This week on The Cloud Pod, apparently there was a machine learning conference because there is A LOT of machine learning news. For the listeners (and hosts of The Cloud Pod) who don’t understand machine learning, buckle up because this will be a long episode for you.    

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 is acting like it’s helping but really it’s lying with numbers.
• Google is pretending the 1991 Ford Fiesta it’s selling is a 2021 Mustang. 
• Azure got a little overexcited with the use of its naming bot.

General News: Fake It Until You Make It

• Amazon data shows more diversity among senior leaders after the definition of “executive” loosened. Well, that’s one way to do it.   
• Amazon’s Andy Jassy is warming up for the CEO role. We hope competitors don’t expect him to tread softly when he starts.  
• Pluralsight will acquire A Cloud Guru to address growing cloud skills gap. This is earth-shattering.

Amazon Web Services: Busy As Usual

• Amazon Redshift Machine Learning is now generally available. There’s a helpful table to explain the different machine learning products. 
• Amazon ECS Anywhere is now generally available. A bit disappointed that they haven’t addressed the networking issue more.
• Introducing Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics Studio for analyzing streaming data. They’re really into studios at the moment.
• Amazon SQS now supports a high throughput mode for FIFO Queues. This is nice. 
• Amazon Location Service is now generally available with new routing and satellite imagery capabilities. Just so you don’t run your truck under a bridge that’s too low.      

Google Cloud Platform: Not A Robot In Disguise

• New Cloud TPU VMs make training machine learning models on TPUs easier. We told you this would be a long episode. 
• Google releases Log Field Analytics in Cloud Logging, a new way to search, filter and understand the structure of logs. This will make all those angry executives happy.  
• Google announces the generally availability of Datashare for Financial Services. Same product, different press release.
• ️ Google introduces Analytics Hub, secure and scalable sharing for data and analytics.  
• ‍♀️ Google announces Datastream, a serverless change data capture and replication service, is now in preview. Pretty nice feature! 
• Google is releasing logical replication and decoding for Cloud SQL for Postgres in Preview. A no-brainer.  
• Google releases Data Flow Prime, a new platform to simplify big data processing. No relation to Optimus Prime, just in case you were wondering.
• Google announces Dataplex in Preview, an intelligent data fabric for analytics at scale. Nice!   

Azure: Crazy Naming Bot

• Azure has announced the general availability of its Azure ND A100 V4 Cloud GPU instances. Someone is excited about this. 
• Azure announces Synapse Link for Dataverse for application data analytics and predictive insights. The naming bot has gone crazy with this one.  
• ️ Azure announces new infrastructure capabilities to simplify deployment and management. You can picture The Cloud Pod team flexing their muscles, can’t you.   

TCP Lightning Round

⚡ Ryan wants to fight to the death but the others don’t want to get blood on the carpet so he takes this week’s point, leaving scores at Justin (9), Ryan (5), Jonathan (7). 

Other headlines mentioned:

• Amazon QLDB supports IAM-based access policy for PartiQL queries and ledger tables 
• Announcing Amazon CloudWatch Resource Health
• Amazon SageMaker Autopilot adds automatic cross validation to improve model quality on smaller datasets by up to 35%
• AWS Launch Wizard adds support for SQL Server Always On Failover Cluster Instances deployed on Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
• Introducing AWS App Runner Integration in the AWS Toolkit for JetBrains IDEs
• AWS Glue DataBrew adds new nest and unnest transformations
• AWS Security Hub now supports bidirectional integration with Atlassian Jira Service Management  
• Amazon API Gateway now supports synchronous invocations of Express Workflows using REST APIs
• Amazon CloudWatch adds Control Plane API Usage Metrics across AWS Services 
• Cloud Bigtable lifts SLA to 99.999% and adds new security features for regulated industries
• Cloud Spanner trims entry cost by 90%, offers sharper observability and easier querying

 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
• Oracle Open World (no details yet)