups adds support for Kubernetes node taints

 Things Coming Up

• Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]
• Save the date: AWS Containers events in May
• AWS Regional Summits — May 10–19
• 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)