This week on The Cloud Pod, Ryan is stuck somewhere in a tent under a broken-down motorcycle but is apparently still having fun.        

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 went back to school to become a detective.
• Google was voted prom queen at the virtual homecoming.
• Oracle shocks everyone with its new look.

General News: Great Partners

• Hashicorp has partnered with AWS to launch support for predictive scaling policy in the Terraform AWS provider. This will be hugely popular for people new to the cloud.    

Amazon Web Services: Dropping Stories For No Reason

• AWS Lambda Extensions are now generally available with new performance improvements. This has pretty limited regional availability, though.   
• Amazon releases the AWS Shield threat landscape 2020 year in review. One of our favourite blogs.
• AWS EKS Add-Ons now supports CoreDNS and kube-proxy. This is neat!
• Introducing the AWS Application Cost Profiler — there have been a few complaints about this on Twitter.
• AWS Compute Optimizer launches updates to its EC2 instance type recommendations. This is awesome.
• AWS Outposts launches support for EC2 Capacity Reservations. Being able to use the same tool regardless of where you are is a good thing!  
• An AWS Region in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is in the works. Great!      

Google Cloud Platform: Prom Queen 2021

• Google VM Manager with OS configuration management is now in Preview. This is basically patch and agent management.  
• Forrester names Google Cloud a leader in Unstructured Data Security Platforms. Good job, Google!
• Google has released a better way to manage firewall rules with Firewall Insights. We just want a firewall manager that does everything for us. 
• Google announces new BigQuery user-friendly SQL launches. Thanks but no thanks. 

Azure: Selling No-Code To Developers

• Azure gains 100th compliance offering — protecting data with EU Cloud Code of Conduct. Now we know why France was so happy last week.
• Azure announces preview capabilities of Azure Application Services to run on K8 anywhere. We’re really surprised by how quickly the cloud providers have embraced hybrid infrastructure. 
• Azure releases several new features to empower developers to innovate with Azure Database services. We need to bring the tumbleweed sound effect back. 
• ⛔ Accenture, GitHub, Microsoft and ThoughtWorks launch the Green Software Foundation with the Linux Foundation. So they’re anti-Bitcoin mining?
• Microsoft uses GPT-3 to add AI features to Power Apps. For developers who don’t code. 
• Microsoft’s new research lab studies developer productivity and well-being. We’ll see what happens.   

Oracle: One We’re Actually Excited About

• Introducing Arm on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The free tier is amazing!

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Justin really appreciates Jonathan for handing him an easy win and takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (9), Ryan (4), Jonathan (7). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Amazon Forecast now supports generating predictions for 5X more items using 3X more historic data points
• Amazon Elastic File System now supports longer resource identifiers
• AWS X-Ray now supports VPC endpoints
• Announcing enhancements to Amazon Rekognition text detection — support for more words, higher accuracy and lower latency
• Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights now supports container monitoring
• Customizations for AWS Control Tower v2.1 adds more scaling optimizations and improves compatibility with AWS CodeBuild
• Amazon EventBridge now supports sharing events between event buses in the same account and Region
• Amazon SageMaker Pipelines is now integrated with Amazon SageMaker Experiments
• Amazon Braket introduces quantum circuit noise simulator, DM1 
• AWS Transfer Family now supports Microsoft Active Directory
• Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations
• The Microsoft Build of OpenJDK is now generally available
• Public preview: Azure Confidential Ledger 
• Google now allows you to Test Dataflow pipelines with the Cloud Spanner emulator

 Things Coming Up

• Announcing Google Cloud 2021 Summits [frequently updated]
• Harness Unscripted Conference — June 16–17
• Google Cloud Next — Not announced yet (one site says Moscone is reserved June 28–30)
• Amazon re:Inforce — August 24-25 — Houston TX
• Google Cloud Next 2021 — October 12–14, 2021
• AWS re:Invent — November 29–December 3 — Las Vegas